Tim started with a slide of a cow to highlight some thoughts from The Wisdom of Crowds about how looking at a crowd's average guess of the weight of a cow can yield some pretty accurate answers. It's an appropriate image for the day after Google stock took a radical haircut on a disappointing quarterly earnings report, as contented cows are not always aware of the threats to their livelihood. Google likes to say it's focused on its users, and increased use of its search and media products seems to bear that out. Tim highlighted the massive scale of content and the worldwide local audiences that have been barely scratched as an indicator of how early it is in the process of media companies learning how to serve users in an online environment. He points to services such as Peapod that deliver groceries to his home as user-oriented capabilities that seemed very dot-commish when they were first launched but quickly become part of a lifestyle.

So what do users want from Google? Tim pointed to the concept of asset management as a tool to define what assets that a vendor (or Google itself) may have that they're comfortable exposing to users and to understand how those assets can be exposed most efficiently to your marketplace. These assets need to be very personal: Tim gave the example of a retail chain such as Target that may mean to a user a place to find a specific kind of toy for your kids but that may not project that specific meaning to a specific user targeted by their sale fliers and other media. Google works to make the monetization of those personalized value statements possible via their contextual ad services that allow click-through pricing to be scaled to an ad's popularity. This idea of letting users define the value of the product is pervasive in Google culture, from AdWords and AdSense user-driven auction pricing to its seminal Page Rank algorithms to a mashup of Google Maps and content from Craigslist that provides popups of real estate data from Craigslist. Tim boiled this down to a simple formula: understand your company assets 100 percent and reach 100 percent of the relevant users who need those assets and get 100 percent of the possible useful feedback and you cannot help but to succeed.

This all makes good sense, but managing brand value as a core asset can be tricky in this equation. Google is wrestling with a number of reputation threats from weblog comment spamming, censoring its China portal and questions as to how it manages personal and copyrighted content, which place pressure on Google to be the vendor-neutral venue that is one of the cornerstones of the Google brand. It's easier for a Yahoo, which is already clearly in the "we play well with corporations" camp, to have far more latitude in the short run to work with corporate advertisers to help them develop their brands online. Being user-oriented and still effectively reaping the growth of online ad dollars from major corporations can be a tricky dance. But Tim laid out a roadmap of how Google is working with corporate advertisers to use Google's contextual ad facilities to test out creative materials for ads to help understand how to target users effectively before committing more ad dollars on traditional brand advertising. The Google-AOL advertising deal is likely to build on those strengths and capabilities to allow for more innovation - and better margins from brand advertising.

It was an interesting step for Google to speak to a large SIIA audience, an acknowledgement of sorts that corporations may not be individuals but they are users of a particular kind. I am not too worried about the Google dip in earnings in the long run, because it's in general easier to adapt existing channels of advertising to a fundamentally user-oriented business model than to do the opposite. The main question mark is whether the friendly cow image that Tim flashed up on the screen will remain the benign image of Google or whether media frenzy and missteps may lead to a significant erosion of the Google image that will eliminate hard-to-replace user trust. For now, it's pretty likely that the Google cow will continue to take these things in stride and continue to churn out buckets of profits for a long time to come.