In the past couple of weeks I have had casual discussions with colleagues about the surge of Google in the university sphere. For example, our library is involved with the Google book scanning project. There have been other discussions around one of Google’s latest service offerings to universities: email.

Getting out of the email business is a very attractive proposition. It is a costly piece of infrastructure to support and it requires talented people to do well. This diverts some of our best human capital and technology resources away from other areas that are more specific to the university’s teaching, research and outreach domains. If the privacy issues surrounding financial aid decisions and other sensitive data can be resolved when storing this information on privately owned servers, it is very tempting for a university to get out of the email game.

However, it is important to ask the question about why a company like Google would want to get into the email business for universities. Here is a guess: having access to the email of university students offers a solution to the Generation X problem. To my mind, the lasting significance of the phrase “Generation X,” as well as its newer spinoffs “Generation Y” and “Millenials,” are the implications for business, advertising and marketing.

While the image of Kurt Cobain may constitute the tragic poster of Generation X both his in life and in his death, from the ‘follow the money’ perspective the phrase refers to a black hole in the advertising business. Advertising revenue goes in and yet no sales come out. Remember that Generation X, in part, was meant to describe a segment of the population, “twentysomethings,” that were unpredictable and therefore unreachable by marketers.

Children and teenagers are easy – just give them candy or some outlandish rebellious style. Middle aged folks are similarly easy – sell them big expensive things like sports cars or retirement packages. But people in their twenties have a lot of discretionary income from their first jobs and no major cash drains like mortgages and offspring. And yet marketers were failing to connect.

So let us take this discussion back to the original point: why is Google eager to take email over for universities. There are 2 significant pieces surrounding Google’s way of doing email:

1. Google and similar companies do not make their money off of the immediate services. You don’t pay Google for searches you do at its website. Likewise, Google probably could not make a significant amount of money on selling an email service. How does Google make money? Advertising. They don’t make money off the service provided to an end user, email in this case. Instead they make money on the data they collect about end users during the service’s use.
2. Google has a model for email vastly different from everyone else until everyone else began to ape Google’s model for email. The motto for their email service is, don’t delete, archive. Interviews I have seen and read with the Google founders also discuss their amazement that advertising has not caught up to the technology available in the 20th and 21st centuries. By harvesting large quantities of data, be it web pages or 2500 megabytes of email, you can deliver advertising to a person that is smarter and more likely to produce results.

Imagine that you could learn about and understand the personal associations and cultural references of an educated young adult just as s/he was heading out into the world to collect those first paychecks. What would you need to do? Well, one strategy would be to harvest their preprofessional communications that relate to their studies. Then you might combine that with harvesting personal and social communications among their peer groups. And doing this for, say, 4 to 5 years would provide a nice robust data set.

Now I do believe that Google is not going to sell any personal identities to advertisers or anyone else because losing their customer base as a result of what would essentially be corporate identity theft would be detrimental to their bottom line. However, you could build some rather impressive anonymous marketing personas that would be worth their digital weight in gold to advertisers.

I don’t think that if universities get out of the email business it is necessarily a bad thing, but I do think we need to be cognizant of what future we are contributing to. This is a technology decision that should be discussed with some of our best and brightest minds not only in the IT departments on our campuses, but also in our philosophy/ethics, business and sociology departments.

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