One of the most innovative companies on the planet could also stake a claim as being one of the slickest sales machines. IAN CAMPBELLgoes searching for the real Google

ONE CAN only speculate on what Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wished for when they blew out the candles at the company’s 12th birthday party this month.

They are working from a big list. Rumours are rife about launching a rival to Facebook, the imminent arrival of Google TV in our living rooms and the Chrome operating system on our desktops.

Recent history shows that not everything Google does is successful, but ventures like Android, the mobile operating system that gives Apple some long overdue competition, prove Google is more than a slick internet company.

Despite all this activity, Google still pulls off the trick of appearing like a geeky student project rather than a ravenous corporate entity. Maybe it’s the logo, which looks like something someone made when they were trying out a new set of felt pens, or the line about not being evil, which sounds like it belongs in a superhero’s speech bubble rather than a corporate mission statement.

Even when you walk through the Dublin office, between table football and brightly coloured sofas, you could be forgiven for thinking you had wandered on to the set of a kids’ TV show rather than European headquarters of one of the world’s fastest-growing companies.

Step across the corridor, however, and you see the other side of Google. Rows of sales people armed with headsets and computer screens are selling online advertising, the business that has turned the internet into Google’s cash cow.

The company founders came up with the algorithm for the world’s most successful search engine and chief executive Eric Schmidt was brought on board to wrap a business model around it. The ingenious set of tools Google developed for placing text-based advertisements next to search results and the pay-per-click model has revolutionised advertising and given millions of customers a taste of e-commerce.

This is the money-making side of the business, the part overseen by John Herlihy in Ireland. The general manager for the EMEA operation (Europe, Middle East and Africa) describes himself as “old-school” and there are no dotcom delusions in his pursuit of solid revenue. “About 80 per cent of my time is spent making sure our advertisers, publishers and users get a return on their investment. Our belief is that, if we deliver, they will continue to spend and keep coming back to Google,” Herlihy says.

About 1,600 people work in the Irish offices, 1,000 directly involved in what he says is “probably the largest sales organisation in Ireland”. The focus is on attracting new customers and up-selling and cross-selling those that are already on board. Sales staff from 60 countries speak 50 languages and deal with customers from Britain to Japan, Russia to South Africa.

“Ireland is the perfect location for an operation that reaches across more than half of the world,” Herlihy says. “It is multilingual, multicultural and multicurrency. If you can do that in one location you can provide a huge amount of de-risking for a multinational.”

Herlihy, who has worked for a number of IT companies including Oracle and Adobe, claims Google puts more focus on customers than any of them. “Our DNA is about solving problems for one person and then rolling it out to all of our customers.”

At this point, the elephant in the room starts to fidget and there’s not just one elephant, there’s a herd of them. The breadth and scale of Google’s disruptive innovation is bewildering and irritating – irritating to stakeholders in old business models threatened by the internet juggernaut as it sets about digitising the world.

Authors and publishers have taken exception to Google Books, entire countries like the Czech Republic have fallen out with it over Street View (launched yesterday in Ireland) and Rupert Murdoch was so angry with its aggregation of his news content that he put the Times behind a pay wall.

Then there are the privacy gaffes, like publishing contact lists of Gmail users who subscribed to its Buzz service, which just ended in Google paying $8.5 million (€6.2 million) in a lawsuit settlement.

Privacy will always be a hot topic for a company that trades on internet traffic. Herlihy says Google enjoys good relations with data protection commissioners around the world and points out that Google Dashboard lets people retain ultimate control over their data, but the scale of its operations still makes people uneasy. Lapses like Buzz don’t help and suggest a disconnect between Google’s capacity to innovate and its attention to detail.

“Too often we run too quickly and a consequence of being the first mover and the first guy to shake the tree is that we get blamed,” Herlihy says. “We want to be disruptive but we do not want to come across as . . . ” – he searches for the last word a little more slowly than his company’s website – “. . . arrogant”.

He says Google is an innovation factory trying to solve problems. This time he doesn’t mention revenue. Isn’t that the endgame?

“We believe in ubiquity first, revenue later. If something is of value, hundreds of millions of people will use it. Afterwards, the business models will come out.”

Sometimes the innovations fail, like Wave, a collaboration platform that it recently shut down. “We’re okay when things don’t work because we learn something from it. Whether it’s Wave or Buzz, we end up with something that can be applied elsewhere and solve a problem.”

Ultimately, Google’s main aim is to give the public what it wants, says Herlihy.

“It’s like opening night on Broadway. If it gets panned we make an effort to fix it, but after a period of time if people still don’t like it, then it’s time to move on. The public decides and it would be arrogant of us in the extreme to try and force something down people’s throats.”