smallchou.com/blog

A friend came by for dinner last night and we eventually started talking about his experience visiting The French Laundry, the iconic Yountville Thomas Keller restaurant. This morning, I opened up my browser and was greeted by a page from the The French Laundry website, left over from the evening:

Every day we create two unique nine-course tasting menus – chef’s tasting and a tasting of vegetables – each a series of smaller, focused dishes. No single ingredient is ever repeated throughout the meal. What we want you to experience is that sense of surprise when you taste something so new, so exciting, so comforting, so delicious, you think, “Wow” – and then it’s gone. We want the peak of sensation on the palate to be all that you feel. So we serve a series of small courses meant to excite your mind, satisfy your appetite and pique your curiosity. We want you to say, “I wish I had just one more bite of that.” And then the next plate arrives and the same thing happens, but in a different way, a whole new flavor and feel and emotion.

I found that description and mission to be incredibly compelling, not just as a (hopefully!) future customer, but for the business itself. The experience that French Laundry seeks to build for its customers is beyond excellence – it seeks to provide emotional stimulation in its work. Surprise. Curiosity. Longing.

If Thomas Keller’s more accessible restaurants (Bouchon, Ad Hoc) are any indication, I’m positive the dishes at French Laundry are unreal. But the craftspeople at French Laundry are really pursuing a mission more substantial and lasting than their employment and the quality of food that they prepare. The creations are just vessels for a deeper experience. And in that way, the institution becomes more meaningful than just the food that is plated.

I think we all want the work we pursue in life to be that meaningful. We want the pursuit to be more profound.

One thing is clear after using Google+ for about a week: the company is pretty serious about Google+. Unlike Google Buzz, which always felt like a bolt-on, annoyance in my Gmail inbox, Google+ feels like a thoughtful annoyance across all of my Google experiences.

Heading to google.com to find out who played Omar on The Wire? Visiting Gmail to respond to my dad’s email? Running to Google Finance to see how my investment in CRM is doing today? On all these properties, I’m greeted with a (newly-redesigned) gray bar that includes an impossible-to-avoid red number.

If you consider how sacred the pixels on google.com traditionally were to the company, it’s clear that Google is all-in here.

On a tactical level, it’s a logical approach to use those properties as a distribution club. It’s a blunt object that Google can swing to push out Google+ in a way that no other “new” social network could reproduce. A distribution lever like this is a necessary component for Google+’s success, but the challenge is that it is not at all sufficient.

I used the term ‘annoyance’, because the core value of Google+ is so orthogonal to my intention on the various Google properties that it is jarring. I’m on Google Finance thinking about my stocks and wondering if NFLX will continue to go up – I’ve come to that page without any intention of seeing what my friends have shared on Google+. The red number is incredibly “outside” of that experience.

It’s the only item in the top bar not just giving me access to another property, but actually calling for my attention. Note that Google has never gone to these lengths for Gmail, though it would make as much sense functionally. It’s because they know email is not a threat.

And at a macro level, that’s the story here. Despite growing revenue to almost $30B in 2010, Google sends a strong message with Google+ that it is paranoid about its position in “Social.” It is so paranoid, that I wonder if anyone in Mountain View realizes that they’re now bundling their new shiny social network with their properties in a way that resembles Microsoft.

Don’t Be Evil was always a handy mantra at the Googleplex to describe the company’s aspirational moral goals to value its users. In practice, it was much more of a way for the company to point out unfair advantages that other companies had.

Apple has a closed App Store for their iOS products? That’s evil and we won’t be like them.

Facebook has 700 million monthly active users, but won’t let us build one-click pipes to get all of that data out for our use because we’re way behind in Social? Evil.

Microsoft used its massive customer base from its operating system to drive users in the direction of IE and other applications through bundling? Unfair competitive advantage. Evil.

But Google using our massive base from totally unrelated properties to drive users in the direction of our new social network because we’re so far behind Facebook? Hmm.

Maybe its time to change the ‘Don’t be Evil’ message. Because when you leverage an unfair advantage to compete, I think most of the time that should just be called smart.