Is Google the New Microsoft?

(Edit Note: I originally wrote this in May of 2006 but thought i would re-post it here to see if it still made sense.)

Now, don't get me wrong, I love Google, I love their corporate motto: "Don't be evil." They represent what seems like a great story about a couple of kids that made good, taking on the might of Yahoo and the behemoth: Microsoft itself.

What could be more honey and little cotton socks than that?

I guess, firstly, it is not really the true story.

Now, I do not want to cast aspersions or imply nefarious intent to those at Time Warner who own 1 billion dollars worth of Google stock. It was no doubt a good investment for AOL and after all the Googlyboys did not make them buy in. There is, however, a public feeling that Google was developed outside the system and is therefore not part of the “them” that people sometimes worry about. Admittedly my polling for this feeling was hardly scientific or as expansive as the never biased zogby, but amongst even the technical cognoscenti that I know, it is widely thought that Google was designed almost garage like, akin to the early development of Apple: a true success story against all odds.

But does it fit the facts?

Does that fit with Andy Bechtolsheim, a founder of Sun MicroSystems, investing USD 100,000 [i] in 1998 for 1 percent of Google? Or, what about Mark Andreassen, father of Netscape and Sillicon Valley, being an early investor?

Or take Yahoo, a primary competitor albeit with a different business model, who invested USD 10 million in 1999 so that even if they lose, they win. If we take into consideration that the Googlyboys own 50% of the company, there were millions of dollars of early investment money. I mean, this would have been one hell of a garage.

I am not saying that any of this is wrong. Let’s face it, when you are up and coming, passionate about wanting to succeed, help is help and you take investment from almost anywhere you can get it. We would of course hope that aesthetics alone would at least provide some pause when taking handouts from organized crime or Enron.

So what am I saying?

Well, first, it is almost impossible to become successful and avoid being part of “them”, the man, the system.

and

Myths, even when you do not spread them yourself, are a form of deceit – a tiny lie perhaps but all part of the slippery path.

Now, it might be more charitable to rephrase the question to: Is Google in danger of becoming the new Microsoft?

The thing I hope Mr. Brin and Mr. Page understand is that the more influence and control their company has, the more constraints they will need to impose on themselves to avoid being "evil". It is a bit like the spiderman ethos of “with great power comes great responsibility" in that the more power you have, the easier it is to do harm. Here's an example:

You are in a bar, you go up to a girl who is on her own and ask her out on a date. Nothing wrong with that. A bit forward perhaps, but essentially all harmless.

What if you are her supervisor at work?

What if you are her boss and have the power to fire her?

What if the girl is deep in debt from having to pay her mother's life saving medical treatment and desperately needs to keep her job to maintain that treatment?

How great must the differential in position be before such a harmless question becomes riddled with potential threat and harm?

In this particular case, maybe the girl would have redress through the courts - unlikely that it would save her mother though - but there are plenty of cases in our complex and interlinked world where no such redress is possible.

This could well be a factor in why God is not found picking up stray women/men in bars.

Maybe much of this comes across as wooly thinking, specious or facile but much is at stake here because the way we search is the way we think. I am sort of taking as a given here that everyone is pretty much aware that the Orwellian potential of Google is colossal. Searching demonstrates how we approach an issue and says a lot about us. And the problem with gathering such information is that it can be used to wildly mischaracterize and misrepresent us. It allows correlation to be increasingly used as proof and by cherry picking what people are looking at, they can, with relative ease, be turned into demons or saints.

It’s a bit like the problem with identity cards in UK. Most people already know that we are all on multiple databases. The issue is less to do with people being able to find information about us but what they might do with that data – it is not a matter of if someone will abuse it but rather when. After all, history basically guarantees that this will happen.

And what happens when you factor in commercial needs to fend off other big players versus being “evil”? (e.g. the decision on China)

Where does this all lead us?

You may want to brace yourself for this!

Google is headed to become the arbiter of truth.

Maybe you don’t believe this. Well, it is possible that truth will be slightly more consensus driven with a number of primary resources (including wikipedia perhaps) but essentially Google will control what options appear in answer to any question: Who invented this or who wrote that?

Seriously, they have the ability to do this. It may seem far fetched but the platform that Google is building is of the mindset that bigger is better. This is why it was relatively easy for them to role out Gmail with its continually increasing gigabytes of storage. They have basically built a humongous, mostly single purpose (search), computer running a cluster based OS that gets bigger, faster and more intense every day. Using this platform, Google are able to turn their attention to any application related to information sharing and attain almost immediate domination.

Now bear with me a sec, while I know it is hard to work out exactly what the Googlyboys overall gameplan is, we can make some assumptions. They will, for example, continue to expand their information resources and grow their platform, increasing advertising revenue by branching out into other mediums, etc. So, here is a fictionalized scenario:

• Say Google becomes a prime resource for generally available information, accessible via the web/mobiles & pdas/tv and eventually directly from a person’s neural array!
• Google becomes increasingly customizable for end users so that they end up with their own Google that fits their life needs. Personalized intelligent agents will be developed to expand the types of queries we can ask and the quality of information returned. They will be like an online buddy, always there when we need them – our Big Buddy.
• Google will launch the GoogleTrust initiative that will encourage people to store all their information in their personal Google. Young people become inculcated to use Google at an early age for homework, diaries (blogs), ideas, work etc.
• Future Google generations who are not so concerned with the “Do no evil” idea will have access to masses of information about everyone. Blackmail, dictatorship, evil things ensue.

We do not even need to wait upon the malfeasance of future generations as current governments, in their terrorist-hunt mindset, are as likely to get their corrupting hands on all that info and again “evil” comes knocking.

I know, I know, it’s the stuff of conspiracy theory, paranoia to the extreme. But remember, control the information and you control the world, and, of late, it seems that the conspiracy “nuts”, I use the term affectionately, have been hitting the nail on the head: Iraq and WMDs anyone?

Now take a look at the mediascape today, already American media is controlled by a few very rich, very powerful interests who use that resource to control the news. Do we really want to head down a path, albeit innocently with some well meaning people, that hands so much information to what will eventually be, that self same few?

I don’t have a definitive answer to this or in fact any of the questions posed here. It seems reasonable to point out, however, that monopoly, they might not want to consider themselves such with only a 52 percent[ii] market share, needs to operate by different rules.

For what its worth, here are some thoughts that Google should look at:

• Information is a world resource that should not be restrained in the hands of a few. Restricting it leads inexorably to “evil”. To counter this evil, maybe Google should consider constraints on their behaviour and let us know what they are so we can help keep them on track - a Google Constitution perhaps?
• Google needs to consider who should watch the watchmen. It needs to move some elements of itself into a global trust, a steering committee whose only remit is to have access to the way in which Google’s information is used and to publicize the same. Google needs to police itself in a way that it can not de-police itself.
• Google needs to separate from its brand those areas that are not a clear part of its model. They need to avoid using the Google brand as a sledgehammer, a market frightener. It may seem counter-intuitive to deny your business a possible revenue stream but when you achieve a critical mass in one area, it is something you need to do to be a decent netcorporation. We already talk about being a good netizen and using netiquette, we surely need a guideline for the way corporations use the internet – Google can light the way.
• Google need to remove some of their own hype. This is particularly tricky but when a company is valued far in excess of any income it can produce, the investments themselves are no longer part of real world achievements, they are essentially investor games – a particularly nasty blood sport that basically causes money to move, osmosis like, from the poorest to the richest. The company’s value must be linked, if only in the most tenuous terms, to its income and profit. In this way Google, a very digital company, stays in the real world and thus connected to real people.

These thoughts could be expanded but I guess they boil down to the idea that power corrupts through a series of degrees, many infinitesimal steps that require counters (checks and balances) to be held in place in order to restrain the corruption. There is no funny end to this story, much as I’d like there to be one because I like the idea of Google and I believe that most of the engineers and developers working there tend towards the libertarian, anti-establishment types that want to do good in the world. Unfortunately, it’s hard to be anti-establishment when you own the place.

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[i] http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

[ii] http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_29/b3943050_mz011.htm

Bubble Dwellers

It is an inevitable part of growing up that you slowly lose respect for authority. Power forms a bubble around itself such that all those within its confining embrace operate in a different reality. Their topics of conversation become the topics of relevance and the more a thing is discussed, the more important it becomes. Looking in from outside, the distortions and the disconnect are often painfully obvious.

Consider the current western obsession with Iran. According to Franklin Foer of The New Republic, "Iran vexes politicians and policymakers across the political spectrum. Yes, it poses a massive threat to global security. But there's hardly any consensus about how we should manage that threat."

Iran, a "massive threat to global security" my arse.

Iran is not any kind of threat to global security unless it is made one. Almost every informed person in the middle east, not living in a bubble, knows this. The problem here is that those with power are used to using that power to get what they want and Iran is becoming harder to bully. Maybe a little reality check is in order: the invasions, surely only a pedant now considers them any thing else, of Iraq and Afghanistan have promoted Iran to a new pre-eminence such that a) Iran will have nuclear power and b) Iran can move to making a nuclear bomb if it so chooses.

I may not like these facts but my liking or disliking them makes very little difference. Likewise, the sooner the west accepts that it is not in control of these issues, the quicker we will be able to move forward and address the real problems.

WTF? Are you mad? Iran having nuclear weapons is not the real problem?

Simply put, no society can totally protect itself from those within it that want to do it harm. If one aspect of society feels sufficiently aggrieved, it will find a way to lash out. It might use nuclear, biological or some new method but where there is a will, there will be a way.

Amongst the powerful cognoscenti, the real issues with Iran are well known and all the gamesmanship we see on our news is more a delaying tactic than anything else. The US aims to maintain its military dominance through missile shields and other futuristic weaponry, hoping to delay Iran long enough to have effective systems in place. If necessary, they may embark on a limited war with Iran in order to set them back while this is done. Now that's a WTF moment if ever there was one, the guys who dreamed up a limited war with Iran thinking that they can contain such a thing. I like to believe that much of the Iran debate is high level posturing but I do get concerned about that bubble and how it creates its own reality.

The real issue with Iran is what is the best way to engage with the country and, to me, the answer is self-evident:

Stop demonising them. Stop threatening them. Negotiate and compromise.

In essence, treat them like another country with the same rights as everybody else.

Does this mean that everything will go swimmingly? No, sometimes there will be problems and sometimes things will not go the way many in the west would prefer. The primary reason why this approach is the best one is that it plays to the real strength of the west: tolerance and liberality. I know that this may not seem like a strength but it is a contagious form of freedom that leaps across cultures and is especially appealing to new generations innately programmed to challenge their authorities. Instead, the west's bubble like approach to geopolitics, enhanced by an arrogant display of power reveals a hideously intolerant underbelly to other cultures, pushing away those most inclined to be our allies.

Ruthless rotweiller businessmen, like Rupert Murdoch, like to promote the dangers of militant Islam and Iran, acting either through ignorance or malice as though these are the same thing, and it is unfortunate that such people reinforce the western centric bubble through their media interests. This bubble encourages a manichean world view, split down one arbitrary line or another, that deals in absolutes and suggests dire consequences for being on the wrong side of the divide. It is almost all crap. I am not saying that there are no dangers but the issues involved are never so clear cut.

Take the stock market crash of 1929 in America. This is a country in love with capitalism. It held as a principle that the oxymoronic free market solves all ills. The great depression proved the fallibility of rampant capitalism sixty two years before the fall of the Soviet Union made the same claim on communism. And how did America recover? They turned to socialism with Roosevelt's 100 days and the New Deal, make work programs, social safety nets and regulation. I am not advocating the embrace of socialism but it is worth noting that capitalism does not work in all cases and sometimes a different approach is needed. The same is true with most absolutist principled positions when applied to the real world. Reality bucks the neat equation and real progress rejects polarising dogma. Osmotically, it looks for common ground.

There is plenty of common ground with Iran. The younger generation wants democracy and freedom. With gentle encouragement from other countries, they will move towards such a state. Every time the west threatens or attempts to coerce the Iranian government, the hardliners are able to clamp down on any progressive movements aided by a natural nationalistic instinct within those against an external threat. Such strange bedfellows are common, allowing fractured fundamentalist groups within Islam to put aside their real differences and fight an arrogant west. We define our enemy by lumping them together and tarring them with a single brush. When we tell the world that you are either with us or with the terrorists, everyone who is not with us but would have no normal ties to so called terrorists, begins to see validity in the struggle against the west. It is through such pompous self-righteous demonstrations that we give form to an enemy that we can never defeat. This is a monster of the ID where we create the thing we fear.