Google becoming evil or just growing up?
By John Pospisil
Is Google’s honeymoon with the public coming to an end? Over the past couple of days journalists and bloggers have been suggesting that Google’s once very bright star is beginning to loose its shine.
Is the Google brand becoming tarnished?
Google’s story is pretty amazing. A couple of smart graduate students create a site that literally changes the world making them fabulously wealthy. Full of idealism they adopt the motto “do no evil”. In the process the Google brand becomes synonymous with “cool”, “innovative” and “trustworthy”.
This fairytale start was always going to create challenging issues for the Google as it matured.
Nathan Weinberg at Inside Google lists a litany of recent ”missteps” that have tarnished Google. These include:
- The accidental deletion of a small number of Google mail inboxes, revealing that there are no backups.
- Server problems that caused Google’s successful social networking site, Orkut, to go down for almost a day.
- Prominent sex blogs being treated the same as splogs (this has been fixed)
- Suggestions that Google’s 2006 Zeitgeist are “bunk”
- Promotion of Google services over competing services on its search engine
Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch points out that Google’s “do no evil” motto makes the company an easy target now that it dominates the search market:
“Now Google is in the position of dominance, and they definitely have the arrogance that goes with it. But they are in a very difficult spot because of that damned motto, and perhaps right on the tipping point where public opinion could change. More and more, people are hoping for Google to stumble. And every time they do, the press pounces. And they always point to the motto.”
Arrrington thinks the company should start living up to its motto, while Om Malik at GigaOM thinks the company should just change its motto:
“Idealism is often sacrificed at the altar of capitalism, and Google is at that fork in the road. It is time to drop that idealistic motto. When it comes to trust, in these cynical times, do we really trust anything, anyone or any corporation? I don’t… do you?”
While its true that Google’s motto it has allowed critics to more easily attack the company, I’m not sure the perceived problems are as serious, or as unexpected, as commentators suggest.
With such strong early success Google was always going to experience growing pains. That doesn’t make it evil. Many high-growth companies have in fact gone of business because they haven’t been able to deal with these growing pains, so in fact Google is doing quite (very) well.
With domination of the search market, Google was always going to make enemies. That doesn’t make the company evil.
With an ambitious growth program, Google was always going to make mistakes and face difficult questions (such as making deals with the Chinese Government). That’s not evil either, though I do know that many people were angered by Google’s accommodation of the Chinese Government.
At present the reality is that the Google brand is still cool (I doubt many users even know about many of the issues that are being raised), and the company still provides an excellent search service to the public.
Sure Google has to work its way through some issues; all high-growth companies have growing pains they have to work through.
Having adopted the “do no evil” motto, Google will always be expected to do the “right” thing – whatever that actually means since the what’s “right” to one person, is not necessarily “right” to someone else. The motto will also mean that there will always be intense scrutiny of the way the company conducts itself, which personally, I don’t think is a bad thing at all.
While the recent problems make good blogging fodder, the real test for Google is how it conducts itself over the longer term.
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on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 3:54 am
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Read more entries by John Pospisil.
Stumble It!
January 2nd, 2007
Both should be assumed, as a matter of principle. It is our duty to the free market to hold the elites to a more grueling standard of quality, ethics, and credibility. Such handicaps are required for the purpose of making room for fledgeling companies to grow. Our first natural defense against parasitically bloated, corporate monopolies is spamming industries with enough rough copies of any given company or product to make monopolization all but impossible. Exercising favoritism for newer, smaller companies and skepticism toward established entities is one way to go about this.