Transactional Analysis and Games People Play

You’ve had a long day a day before. There was an urgent release to be deployed. You give your best shot to debug it. After a lot of grueling hours and wrestling with the issues, you do manage to deploy it successfully and go back home at 2 – 3 AM to catch a few hours of peaceful sleep. You start the next day in an up bit mood, expecting that your immediate superior would say a few good words about you.

It’s almost afternoon and there’s no news from him/her. You become restless but still assume that everything would be working fine and gently give a pat on your own back to appreciate yourself. Suddenly, as you are about to leave for the day, PM/Senior storms into your cubicle, firing you for an issue that surfaced in the release. The heaven you enjoyed throughout the day suddenly turns into hell. You get irritated yet defensive. You try to defend yourself for the issue but the senior is in no mood to listen. “I had told you umpteenth times to follow the processes. Do your documentation properly. But you never listen! Look, what you have done now. Now, stay here and clear the mess you have created”, he barks at you and again, storms out. Poor you could only mumble, “I myself am confused how this can happen. I really dunno what to do” Fortunately, another colleague of yours just comes round the corner, tries to soothe you and says, “Ok. Now that we know we’ve got a problem, let’s concentrate on the solution, instead of putting blame on someone and letting him defend it” He helps you with your task and you manage to make home by 11 PM. You toss and turn in your bed wondering with mixed feelings about whatever happened.

I wish that nobody should go through such an incident but then this, indeed, is a familiar scenario. In this small incident itself, one could see three different personalities, their attitudes and feelings. Even you yourself have changed your moods from tired yet pushing, to a satisfied and happy, to anxious, to scared and then again a mixture of Satisfaction, Anger and anxiety.

Ever wondered why you feel what you feel? What is that that stimulates your mood? Who controls your feelings and reactions? Well, they say, “Mind has its own reasons which the Reason is not aware of!” Many philosophers like Aristotle, Kant contributed in their own ways to find the reasons of the mind, laying up the base for Psychology.

But if there’s one name that pops up in our mind when we say “Psychology”, it’s Sigmund Freud. It was he who first pondered upon the human behavior and the things that influence it, in the early 20th Century. He proposed that Human Personality is essentially made up of three components: Id, Ego and Superego. In brief,

Id: Person’s inherited unconscious psychological impulses; the irrational and Emotional Part of Mind

Ego: The part of the mind that reacts to reality and has the sense of individuality; the rational part of mind.

Superego: This is the advanced part of the mind that acts as a conscience and responds to the social rules; the Moral part of mind.

This also means that human mind is multifaceted. Thus, a person is not one single component but a mixture of them, colliding and crossing each other, imprinting the person’s thoughts, behavior and feelings.

The Freudian thoughts prevailed and are still considered the foundation of psychology. But this branch of science lacked an important thing: A fundamental Unit. There was no such unit available in Psychology, the way we have atoms in Chemistry.

In late 50’s, a psychoanalyst named Dr. Eric Berne thought of an approach quite contrary to the then beliefs. While the methods used by Freud and Co were individualistic i.e. revolving around an individual, Berne stressed on the social intercourse people have as the base for his study. Rather than Freudian method of keeping “I” or “Me” at the center, Berne proposed that it is easier to analyze a behavioral problem simply by witnessing what is said or how something is done by an individual.

He coined the term “Transactional Analysis” – the method of studying the interaction between individuals. In 1958, he penned a paper named “Transactional Analysis: A New and Effective Method of Group Therapy” in which he defined Transactional Analysis as:

“The unit of social intercourse is called a transaction. If two or more people encounter each other... sooner or later one of them will speak, or give some other indication of acknowledging the presence of the others. This is called transactional stimulus. Another person will then say or do something which is in some way related to the stimulus, and that is called the transactional response."

What is so different about Transactional Analysis?

In early 50’s, Berne handled many cases as a practicing psychiatrist at Carmel, California. Treating his patients, he noted down the subtle non – verbal changes the subject goes through during the session. In one such counseling session, Berne treated a 35 year old lawyer. During the session, the lawyer (a male) said "I'm not really a lawyer; I'm just a little boy." But the outside world knew this patient as a successful, hard-charging, attorney. Later, in their sessions, the lawyer would frequently ask Dr. Berne if he was talking "to the lawyer or the little boy." Berne was intrigued by this, as he was seeing a single individual display two "states of being." Berne began referring to these two states as "Adult" and "Child." Later, Berne identified a third state, one that seemed to represent what the patient had observed in his parents when he was small. Berne referred to this as "parent." As Berne then turned to his other patients, he began to observe that these three ego states were present in all of them. As Berne gained confidence in this theory, he went on to introduce these in a 1957 paper - one year before he published his seminal paper introducing Transactional Analysis.

Please note that no person could always be under control of any one of the “Parent”, “Child” or “Adult”. Depending upon the various phases of life and even the day, these three states control the behavior of an individual.

The Characteristics of the three states:

Parent: The parent represents a huge collection of recordings in the brain of external events experienced or perceived in approximately the first five years of life. The external events may include anything that a kid experiences from the people nearer to him. As the majority of the external events experienced by a child are actions of the parent, the ego state was appropriately called Parent. The parent is authoritative, rigid and patronizing.

Physical - angry or impatient body-language and expressions, finger-pointing, patronizing gestures.

Verbal – “always”, “never”, “for once and for all”, judgmental words, critical words.

Child: Contrary to the Parent, the Child represents the recordings in the brain of internal events associated with external events the kid perceives. In other words, the Child represents the feelings and emotions that come along with the external events. Again, these are also built by the age of 5. The Child uses “Really” “That was Great” “It scared me” Here again, it does not necessarily mean that use of “Great” or any such word is an indication that the Child is in control. The Child state means that the emotion (anger, despair) is overpowering Reason.

Physical - emotionally sad expressions, despair, temper tantrums, whining voice, rolling eyes, shrugging shoulders, teasing, delight, laughter, speaking behind hand, raising hand to speak, squirming and giggling.

Verbal - baby talk, I wish, I dunno, I want, I'm gonna, I don't care, oh no, not again, things never go right for me, worst day of my life, bigger, biggest, best, many superlatives, words to impress.

Adult: Adult is when the kid starts to differentiate between what he observed (Parent) and what he felt (Child). 'Adult' is our ability to think and determine action for ourselves, based on received data. The adult is the means by which we keep our Parent and Child under control. If we are to change our Parent or Child we must do so through our adult.

Physical - attentive, interested, straight-forward, tilted head, non-threatening and non-threatened.

Verbal - why, what, how, who, where and when, how much, in what way, comparative expressions, reasoned statements, true, false, probably, possibly, I think, I realise, I see, I believe, in my opinion.

Also, while analyzing the behavior:

Only 7% of meaning is in the words spoken.
38% of meaning is paralinguistic (the way that the words are said, pitch, tone etc.).
55% is in facial expression.

To sum it up:

Parent is our 'Taught" concept of life
Adult is our "Thought" concept of life
Child is our "Felt" concept of life


According to Berne, effective transactions (i.e. successful communications) must be complementary. They must go back from the receiving ego state to the sending ego state. For example, if the stimulus is Parent to Child, the response must be Child to Parent, or the transaction gets 'crossed', and there will be a problem between sender and receiver.


For example, the fevered kid asks for a glass of water, and the nurturing mother brings it. In this case, the “Child” of the small kid directs an inquiry to the “Parent” of his/her mother. “The Parent” of the mother acknowledges this stimulus, and then gives the water to the kid. In this example, the “Child's” request is the stimuli, and the “parent” providing the water is the response. If the response doesn’t go back to the stimulus i.e. if the mother doesn’t listen and bring kid a glass of water, it’ll surely lead to an ineffective communication and a hostile feeling.

Berne’s theory became immensely popular amongst the common readers when he put forward his, otherwise not so interesting, concept in the form of a book “Games People Play”. Essentially, these are real time scenarios that capture the various patterns of human nature.


He defines these games as:

“A game is an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome. Descriptively, it is a recurring set of transactions... with a concealed motivation... or gimmick.”

I would just quote one of these interesting games.

Blemish:
Theme: Fault Finding

Purpose: To keep everyone, including oneself, looking in the other direction rather than the problem.

Blemish is commonly played by the subject with the attitude I’m – better – than – you in order to compensate for a depressive (I'm not-OK) primary position. By constantly pointing the finger at the shortcomings, real or imagined, of others, he/she avoids the spotlight and having to examine her own feelings of inadequacy. This person rarely ever gives straight complements or genuine praise. There always follows the conditional modifier: "That is really quite nice, except…"

Blemish players never feel comfortable around someone until they locate some convenient handle for fault finding. There is often a role switch, with the subject shifting to a Rescuer mode - "I hope you don't mind honest criticism . . . I'm only trying to help you . . . " and may follow it up with, "but that's OK, even I do that myself sometimes . . . let me show you how I deal with it . . . ," attempting to initiate a twisted form of closeness.

Chronic Blemish players are universally annoying to almost anyone without a strong uncompensated inferiority/ masochism streak. Consequently, their circle of friends is often severely limited, and relationships are generally seriously dysfunctional, mutually parasitic, power paradigms.

The “Games People Play” book remained the bestseller on the New York Times’ list for 2 years (really) becoming the first of its kind non – fiction book.

Dr. Thomas Harris, who was a student of Dr. Berne, expanded his mentor’s Parent – Child – Adult framework and applied them to various walks of life like Marriage, Career etc. in a book named “I’m Ok – You’re Ok”. This is another good book describing how the feeling of “I’m not Ok – You’re Ok” and other such combinations lead to various scenarios and which ego states would go hand – in – hand.

Finally, I find all the psychology fundamentals mentioned above are quite practical. Finding out – guessing – the state of the mind of the person you are interacting with would surely help make better communication.


Well, the Mind is really Mind – Boggling…



Regards,

Abhishek

P.S.:

In the past two Gyans I had talked about the way we make our decisions and the factors that influence them. So here’s just a small note on “decisions”

I should have… I would have… Oh…I could have…

Many a times, I see myself and almost all of us saying, “Had it been two years later, I surely would have done it” “If the opportunity would have come a year earlier, I would have grabbed it” and all such ifs and buts. But they say, “Hindsight is always 20/20” That means, if you would have been presented with the same situation and asked to make the choice, you would have surely made the same decision! After some time moves on, you could analyze the situation that prompted you to take that particular decision and hence, that hindsight is always pure, unbiased. So, if the choice you made is, indeed, appropriate to the then situation, why worry about things later?! Moreover, when we are wasting our time worrying, we are missing out on even more opportunities. Well, it’s all easy to say but hard to act upon but I would just like to end this longest Gyan so far with a telling anecdote:

A passenger was traveling in a train. With no place to sit, he was standing and carrying his heavy bag, shifting the weight time and again. The conductor came to him and said,” Sir, you can keep the bag down. The train is capable of carrying both you and your bag!” May be it’s time for you to let the train carry the load!

Blink - Malcolm Gladwell

Have you ever wondered how we take our decisions? I’m sure that given a choice between “Logical, well reasoned” and “Impulsive, on the spur of the moment”, our answer would, most probably, be the first one. As an intelligent being, we usually take into account all the options presented to us, analyze them, imagine the consequences of all the probable choices and choose the option that gives us the most favourable outcome.

Well, things aren’t always that simple.

Let me present you a puzzle. Remember, no mathematical formula could be of any help to you in getting to the solution. The only thing that you’d need is what you have generally seen so far in your life. So here goes:

A man and his son are in a serious car accident. The father is killed, and the son is rushed to the emergency ward. Upon arrival, the attending doctor looks at the child and gasps “This is my son”! How can the Doctor say something like that?

It could be that you might have heard of this puzzle earlier but did you really wonder, at least for the first couple of seconds, that how this is possible? Or did it strike to you, the moment you read the question, that the Doctor could be a female – the mother of the injured son?

Well, the first Gyan of the year 2006 is also the first of the three articles on Psychology – and specifically, on how we take snap judgments, even without making a conscious, logical attempt to do so. Trust me, I’ll try my best not to make the write up as boring as it may sound when you heard of the word “Psychology”.

The punch line of the book “Blink” penned by Malcolm Gladwell itself is quite catchy: “The power of thinking without thinking” Using day – to – day examples from various fields of life like Art, Business, Police etc., the author presents his ideas in simple English without making much fuss about the jargon.

They say, “First Impression is the last impression” and rightly so. It is in the first meeting that we make most of our observations and conclusions about a person or a thing, in other words “judging book by the cover.” * The brain receives large amount of data through the senses. And it is the brain’s job to make some sense out of this chaotic burst of information. To make this task easier, it tries to search for typical patterns – could be called as a “Preconceptions.” And even when you are trying to think logically, the preconceptions residing in your brain quickly ride over your logical thinking and take a decision. Perhaps, you would have observed it while solving the above puzzle. Of course, these quick decisions can’t be absolutely right or absolutely wrong always.

To start with, the author presents a test. There are two categories: “Male or Career” and “Female or Family”. The test taker is asked to relate the words presented to him with these two categories. These random words include something like: John, Home, Capitalist, Lisa, Kitchen, Corporation, Children etc. In the first run, it takes very less time to relate the words with the categories, putting John and Capitalist in the “Male or Career” category and Lisa or Kitchen in the “Female or Family” category. However, when the categories are changed to “Male or Family” and “Female or Career”, it takes a longer time for the test taker because he/she finds it difficult to relate words like Corporation, Capitalist to “Female or Career” category even when they are related to Career. Same holds true for “Male and Family” as it is hard to correlate words like Home, Kitchen etc. with a Male even when these words are related to Family. I guess, it would have answered your curiosity why you found it a bit difficult to imagine a female to be a doctor because most of the times, we have that preconception that the Doctor has to be a male!

On the similar lines, when we meet a new person, we make our first assumptions by his/her attire and the face. Psychologists have come up with approximately 5000 combinations that the 43 odd face muscles can make. Depending upon the patterns, one can thin slice every facial expression and come up with some conclusions about the nature, habits of an individual. When we meet a person, unconsciously the brain observes and compares these expressions with the ones already present. Of course, it is not always possible for the brain to capture minutest movement of a facial muscle and hence, we tend to make a wrong snap judgment.

When a customer enters a car showroom, the salesperson usually tends to guess his financial conditions, his budget and which car can be sold to him, just by looking at him. The author gives an example of a successful salesperson who refrains himself from guessing about the customer. His experience tells him that even a badly clad gauche could be filthy rich and is sufficiently cashed up to buy the most expensive Car. Losing on such a customer due to early guesses and preconceptions would surely affect the sales. The successful salesperson presents cars to every customer with almost the same interest, without bothering much about their looks as they might be deceiving.

Talk of looks and personality, our image of “Boss” (a respected oneJ) is something of a person with imposing personality, masculine voice and charisma, and usually, we imagine him to be taller than average person. In US, approximately 14.5% of the men are 6 feet or taller. Surprisingly, the same percentage rises to 58% in the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies! Also, there are 3.9% men who are 6 ft 2’ or taller. The same percentage is, however, 33% when it comes to the same group of CEOs. Apart from the fact that these CEOs would surely have the necessary leadership and managerial qualities in them, the preconceived image of a Boss would have really helped them, in a way, to reach that position.

There is other side to the coin, as well. The snap judgments can be really useful and life saving at times. In a Fire Outbreak, a fireman felt that the fire is much serious than what it appeared to be. However, he didn’t notice any clear signs of a major fire. But, as soon as he asked all his colleagues to pull out feeling danger, the building collapsed! The probable reason for his snap judgment was that throughout his career, the fireman’s brain had unconsciously picked up symptoms of fire. In this incident, even when the fire didn’t appear to be quite serious, the senses picked up these subtle hints and set the unconscious mind in action. So, even before the fireman could actually figure out the actual fire, his unconscious mind prompted him of a danger and he quickly pulled out.

When you gather a good amount of experience in doing the same activity, you develop instincts/ gut feeling. Even when you can not give a logical explanation why you took a particular decision, the answer that “I just felt it”, “it just dawned on me” are and should be equally acceptable. They are the proofs that there’s a mind which is continuously running even without you noticing it.

Another example of difference between Systematic/Logical Thinking and Thinking in a blink of an eye:

To test their war preparedness and strategy, US Army set up two teams. One with all the strategy, Data, high end communication equipments etc. (Blue Team) and the other team led by a Vietnam Veteran (Red Team) Red Team was asked to defend the coast of Syria. The Blue team laid out a systematic plan to disable all of the Red Team’s communication equipments and to use satellite images to track the Red Team’s progress. The Red team led by the veteran however used the conventional ways to communicate like sending a dispatch on motorcycle or encoding the message in a prayer, instead of using Mobiles or other high tech gadgets. Also, they deployed fake ships to fool the satellites. Taking a preemptive action, they attacked and captured several ships of the Blue Team and left them surprised. Fortunately, this was only a simulation, had it been an actual war, the Blue team with its plans, Operations Net Assessment and other jargon would have faced high casualty within a short time. The reason for Blue Teams’ defeat is in their way of thinking. In a situation like war where snap judgments are much needed, following a procedure to carry out an order would surely take the precious time and delay the action. Also, they failed to take into account the use of conventional ways and to counterattack to make them ineffective. Whereas, for the Red Team, the veteran had developed a kind of “Gut Feeling / Hunch” that helped him in making quick decisions that changed the course of the war.

To quote Iacocca about gut feeling: while launching a new car or a product, you’d do market survey, research and gather almost 95% of the data that would help you to decide when to launch the product. If you decide to wait for another 6 months for the remaining 5% just to be sure of your decision, the market would have changed by that time and whatever product you thought of introducing in the market would be obsolete even before launching. To compensate for that 5%, you have to use your gut feeling or hunch to decide the best timing to launch the product!

Finally to sum it up all, neither the Logical Thinking nor the Unconscious, Blink – of – eye thinking are perfectly reliable. And the answer to how we think lies partly in both of them. Well, when they say “Listen to your heart”, it could very well be the power of thinking without thinking!


Regards,
Abhishek

*: Customers usually judge a product by the packing. There’s a meat producer named Harmel. On the cover of the container, they just put an image of a natural cascade (spring) between “r” and “m”. The customer relates the image of the spring to “Freshness” of the meat, even when the inside thing could be stale! The principle of not changing a successful brand or packaging lies in this customer psychology. The “New Coke” disaster was also one very good lesson to learn about Branding.

The Google Way

In the earlier Gyans on FedEx and JCB, I had said that it would be dream of any entrepreneur to see his company become so popular that it would be used as a routine word for some activity. Well, if it hadn’t been for this company, I wouldn’t have been able to post some of the Gyans (including this one) and all of the images. Yes, you got it… it’s “Google”! What started as a research project in January 1996, Google is a fairy tale – a typical Silicon Valley success story.

The decade of 90’s saw a major leap in computer world with the advent of Windows and Internet. The Silicon Valley – the cradle of the Computer revolution was crowded with new startups owned by young men, hardly in their 20’s. The computer and internet era showed a dream of quick money in huge sums for these mavericks.

The idea to connect the computers all across the globe through the internet opened avenues for hosting websites. These websites were the best way to advertise and reach to the customers in other parts of world. The number of websites soon started increasing in multiples and the need to search for a specific piece of information in this heap was felt. This need was partly fulfilled by search engines like Alta Vista.

At the start of 1996, two Ph. D. students at Stanford, Lawrence “Larry” Page and Sergey Brin, aged 22 and 21 respectively, set out to write their thesis on a Search Engine based on analysis of relations between websites. A year earlier or so, Sergey was assigned to show Larry around the university on a weekend tour. Reportedly, they did not hit off well to begin with, arguing about every topic they discussed. However, they soon found a common interest: retrieving relevant information from large data sets. And that was something that was going to help them with the thesis.

The existing search engines in those days were based on the number of times the keyword to be searched appears on the site. The site on which the particular keyword appears for the maximum number of times would be on top of the search results. But the hypothesis underlying Page and Brin’s thesis was: The website which has the maximum number of links pointing to it should be on top of the search results, clearly indicating that it is an important website. It was named BackRub as the algorithm checked for backlinks for the particular page.

The duo penned their concept in a research paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" and till date, it’s the tenth most accessed scientific paper at Stanford University!

On 15th September, 1997, www.google.com domain was registered and the company “Google” was formally launched a year later in Menlo Park, California. The story goes that the two founders wanted to name the company as “Googol”. (Googol = 10100) But the Venture Capitalist goofed up with the spelling and wrote off the cheque in the favour of “Google”! Well, Larry and Sergey later got ample opportunities to showcase their love for typical numbers in a different way.

In 1999, Google’s major rival Alta Vista relaunched itself as a portal. The users didn’t perceive this change positively. Google quickly cashed on this opportunity and grew at a much faster rate. In 2003, the company was shifted to a complex of buildings (named Googleplex) in Mountain View. (Incidentally, Googoplex is 10Googol)

One thing I, personally, like about Google is that it does exactly what it is supposed to do. If the user is searching for a particular keyword, then all he needs is a Text Box to enter the keyword and a “Search” Button! As long as the search functionality is working great, the user is least bothered about categories, links and other such things that only clutter the screen. And still today, the founders have made sure that the google.com home page screen is not at all cluttered with unnecessary things. And perhaps, this is the reason why Google succeeded in generating revenues when its other rivals perished in the dot com market.

In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with the search keyword to produce enhanced search results for the user. This strategy was important for increasing advertising revenue, which is based upon the number of "hits" users make upon ads. The ads were text-based in order to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed.

On 4th September, 2001, U.S. Patent 6,285,999 describing Google's ranking mechanism (PageRank) was granted. The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor.

2001 also saw Page stepping down from the top rank, making way for Eric Schmidt to be the CEO of Google. Schmidt started his career in Xerox PARC. Moving on to Sun Microsystems, he headed the development of Java project. Bringing an experienced CEO like Schmidt helped Google bring better management in the organization and the founders could concentrate on the expansion and introduction of new services.

In February 2003, Google acquired Pyra Labs, owner of Blogger, a pioneering and leading weblog hosting Web site. The acquisition secured the company's competitive ability to use information extracted from blog postings to improve the speed and relevance of articles contained in a companion product to the search engine, Google News.

Till 2003, Google was a privately owned company and had posted a profit of $105.6 million on revenues of $961.8 million. Then, it was decided that the company should go public. Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston were chosen as the joint underwriters. Google also chose the unconventional way of allocating the initial offering through an auction ("Dutch auction", to be specific), so that anyone would be able to participate in the offering.

Now some numbers:

The long awaited IPO for Google took place on August 19, 2004. 19,605,052 shares were offered at a price of $85 per share. Of that, 14,142,135 (mathematical reference as √2 = 1.4142135...) were floated by Google and 5,462,917 by selling stockholders. The sale raised $1.67 billion, of which approximately $1.2 billion went to Google. The vast majority of Google's 271 million shares remained under Google's control. The IPO gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. Many of Google's employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited from the IPO because it owns 2.7 million shares of Google. The company was listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol GOOG. On August 18, 2005 (one year after the initial IPO), Google announced that it would sell 14,159,265 (another mathematical reference of pi = 3.14159) more shares of its stock to raise money. The move would double Google's cash stockpile to $7 billion.

Today, Larry Page and Brin themselves are worth $11 Billion each and joined ranks with the youngest self made billionaire like Bill Gates and Pierre Omidyar of eBay. The company has close to 5000 employees and revenues clocking more than $3 Billion.

In 2005, New York Times ran an article, “Relax Bill Gates, it’s Google’s turn as the villain” And many others see Google as the next monopoly after Microsoft in making. To know why, just have a look at the services Google now offers:

1) Google Print: This is considered as a big threat by the Author’s Guild in USA and has sued them for copyright. Google started off with digitizing every single page that is printed so far. Obviously, it will be far easier and cheaper to get any book in the electronic format that, otherwise, would have cost you a good chunk of money from your pocket.

2) Google News: This is considered as a threat by the media as Google provides one stop quick news portal pointing links to the latest happening. AFP has sued Google over this. I remember a link which describes the vision of Google to become the global media company in coming years. Epic (?) is going to capture the whole of world media. The clipping shows New York Times going out of the business because of Google and the concept of Newspaper is shown obsolete by 2010!

3) Froogle: Allows the user to shop online searching websites within a user specified budget.

4) Google Talk: Online chatting messenger using which you can talk over the internet absolutely free!

5) Google Earth: This is creating a lot of brawl these days. Using Google Earth, you can have a look at snaps of almost every point on the earth. This includes not only famous places but also cities of strategic importance.
6) Google Desktop: I love this. This is by far the best search facility to search for even a small keyword that appears in the files stored on your computer’s hard disk, e.g. if you are searching for “is”, the search result will show all the files, documents containing the word “is”! Even when you are searching online, it displays the contents that are already stored on your computer.

7) Orkut: This is making quite a wave amongst the youngsters. Basically, it’s a network of friends and you can search for and add long lost friends. You can publish your personal profile, what you like, your hobbies, snaps and so many other things!

8) Blog: Google acquired Blog to its serviceline (as mentioned earlier) It is derived from Web Log and helps put up your own articles on net.

9) G Mail: The first mailing service to provide 1 GB memory size!

I might have missed out on many things Google offers. But one thing that appears starkly here is that they are not much trying to directly attack Microsoft because Microsoft itself is notorious for eating up its competitors. Google has not, so far, directly entered the market where Microsoft is already the leader*. In fact, all their products so far are made to coexist with Microsoft (e.g. Google Desktop runs only on Windows), nor are they getting into debates of who’s better: Microsoft or Linux. This philosophy is well reflected in what Eric Schmidt said recently “We don't do the same thing as everyone else does. And so if you try to predict our product strategy by simply saying well so and so has this and Google will do the same thing, it's almost always the wrong answer. We look at markets as they exist and we assume they are pretty well served by their existing players. We try to see new problems and new markets using the technology that others use and we build." And this is the essence of their success: Just swim with the shark without messing up.

Well, there is still much more to write about Google and I hope, the book “The Google Story” would hold a lot of not – so – known facts and Google’s plan for the future. I’m waiting for it.

Whatever the Future may have in store for Google, the fact remains that it is, by far, theirs is one of the most successful stories of companies run by the Techno savvy strategists.

Regards,
Abhishek

*: Google comes up with modified logos to suit the occasion like Halloween, Da Vinci’s Birthday etc. They are called Google Doodles.
**: The buzz is that Google is coming up with Google OS. Also, the tide has, in a way, reversed as Microsoft is started competing with Google with its MSN Search and other offerings. There is another search engine coming up named “PreviewSeek” A good one!