Google Cracking the Code

Ever since Google and Sony annouced a joint marketing relationship for the Da Vinci Code there has been a lot of chatter about what it means. Coming off the top rope, Umair Haque thinks it means very bad things.

From Umair:

"The next great business game is going to be about ripping branding apart and making it hyperefficient, hypercultural, hypersocial. This is the game MySpace is playing. This is the game Google wants to play.

But brands are about what make us human: the cultural and the social. Google, as we know, is deeply algorithmic. It is like HAL 9000.

Now, this is a problem. A big one.

Why? Because Google can't play this game. It has very different competencies - in my language, it doesn't understand subduction and the commoditization of meaning. But more on that later.

This move is very important because it's a tell: buried deep within this move are the seeds of Google's strategy decay."