The Leadership Letter

Real correspondence from the people running real companies — and what it reveals about leadership.

Measure What Rivals Are Quietly Stealing From You

If a competitor might be eating your lunch one bite at a time, build the instruments to see the bites — don't settle for gut feel.

Thanks for the very helpful summary Cory. I would keep (somewhere in the stack) a couple of other items in mind. 1. I do believe we have a markedly better core search product than they do and we should both accentuate (through Marketing etc) this lead and increase the lead. (In my experience nobody articulates this better than Microsoft CTO - and former head of Bing, which still rolls up to him - Harry Shum.) The search world is in awe of what we do and we here take it for granted. 2. I know we run very detailed longitudinal studies - and this is best discussed offline - analogous to 'what impact is DOG having on our search volume?'. For instance, 'do Amazon Prime members perform fewer commercial queries over time on Google'? So I would hold us to a higher standard than 'it's got to be gut feeling, it's too hard to measure'.

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Court Exhibit
United States v. Google LLC (Search)
1:20-cv-03010 (DCD), Trial Ex. UPX0500 — DOJ public archive
June 20, 2019
Public domain
View the primary source →