The Social Analyst is a column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.

Ten years ago, Google co-founder Larry Page gave up his role as CEO to an executive who had more experience with fast-growing technology companies: former Novell CEO Eric Schmidt.

This week, Page took back the reigns of power at the company he helped create. On the surface, Page seems to be inheriting a company in great shape. It still controls two-thirds of the search market, its Android mobile OS is rapidly growing, and it has an array of successful products such as Gmail, Google Docs and YouTube.

When you peel back the layers, though, Google is a company that has many looming challenges. Facebook’s skyrocketing growth seriously threatens Google’s supremacy on the web, and its big attempts to enter the social space have flopped spectacularly. It also faces pressure from Apple, now the world’s second most valuable company, and Microsoft, whose relaunched search engine simply won’t go away.

If Page is to successfully navigate Google through these choppy waters, he needs to hire a COO that will complement his own strengths and handle many of the day-to-day affairs required to operate a company of that size.

To explain why, all you need to do is take a look at two of the search giant’s biggest rivals: Apple and Facebook.

---

Jobs and Cook

---

From left to right: Tim Cook (COO), Steve Jobs (CEO), Phil Schiller (SVP Marketing)

As I argued in a previous edition of this column, Google needs its own Steve Jobs, a visionary CEO who can create new products that take off in the face of fierce competition. It took Jobs’s vision and relentless pursuit of great products to bring Apple from the brink of bankruptcy to the incredible success it enjoys today.

Jobs didn’t do it alone, though. In March 1998, former Compaq and IBM VP Tim Cook joined the company as SVP of operations and was eventually promoted to COO in 2005. When Cook first joined the company, its stock was worth less than $7 per share. Today, it’s worth more than $340. The company has grown from a $7 billion company to a $317+ billion juggernaut.

While you can’t attribute Apple’s success solely to Jobs and Cook, they have proven to be a formidable team with complementary skills. The following is from a profile of Tim Cook in The New York Times:

In Silicon Valley, Mr. Jobs is also known for relentlessness. Yet on many levels, he and Mr. Cook are opposites. While Mr. Jobs is mercurial and prone to outbursts, Mr. Cook, who was raised in a small town in Alabama, is polite and soft-spoken. He is often described as a “Southern gentleman.” While Mr. Jobs obsesses over every last detail of Apple’s products, Mr. Cook obsesses over the less glamorous minutiae of Apple’s operations.

Their complementary skills have helped Apple pull off the most remarkable turnaround in American business, and made it the world’s most valuable technology company.

---

Zuckerberg and Sandberg

---

From right to left: Sheryl Sandberg (COO) and Mark Zuckerberg (CEO). Image courtesy of AllThingsD

In March 2008, Facebook poached Google’s VP of online sales & operations, Sheryl Sandberg. In its original press release at the time, Facebook announced that Sandberg would be “responsible for helping Facebook scale its operations and expand its presence globally,” and primarily focusing on “sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy, privacy and communications.” Zuckerberg, on the other hand, would be able to shift more of his attention to his strengths: engineering, product and design.

At the time, the company was worth $15 billion. Today, the company is worth $50 to $75 billion. It’s scaled from 100 million users to more than 600 million.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg have proven to be an extremely effective duo. Once again, I’d like to quote a recent profile of Sandberg in The New York Times:

“One of the reasons the company is doing so well is because the two of them get along so well,” says Mike Schroepfer, vice president for engineering.

Ms. Sandberg has focused on building the business, expanding internationally, cultivating relationships with large advertisers and putting her polish on things like communications and public policy. That has freed Mr. Zuckerberg to focus on what he likes best: the Facebook Web site and its platform.

Donald Graham, the chairman of the Washington Post Company, who once tried to hire Ms. Sandberg, says that in the last two years a lot of questions about Facebook’s viability have been put to rest.

“The combination of Mark and Sheryl is the primary reason,” says Mr. Graham, who is also a member of Facebook’s board.

---

Larry Page and …?

---

While Google isn’t in dire straits, there are storm clouds on the horizon (Facebook), and it will take a visionary leader to steer the ship through turbulent waters.

That’s the role Page will try to fill. As Google’s longtime president of products, he has been the visionary behind the company’s search engine and many of its related products. As CEO, he will have even more control over the company’s product strategy, especially now that SVP of Product Jonathan Rosenberg is leaving the company. In a lot of ways, Page’s role will be identical to the ones Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg play at their respective companies.

Page doesn’t have a Tim Cook or Sheryl Sandberg to back him up, though. Eric Schmidt was always the guy who took care of care of business operations, sales, marketing, public relations and human resources — the less-than-glamorous parts of operating a multi-billion dollar company. But with the famed Google triumvirate (Page, Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin) broken up, Page can’t rely on Schmidt because he already has one foot out the door.

Page is going to need help managing the day-to-day affairs of the company and dealing with the non-visionary tasks of HR, advertising, legal, and operations. He’s a product guy — dealing with business operations isn’t his strength or his passion. Co-founder Sergey Brin cares even less about business. He’s happy working on new products at Google and has no interest in the COO job.

That leaves Page with three options: to run everything himself, to divide Schmidt’s old responsibilities among his lieutenants, or to get a COO.

I believe Page should take a few lessons from his CEO counterparts and promote or hire someone to be his second-in-command. History shows that pairing a visionary product CEO with a detail-oriented COO is often a winning combination, especially in the technology world.

---

Interested in more Business resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, sx70

Google CEO Eric Schmidt appeared last night on The Colbert Report. The two discussed everything from user privacy to why Google exited China: “Because we didn’t like their laws,” Schmidt said.

Still, one has to wonder who at Google thought it’d be a great idea to put Schmidt in an interview with Colbert. In the end, we only walked away knowing that Colbert wishes Google indexed more images of tall women carrying heavy objects and that Schmidt hopes his company’s algorithms don’t, in our lifetimes, become sentient and force humanity into servitude.

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Eric Schmidt
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News

To be fair, though, there are few who can emerge unscathed from an interview with Colbert, and Schmidt did about as well as anyone. Nevertheless, he maybe should have considered wearing different attire to this appearance, because there was definitely a high potential to get wrecked.

Can data from Facebook’s increasingly ubiquitous “Like” buttons give Microsoft an advantage in the search wars? The software giant may be banking on it, as AllThingsD reports the two companies are “deep in talks” about expanding their search partnership.

Such a move wouldn’t be a huge surprise. Ever since Facebook introduced its Like buttons there’s been speculation about a grander plan to organize the web around Likes instead of links. With the button now in use by hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of publishers, that possibility is quickly becoming more of a reality.

The even more intriguing part, however, would be Facebook offering up this information to Bing, and in turn giving Microsoft a treasure trove of social data not available to Google. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday that “The best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data,” as the company looks to integrate social features into more of its products.

Facebook may be willing to work with Google, however. The company signed deals with both Microsoft and Google to make information like public status updates available as the two tech giants launched their own real-time search products last year. The possibility of additional cooperation may be growing less likely though as Google’s revamped social strategy takes shape.

We’ll obviously be tracking this story and will update with any additional information.

When startups ask me whether they should outsource product development, I usually advise against it. If they’re desperate to save money, they should outsource some testing or ancillary-product development, not core products.  That’s because the developers of innovative technologies need to interact with each other and be close to customers and markets.  In my book, outsourcing is for corporate I.T. departments and for large companies with global operations, not for small tech companies.  I said this in my BusinessWeek column, three years ago.  I also cited research that showed that the tech industry has never constituted more than 15% of the outsourcing market (banking, finance, and insurance accounted for 40%; telecom, 17%; and manufacturing, 12%)-and this includes the product development that companies such as Microsoft, Adobe, and Cisco perform in their offshore locations.

When I wrote that BusinessWeek piece, Peter Harrison, CEO of GlobalLogic-who happens to be a good friend and someone I have mentored over the years-tore into me.  He insisted that I was wrong and offered to prove it by introducing me to his customers.  I ignored him (as I often do).  But Peter is persistent.  Last week, he roped me into his customer conference to have dinner with Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital, who is a GlobalLogic investor.  Peter also had me meet some of his customers.

I wasn’t surprised at how bullish Moritz was on GlobalLogic and outsourcing. VCs always hype their investments and are known to put pressure on their portfolio companies to reduce development costs through outsourcing.  But I was a little surprised to hear small Valley firms rave about the productivity and cost savings they were achieving by doing R&D; in places like Kiev, in the Ukraine, and Bangalore, India.  And I was very surprised to learn how rapidly GlobalLogic was growing despite the dismal economy. The company employs 3000 software developers world wide and has just received a mezzanine investment from a top investment bank (which usually means that the company is one step away from an IPO).

Despite this, I remain unconvinced that outsourcing core development is a good strategy for startups.  During my tech days, I outsourced R&D; to St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk, Russia.  But as you can read in this FastCompany article, my technology was conceived there, and that’s where my entire development team was located (and I was able to hire brilliant ex-KGB mathematicians who had skills I couldn’t find anywhere else). Having development teams working on a single product but being in different locations makes innovation much harder to achieve (yes, I know this is how open source works, but that’s different).  I’m going to detail my reasons and let GlobalLogic CTO, Jim Walsh, tell us all why he thinks I’m wrong.

Here are the reasons I’ve cited for outsourcing not making sense:

1) Communications and customer needs. Developing a product requires a deep understanding of customer needs, and extensive user interaction.  Locating R&D; personnel away from customers limits the ability to develop innovative products that meet market needs.

2) Components must fit together. Complex software is more like a Swiss Army knife than a meat cleaver.  The blade, bottle opener, and screwdriver have to work in an elegant manner and can’t be developed independently.  In a similar way, members of a software-development team need to work closely together.

3) Management bandwidth. It is a lot more challenging to manage diverse teams at multiple locations and in different time zones than to manage them together.  Additional layers of management are often required.

4) Fewer developers can often produce more. In the tech world, scaling up development teams doesn’t always lead to greater productivity.  Small teams are often the most innovative and productive.

5) Skills scarcity. The specialized skill and mindset that tech companies look for are hard to find.  For example, India doesn’t have programmers who have grown up to understand the intricacies of computer-game development, because few can afford the high-speed Internet connections needed.  In India, the best developers gravitate to prestigious companies like Infosys and Wipro, not to small startups.

6) Intellectual-property protection. This is a particularly strong concern in China, where it is almost impossible to protect trade secrets and where piracy is rampant.  Employees often leave to start ventures that compete directly with their foreign employers, and the laws provide little protection, because they aren’t enforced.

Here is Jim Walsh’s response.  I must warn you that this may read like an ad for his company, but I need to be fair, because I’ve just trashed GlobalLogic’s entire business model.  So take this for what it’s worth:

If  by “outsource” you mean throwing stuff over the wall to a third party, then I’d never advocate this for core development. If, on the other hand, you mean collaborating with a firm that possess specialized skills that you lack, are hard to find or very expensive and aligning your goals around a common outcome, then clearly I’m a fan. Firms that fail at globalizing R&D; do so because they either because they pick the wrong partner (i.e., one that lacks the R&D; DNA and does not specialize in the firm’s domain) or because they throw stuff over the wall and don’t invest in the intimate collaboration and goal alignment that true R&D; requires. Most IT services firms make poor product development partners because they focus on compliance and optimization, which suppresses innovation. By contrast, GlobalLogic has created a network of global innovation hubs that are made up of some of the brightest and most innovative software minds. Our software professionals are connected by a platform that supports Agile collaboration and that is designed exclusively for the purpose of accelerating breakthrough products to market. We are doing this successfully for a “who’s who” of the technology sector, from the very tiny to the very large. That said, let me respond to each of your points in turn.

1) Commun
ication: I completely agree that building great products calls for a deep understanding of customer needs and great communication.  We believe in creating small agile teams where the product owner is an integral member.  If this team is distributed, then it’s essential that you either (a) separate the scrums and have product owners in each location or (b) have the product owner overlap with the engineering team for several hours every day to review deliverables and provide constant feedback.  Although in the old days this was hard to do, modern communication and development platforms have made collaborating across distance easier.  In some cases, they can improve the quality of communication over co-located teams.

2) Integration: While building tightly integrated products with distributed team members might have been hard in the past, modern development tools and architectures have made it increasingly straightforward for even the most complex products to be built by distributed teams.  Most open-source projects are living proof of this progression.

3) Management: Managers who have distributed teams do need to learn new skills; however, once proficient, a manager with a distributed team can often outperform a centralized one. Take for example the opportunity to follow the sun by developing during the day and testing the same code line at night (i.e., daytime in a second location).  Or consider the opportunity to leverage specialized skills that you simply don’t have in one place or to have a larger or more skilled team than one could assemble otherwise.  If you’re struggling to overlap enough hours a day, one can always leverage teams in Latin America that work in US time zones.

4) Talent: I’m well aware that one great developer can often outperform many mediocre ones. That’s why I’d never compromise on the quality of team members – particularly for new product development. However, it’s possible today to get developers in Argentina, China, Eastern Europe and India (i.e., locations where we have innovation hubs) who are just as talented-and in some cases just as experienced and innovative-as those in Silicon Valley.  The key is to set your bar high and hand-pick your team in the same way that you would if you were doing the development right here at home.

5) Skills: While there was a time when specialized skills were hard to find abroad, this is simply no longer the case.  When I started in this industry 25 years ago, the skills in the U.K. were about 10 years behind those of the U.S.  Today, there is no longer any skill lag.  Indeed, it’s possible to get skills in cities like Bangalore and Kiev that are in advance of what you can find in many U.S. cities.

6) Intellectual Property: For all but a handful of products, IP risk is a red herring thrown out by firms to defend the status quo.  In our history of building more than 1000 products for more than 200 product companies, we’ve never had an incident of IP theft.  There is simply too much at stake for our firm and our employees for this to be a meaningful risk.  Finally, many firms have concluded that the only true defense for their IP is moving faster than the competition, and we can certainly help them do that.

Lastly, we would argue that the day has come when even a startup needs to think globally (i.e., become a micro-multinational) and seize the opportunity to create products that can be used around the world.  Therefore, it’s not enough to focus only on what American consumers want.  Having a global team is a great way to ensure that you’re creating a product that can address global needs.

The last part, on globalization, is exactly what Mike Moritz said in his talk.  I agree with this.  But Jim hasn’t convinced me about the other issues.  It could be, though, that things have changed from the time when I was a CTO and CEO, and that my information is dated.  So I look forward to reading your comments on what has and what hasn’t worked for you, and what you think about this topic.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

The OWLE team is back at it again, and they never fail to impress. Just a week ago, they announced the availability of the OWLE Bubo, their first product, which turns the iPhone into formidable video camera. Now, Harold Smith and Graham Mcbain have gone a step further. They’ve figured out how to access the 30 pin connector, the connector on the bottom of your iPhone that you use to charge it with, for more then just charging. What Harold and Graham have come up with today, could make video on the iPhone near broadcast-quality.

The idea of the OWLE Bubo is to take your camcorder accessories and let you use them with your iPhone to optimize the iPhone’s video experience. OWLE today posted a video to its YouTube channel (embedded above), explaining what they have achieved. They show a hack of the iPhone that allows it to use audio and video equipment that professionals use for movies.

The latest prototype that OWLE has developed, which is different than what they start shipping tomorrow, allows you to use lenses with depth of field and telephoto effects, XLR microphones (both wired and wireless microphones), stereo microphones and more. Basically, it allows you to plug in any professional audio equipment that filmmakers use, on your iPhone. The mics are plugged in through the 30 pin, and the telephoto lens was cobbled together.

To develop this working prototype, Harold and Graham took apart numerous other products that had the chips they needed to create what they feel is missing from current products. To be clear, none of these workarounds have been authorized or otherwise approved by Apple, but to see the quality and the possibilities with the iPhone 3GS really makes you think — what if Apple did approve this?

If Google were a sitcom, it would open every week with co-founder Sergey Brin arriving late to a meeting “out of breath in a T-shirt, gym shorts, and on Rollerblades.” This familiar depiction of Brin finds its way into practically every major profile ever written about the company, and so too does it dutifully roll into Ken Auletta’s newest book, Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It.

The first scene is a 2003 meeting with Mel Karmazin (then CEO of Viacom) at the Google campus with a sweaty Brin, Google’s other co-founder Larry Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt. At the end of a his visit, Karmazin tells them he is appalled that Google is “fucking with the magic” of the media business by actually telling advertisers which ads work and which ones don’t.

Auletta is a writer for the New Yorker steeped in the media industry, and while he spent a lot of time with Brin, Page, and Schmidt, his best stories like this one come from the titans of media he’s been covering and schmoozing with for decades. As such the focus of the book is on Google’s rise as a media company at a time when every other media company is feeling threatened by the Internet, and Google specifically.

Googled is not published yet, but I managed to get my hands on a copy of the uncorrected proofs. One of the most startling assertions Auletta makes right up front and repeats throughout is this:

In 2007, Eric Schmidt told me that one day Google could become a hundred-billion-dollar media company—more than twice the size of Time Warner, the Walt Disney Company, or News Corporation.

Later on, you find out that Schmidt qualified this statement with a list of very large businesses Google would have to enter successfully to some day get to that $100 billion figure. These include mobile, TV, enterprise, and existing bets like YouTube will have to pay off financially as well. All of this was part of a hypothetical “planning process where we said, is it mathematically possible for Google to become a hundred-billion-dollar corporation.”

But no matter, $100 billion sounds impressive. Auletta does a masterful job turning Google’s story into one that is about his favorite subject, the media firmament, and how Google secretly plans to shake it.

Auletta, however, is forced to hinge his narrative on quotes like that one from 2007 because Schmidt isn’t saying things like that anymore. Google is currently so vilified by the fearful media industry—from newspapers and book publishers to TV networks and movie studios—that Schmidt is bending over backwards these days to sound more conciliatory.

By media, Auletta means advertising, not content. Google is more than happy to leave the content production to others. The following passage is typical of how Auletta spins the Google story into the most epic media battle of our times:

Still, Page told me, he does not see Google as a content company. Google’s computers can “aggregate content; we can process it, rank it, we can do lots of things that are valuable. We can build systems that let lots of people create content themselves. That’s really where our leverage is.” Their leverage, inevitably, makes it easier for audiences to migrate away from old media. This will cause some distress, but satisfying everyone, including traditional media companies, is not Google’s goal, he said; serving users is. “You don’t want to do things the wring way that is causing real damage to the world or to people. But you also need to make progress, and that’s not always going to make everybody happy. Armed with this conviction, Page and Google’s engineers have made many media companies very unhappy indeed.

The scope of their ambition makes even other Internet entrepreneurs, like Marc Andreesen, suspicious of their motives. Andreessen provides one of the choicest quotes in the book:

“Their game plan is to do everything. Google is Andy Kaufman. The whole thing with Andy Kaufman is you could never tell when he was joking. Google comes out with a straight face and said, ‘We’re just going to be a search engine. We’re not going to be doing any of this other stuff’”—competing with advertising agencies, with telephone companies by getting into the cell phone business, with Hollywood, with publishers, with newspapers. “But I am quite sure they’re joking.”

Did Andy Kaufman ever wear Rollerblades?

The excerpts above give a flavor for the book and its slant, which alternately characterizes Google as both a growing media giant and a media killer at the same time. Auletta culls great fly-on-the-wall anecdotes from his sources, both at Google and at the media companies it may one day displace. But that is only one facet of Google’s incredible story. As such, Googled reflects the author’s lifelong preoccupation with the media industry as much as it reflects a complete picture of Google. But that’s why people read Ken Auletta books, to get that point of view, and for his exhaustive research and the riveting detail he brings to his subjects. And if it makes readers see Google in a new light, then it can be forgiven its overriding preoccupation.

The Walt Disney Company has agreed to acquire Marvel Entertainment in a stock and cash transaction, the companies announced this morning. Under the terms of the agreement and based on last week’s closing price of Disney, Marvel shareholders would receive a total of $30 per share in cash plus approximately 0.745 Disney shares for each Marvel share they own.

Based on the closing price of Disney stock on Friday, August 28, the total transaction value is $50 per Marvel share or approximately $4 billion.

Under the deal, which has been approved by the boards of both companies, Disney will acquire ownership of Marvel including its portfolio of over 5,000 Marvel characters. That portfolio includes many familiar names like Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor.

Says Disney CEO Robert A. Iger in a statement: “We believe that adding Marvel to Disney’s unique portfolio of brands provides significant opportunities for long-term growth and value creation.”

Ike Perlmutter, Marvel’s CEO, added: “Disney is the perfect home for Marvel’s fantastic library of characters given its proven ability to expand content creation and licensing businesses. This is an unparalleled opportunity for Marvel to build upon its vibrant brand and character properties by accessing Disney’s tremendous global organization and infrastructure around the world.”

Mr. Perlmutter will oversee the Marvel properties, and will work directly with Disney’s global lines of business to build and further integrate Marvel’s properties.

Marvel stock is surging following the news, up 10+ points at the time of writing (+27%), while Disney’s is down a little (-0,5%).