Can Google Take on Wall St — and Win?

Dear Google,

Eric Schmidt recently said, “CIOs are trapped in a 1980’s architecture.” Actually, the world is trapped in a 1970’s architecture: a financial architecture that was designed for a bygone era, without the prosperity of future generations and the natural world in mind.

So here’s my challenge to you.

The global IT market is worth a few hundred billion bucks. But you’re (still) the most innovative company in the world — and there are bigger fisheries to rescue. A better global financial architecture is worth 10x more: at least $12 trillion, if the amount spent on the bailout is any

Can you build one?

Every day, you handle more searches than the NYSE handles trades — and that difference, I’m guessing, is about to hit an order of magnitude more. Every day, you connect people, businesses, and communities in deeper and tighter ways than besuited beancounters do. From my tiny perspective, it seems that you just might be in the best position of any organization in the world to take on Finance 2.0.

After money, the first great financial innovation was bills of exchange. What’s interesting about bills of exchange is that they’re just, well, information. Their example makes the point: money, debt, derivatives — all are just information.

You’re the veins for the informational lifeblood of the economy. Can you put that information far higher value use than search results for Balloon Boy? Can you help ignite new financial products, services, and platforms that — unlike Wall St’s — create thick value, and make people authentically better off?

You used to solve the big, massive problems. I haven’t seen so much of that lately. Now, that passion, courage, and refusal to accept the status quo seem to be shrinking to…”selling into” to an industry. Is corporate-itis setting in? Does rich and successful equal lazy and uninteresting?

Google Finance is nice. I like using it a lot. But if it created thick value — by really slashing search costs in finance — it would have prevented people, communities, and society from investing in toxic CDOs in the first place. It didn’t. It’s a pair of reading glasses, when what the world needs (to begin with) is the financial equivalent of an electron microscope.

What would a Googlier finance industry resemble? What would a more Googly set of capital markets look like? That’s the $12 trillion dollar question. After all, markets are just search engines — remember?

You still think you’re in the media business. You’re not. In the 21st century, everyone’s in the same business: the awesomeness business. It doesn’t matter what you make, as long as it offers maximum awesomeness. And right now, better finance would be pretty awesome.

Yesterday, you used to change the world. If you think a bit harder, a bit smarter, a bit more disruptively — you still can. If you don’t — well, the biggest catfish in a parched, dried up pond sure ain’t the smartest catfish.

Tracked, ValueCruncher, StockTwits, and many more are the leading edge of a revolution — a revolution in what finance has been for the last several centuries, and what it must become in the 21st.

Maybe my Finance 2.0 Manifesto can help you — and everyone else — get started.