The curious incident of the unlinked logo

Isn’t it interesting that the Google logo at the bottom of its youtube sidebar widget isn’t linked? Not to itself, not to youtube, not even to a google search of the keyword that filtered the playlist above it. Instead, It’s that rare, online oddity – the flat, unlinked logo. (And if you’re going, “huh?”, you probably shouldn’t be reading this.)

Call me naive, but something tells me we can’t attribute it to bad design or sloppy engineering or foolish oversight. On the other hand, it seems obvious that if any online entity has the strategic foresight/ security/ balls/ streetsmarts – call it what you will – to do this (leave its own logo on a foreign site unlinked), it has to be Google.

Now, it’s also just common etiquette to link so users can just click and go even if they know how to type your url. So what exactly is Google doing by going against the norm? 
 

 [A brief digression as I try to locate a pattern from my tenuous grasp of history - Woah! Just dropped a stack of books....]

I’m wondering if it has something to do with this. 

Great Britain still doesn’t put its own name on its postal stamps. Is it pretending to be more powerful than it is? Is it just hanging on to its memories of world domination? Or is it just saying that it doesn’t feel the need to do it because everybody knows who it is? 

the omission of an expected sign creates another - often more powerful - in its place.

In the case of the stamps, the omission began life as an oversight caused by the fact that they were, at first, intended only for local use and which later came to be a practice that continued by agreement – aided presumably by diplomatic reinforcement – with foreign postal services. As for Google, I think it’s safe to assume that there has been considerable thought behind the choice to unlink.

So what am i saying about google? That it is smarter, bigger and more powerful than any other player on the web? Maybe. But Bubble Generation says it better.

“It amazes me that most firms pretend Google, as a strategic player, does not exist. Time to wake up. Google has succeeded in part because of it’s technology, but equally well because of it’s strategy. What does that mean?

That means a deep competence in organizational learning – specifically from your consumers, a massive resource in systematic creativity and innovation, a critical resource in ethics (Google is ‘not evil’), a resource in intuitive usability, and of course a strong technological resource. Oh, and a commitment to strategic renewal.

This is pretty much the perfect set of resources to develop in a network market. Of course, the corporates will never understand this – because they don’t have the organizational capacity to even perceive that Google has a strategy.”

“Moral Relativism aside, evil is what I call a player with a better game.”