As the Manichean Google Worm Turns
I have always been a Google agnostic. I don't love Google, and I don't hate Google. I think Google is a company with good and bad, like most companies, institutions, and human beings.
My picture of most "companies, institutions, and human beings"-and this is very transparent with my kids-is that an angel sits on one shoulder and a devil on the other. Sometimes the angel wins, and sometimes the devil wins.
Google cooperates with the Chinese government to censor Internet access in China. Chalk up one to the devil. On this story, you may laugh or cry when you read about Bill Gates taking the unusual step of praising the competition and Google's censorship in China as preventing more censorship overall. George Orwell, where are you when we need you?
Google resists turning over search records to the U.S. government when its competitors roll over and play dead-and don't give a fig for the privacy of their customers. This time it's three cheers for the Google angel!
On the good side of the ledger, I am very, very impressed with Google's technology prowess and business acumen. Besides personally using Google's search all the time, as the author of two books about using Google's technology, I am professionally grateful to the company. (The books are Google Advertising Tools and Building Research Tools with Google.)
However, I've been bemused for a long time about the free pass Google has got from the technology community (and media) for behavior that would have been critiqued soundly in any other company. (See, for example, my Do no evil? from August 2005.)
Any big business that enjoins on its Investor Relations pages "don't be evil" is riding for a fall. By the way, Google's famous-or infamous-"don't be evil" motto ties in nicely with my devil and angel Google analogy. Both "don't be evil" as a world view and the devil-angel dichotomy are representative of a black-and-white Manichean outlook. Google's more recent Corporate Philosophy statement has hedged "don't be evil" a bit by replacing the notorious too-good-to-be-true aphorism with the declaration that you can make money without doing evil.
Now the Google worm has begun to turn, and the company that could do no wrong can do little right in some quarters. For example, check out Danny Sullivan's 25 Things I Hate About Google on SearchEngineWatch. Danny also loves Google, so I think he buys into the dichotomous Manichean Google worm world view, too.
Posted by Harold Davis at March 15, 2006 10:37 AM
