No one is quite sure when it happened. One day there was no Google. The next day there was, and everyone was using it. Somewhere between September 1998 and December of the same year, it crept into our consciousness and went from being a garage-based start-up to one of PC Magazine‘s top 100 websites of the year. As a search engine, it was covering 10 000 pages in 1998. Today, it indexes 8 168 684 336 (that’s just more than eight billion).
What’s been most notable about Google is not the mind-boggling rapidity of its growth, or the deadly accuracy of its results, but rather the way it has snuggled up to every journalist, opinion maker, customer and website owner over the years and become one of the few global companies that can do no wrong.
Until now.
To say that Google has lost some of its lustre over the past couple of months would be understating it somewhat. The honeymoon is over, finally. But the sad truth is that this end was inevitable. In a world where the fortunes of online brands heave and sway like a slo-mo running scene from Baywatch, there had to come a point where someone points out that the engine is wearing no clothes. And it ain’t pretty.
Everyone loves a fairy tale, and the Google story is a classic. Small start-up, operating from a garage, two friends at the helm, develops life-changing technology that takes the world by storm. The company is listed, the friends and their believers get rich. Magic stuff. But then the dust settles and everyone realises that business as usual is just that — business. The newly legitimised company emerges with a real structure and all the trappings of corporate life, and begins to soar and spread its wings. But is it ”happily ever after”?
For the first time, journalists and privacy groups are starting to question the invasive pervasiveness of Google’s technology. It is part and parcel of most people’s web experience. Through its web of online properties Google could, in theory anyway, draw up a detailed profile of who you are, what you do on the web, who e-mails you, who talks to you and loads more. Yes, there is a potential threat to privacy. But that’s a debate that was always going to take place, regardless of how Google behaved in the public domain.
The new Microsoft
More telling is the way that Gary Rivlin, a tech writer for The New York Times, described the company. In a recent article he positioned Google as the new Microsoft (hungry and predatory, yet agile and innovative) and Microsoft as the new IBM (benign, gentle, appeasing and welcoming).
It is a startling comparison. Because it resonates.
Microsoft has long been the ogre in Silicon Valley, and Google the blue-eyed child. If you had said to any analyst a couple of years ago that the time would come for those roles to be reversed, you would have been ALT-F4d in seconds. It was just inconceivable. But yet it has happened.
Google has spread itself far and wide across the technological landscape. Not content with being a great search engine, it has spread its influence into every aspect of tech life. Advertising, discussion groups, online shopping, e-mail, desktop search and, announced last week, telephony. It’s all there in the Google bundle.
The point is not that Google has moved beyond search, but rather that it is demonstrating its core competency — a voracious appetite for innovation, and an internal culture that thrives on new, sexy and cutting-edge technologies, as well as a range of brand line extensions.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Staying ahead of the pack is the make-or-break strategy that any online company needs to employ, and Google shouldn’t be knocked for employing it well.
But if innovation is its core competence, then arrogance is its fatal flaw.
Rule of Corporate Hubris
I have an (unscientific) theory that I call the Rule of Corporate Hubris. The theory maintains that there is a correlation between where a company is in its life cycle and its public demeanour. When they are in their infancy, most companies are hungry for publicity and acclaim, and do whatever it takes to stay in favour. Then they grow bigger — and the faster they grow, the cockier they get and the less attention they pay to what people are muttering about on blogs and websites.
They then wake up, panic and overreact to the negative sentiment. They slowly unwind and begin to realise that critics come and go, and while they are there, they have their place. Customers, though, are what endure, and that is where the company puts its focus. That’s the cycle.
There were signs of the hand-wringing apology stage from Google a couple of years back when it manipulated its previously sacrosanct database after some pressure from the Church of Scientology. There was an outcry from most sensible people, the company apologised and reverted its database to its previous state. In those days, Google was still ”by the people and for the people”.
But then it entered the cocky stage, where the company still rides on that first intoxicating wave of acclaim and begins believing its own publicity machine. Then (possibly because it grew so fast) Google moved swiftly and seamlessly into panic mode.
Here’s the sign: Google recently threw down the gauntlet to the world’s media when it declared that it would no longer speak to any journalist from CNETNews.com. The sin for which it was exacting revenge? An enterprising writer from the news service did a Google search on the company’s CEO and published the results, a collection of personal facts, by way of illustrating how Google is a threat to online privacy. A great angle for the journalist, but not for a company that is used to being the darling of the media, hence its untypically heavy-handed and unnecessary reaction.
And then there was Mark Jen, an enthusiastic new Google employee who let readers of his personal blog follow his first few days working at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters. Google thought he had revealed too much of what it did. Today, Jen is an ex-employee.
Two small examples, but sadly they may tell us more about the Google of today than the number of pages it searches. And public response to both has put Google public relations on the back foot.
Fortunately, it is a cycle, which implies that, at some stage, Google will emerge more mature and able to put its pride in its back pocket. It will be the new IBM, and something else will be the new Google. Until then, though, shed the occasional tear for the Google we once loved. It seems to have lost its ‘ooooo’ … which, sadly, makes it the decidedly less sexy Ggle.