Wal-Mart and Google slug it out!
I ran a GoogleFight between Google and Wal-Mart, and Google knocked Wal-Mart out by 158 million to a tick under 6 million. Hardly a contest!
What brought this to mind was a Digital Rules column by Rich Karlgaard recently published in Forbes Magazine. Karlgaard, a Forbes publisher (or, for all I know *the* Forbes publisher), compares Google and Wal-Mart and says they are more alike than people think: Both have a simple mission and a simple brand, both company's products are simple to use, both companies are technology leaders, and both companies exploit the "cheap revolution" -- Wal-Mart by importing from China and (although it is not stated) underpaying employees, and Google by running cheap Linux servers.
Well, no. From a philosophic viewpoint, all "things" have some commonality simply by virtue of being things, and certainly all corporations have some commonality by being corporations. You could take this a bit further and say that all very successful corporations (and both Google and Wal-Mart certainly are that) have a fair amount in common (like money in the bank). This is a bit along the lines of Tolstoy's famous dictum that all happy families are alike. But, in fact, it is hard to imagine two successful corporations with a greater difference than Wal-Mart and Google:
Google hires the smartest people it can find and gives them time for their own projects (except in its technology department in Bentonville, Arkansas Wal-Mart doesn't care much about employee intelligence, and rigidly structures store employee time with things like penalties for going to the bathroom too often)
Google provides employees with great benefits (Wal-Mart weasels out of paying any benefits at all much of the time; avoidance strategies include using captive illegal labor)
Google's mission is to be an information portal, and makes its money via digital mechansims related to information (Wal-Mart trades in physical things)
Google makes more than $500,000 of cash flow per employee (Wal-Mart makes $16,000 per employee, or about 3% what Google does per worker)
Google makes a conscious effort to care about what it does and the world around it and to "do no evil" (Wal-Mart could care less about what it does to local merchants, employees, or the environment in China as long as it can squeeze a few pennies more profit)
Why the unlikely Forbes equation of these two? I think it is part of a subtle business-world putdown of the idealistic component of Google and the Internet. All that matters, so this goes, is profit and the bottom line which is in keeping with the insidious logic of our times. Google is really Wal-Mart in this world of Orwellian speak, and yes, we can save social security by looting it and handing the proceeds to the investment community -- because, after all, it is all about profit, and no company is really different from any other.
Posted by Harold Davis at March 4, 2005 12:28 PM
