September 2nd, 2008
Can Google not do evil?
Conventional wisdom holds that, no matter how altruistic a company starts, its growth eventually turns those values inside-out and creates a monster.
During my own career I have seen this happen twice, to Wal-Mart and Microsoft. With the launch of Google Chrome, the nattering classes insist it is happening to them as well.
Back in the early 1980s Wal-Mart was an upstart, bringing big city bargains to small towns, turning associates into millionaires through the magic of stock options. Founder Sam Walton was revered, the modest man who built wealth on people power.
Today Wal-Mart has more enemies than Richard Nixon ever imagined having. Its critics call it the destroyer of worlds, horrible to employees, the drivers of our trade deficit and China’s human rights policies, environmentally insensitive.
The same thing happened to Microsoft. In the early 1990s all those Sam Walton stories became Bill Gates stories. (They are now Warren Buffett stories.)
Microsoft had taken on the IBM monopoly and won. Microsoft offered an open system in Windows. Microsoft brought computing to the masses.
Now those same policies are seen as evil. Windows is an ever-encroaching monopoly, which devours its young. Microsoft wants to control all of computing and Elvis, in the form of Gates, has left the building.
The same thing will happen to Larry and Sergey, we’re told.
But what really happened in the earlier cases? Nothing much.
Both Wal-Mart and Microsoft continued to do business as they had. External factors caused what had once seemed good to seem bad. Neither could adjust in time. Both remain strong competitors, but their images are tarnished.
The question is, can Google avoid this fate? (Picture from Originaldo.com.)
Some are already asking the question, is Google evil? Its data makes it Big Brother, it kowtows to China. And now, with Chrome, it will control the desktop as it controls the search space.
Chrome (the name comes from an early short story by William Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace) is just a collection of very good ideas meant to grow the market.
Javascript is killing browsing sessions. Malware is stealing our money without our knowledge. Current browser design can’t handle these growing pressures. Google is threatened by this just like the rest of us.
Chrome, we are told, can fight this. Can it? We shall see. I’m looking forward to it. And I’m certain that, despite some carping, versions for the Mac and Linux are right around the corner.
Most important, this is not proprietary. Firefox can adopt it, adapt it, add to it, tweak it. So can others. So can you.
This will grow Google. But it will also grow Microsoft. It will even grow Wal-Mart, by giving it a more robust Internet platform on which to extend its commerce play.
Given the size and innovation at Google it frankly shocks me that they don’t control more of the world. They still don’t have an enterprise play. They don’t sell goods. If you’re a big company looking to build in a cloud, call Amazon.
That’s really their plan for avoiding the monopoly tag. Grow the market so fast that even Google can’t dominate all of it.
So what if they killed the free dinners at headquarters? They added more day care.
Now it’s possible that, at some point, Google might indeed become evil. It’s very possible that Microsoft and Wal-Mart are not nearly as evil as their critics fear, just defensive and, in a corporate sense, middle-aged.
But a good open source project does not evil make.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
