CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
Where Is the Wave
Taking Google?
Google is surfing a huge wave that seems not to have
crested. Eileen Naughton is the director of media platforms for
Google and works out of its block-long New York office on West
Fifteenth Street. Before joining Google, Naughton spent more than
fifteen years at Time Warner, where she held a number of senior
positions, including president of Time
magazine and vice president of investor relations during the merger
of AOL and Time Warner, when everyone feared layoffs, turf battles,
a stock price drop, and senior management at the joined companies
vied to mirror the Ottoman Empire, where the wives of sultans
poisoned stepsons. When asked to describe the difference between
working at Google and at an old media company, Naughton offered a
one-word reply: “Optimism.”
Google may not have
an overarching strategy, but it does aim to be a disrupter. Google
has always been guided by a vision enunciated as early as 2002, as
we’ve also seen, when Larry Page told a Stanford class, “If you can
solve search, that means you can answer any question. Which means
you can do basically anything.”
When Google defines
its informational mission so broadly, and enters businesses where
engineering can eradicate inefficiencies, it is left with a
shooting gallery of swollen targets. An “innovative” company like
Google, said Brin, enters fields where “we scale,” meaning where
they have the infrastructure to enter fairly cheaply and without
huge diversions of resources. With millions of computers and
servers processing searches and collecting and digesting data, this
architecture makes it possible for Google to “scale” into cloud
computing, to store and search and sell digital books, to host the
fifteen hours of video uploaded each minute on You Tube—the
equivalent, Brin said, of uploading eighty-six thousand full length
movies every week. “Everything Google does extends its reach,” Bala
Iyer and Thomas H. Davenport wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “It is informational
kudzu.” And although Google likes to say they don’t compete with
media companies and prefers to call them “partners,” Iyer and
Davenport write that by working with advertisers and newspapers,
magazines, television, radio, mobile telephones and Web sites, it
“is quite possible that what Google learns across various media as
it solves problems for the ecosystem partners may position it to
become the competitor that it now claims not to be.”
Google appears to be
well positioned for the foreseeable future, but it is worth
remembering that few companies maintain their dominance. At one
point, few thought the Big Three auto companies would ever
falter—or the three television networks or AT&T, IBM, or AOL.
For companies with histories of serious missteps—Apple, IBM—it was
difficult to imagine that they’d rebound, until they did. To avoid
the roller coaster, Google has to avoid two sets of obstacles, one
external, the other internal.
THE EXTERNAL HURDLES
START with Microsoft, but they don’t end there. Because Google has
been so audacious, it has “waked up the bears,” colliding with
various industries and companies. Alert to Google’s growing
dominance, Verizon in late 2008 chose Microsoft’s search engine for
its mobile phones. Newspapers and magazines now want Google to pay
to link to their stories. Television and movies seek license fees
from YouTube. Telephone companies fear Google’s Android.
Advertising agencies seesaw back and forth between wariness and
hostility. Cable and telephone broadband providers are angry about
Google’s call for an “open net.” Rupert Murdoch is unhappy that
Google is likely to end its lucrative advertising guarantee to his
MySpace when the contract expires in 2010, as Time Warner was when
Google announced in early 2009 that it would sell its 5 percent
stake in AOL, cheapening the value of AOL and of Time Warner’s
stock. Microsoft needs no reminders that Google is their enemy and
was reminded of this in July 2009 when Google announced—as
Netscape, to Microsoft’s chagrin and alarm, did a decade
earlier—that it was retooling its browser to become an operating
system for PCs, one without boot-up delays and that would be
simpler and faster and cheaper than Windows. (Of course, Microsoft
countered with a Web-based version of its Office software that is
also free.) Overseas, Google is challenged. Its social network
site, Orkut, has seen its market share slip in countries like India
and Brazil, where it was once dominant. Even in search, there has
been slippage; in Russia, a private start-up named Yandex has a
market share approaching 50 percent, well ahead of Google. As with
nations, there are few permanent allies. Friends like Apple are
angry about Android, and although Jeff Bezos was an original Google
investor (and declines to say if he still owns Google stock),
Amazon is mounting a cloud-computing challenge as Google is
mounting an electronic book challenge. “These companies air kiss
each other, just as any Hollywood company does,” observed Andrew
Lack, the former president of NBC and the CEO of Sony Music, now
the CEO of the multimedia division of Bloomberg LP. “So their level
of sincerity is not much different than the traditional Hollywood.
Usually we think of Hollywood and Washington, D.C., as company
towns. Ironically, Silicon Valley is often right there with
them.”
Google knows that one
day its cold war with Facebook could turn hot. By March 2009,
Facebook had 200 million users, double the number it had when
Sheryl Sandberg joined a year earlier. Sandberg projected that by
the end of the year, Facebook would have 1,200 employees. Despite
sneers that Facebook makes no money, Sandberg said if her company
extracted the money it reinvests in its computerized
infrastructure, “we’ve been profitable for seven quarters.” (Of
course, one can’t extract these core business expense.) By the fall
of 2009, she predicted that Facebook would take in more cash than
it expends. Asked whether Facebook was a threat, Bill Campbell
replied without hesitating, “Anybody that gets a widely accepted
user platform is to be worried about.They could be the start page
for people that use the Web.” The Google model is based on getting
users out of Google and to other sites, on maintaining the Internet
as the primary platform. Facebook and other social networks seek to
keep users on their sites, to become the hub of their online lives,
to become their home.
Social networks might
pose a threat to Google search. At the MIT Media Lab in the winter
of 2009, a Ph.D. student named Kwan Lee was devising a mobile phone
application for a social network search function. Lee began with
the premise that “Ads on the side are not useful to me.” Google
search, he said, “is a pull model,” in which the search program
aggregates data and lets users decide what is useful. Lee thinks it
is difficult for users to “pull” the data they want from the
hundreds of thousands of links received in response to a single
search query, much of which he considers spam. As a substitute, he
is devising a “push” model with which friends who are part of a
social network could push tips to friends, sharing what they
purchased. It would also allow participants to ask questions of
friends, who are likely to deliver more precise and trusted
answers. “This makes search much more efficient,” said Lee,
fondling his iPhone in his space on the fourth floor of the Lab.
“My goal is to reduce and eliminate spam,” to allow “people to get
recommendations from friends.”
This could pose a
threat to Google, for although it has a broader base of data,
social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Ning, or Linkedin retain
more in-depth information about individuals and their community of
friends. A familiar brand name like Amazon could also pose a
challenge. “What happens if people searching for a product go right
to Amazon and not to Google?” asked an important Google
adviser.
Google’s founders are
acutely aware that search is still fairly primitive. Type into your
Google search box “Was Shakespeare real?” and in less than a second
up pop 5,06,000 results. Because many books have been written
exploring whether someone other than William Shakespeare penned his
plays, one result would not be possible or even desirable. But 5
million? Page and Brin often say that their ideal is to have so
much information about their users that Google can devise an
algorithm that provides a single perfect answer.
Kwan Lee is not alone
in thinking that Google is mistaken to treat search as an
engineering problem. John Borthwick, who created one of the first
city Web sites, sold it to AOL in 1997, and later became senior
vice president of technology and alliances for Time Warner, thinks
Google “lacks a social gene.” (Borthwick has since founded and now
runs Betaworks, which seeds money for social media.) Information,
he said, “needs a social context. You need to incorporate the
social graph [the connections among people] into search. Twitter
becomes a platform for search. People put out Tweets—‘I’m thinking
about buying a camera. What does anyone think of this camera?’”
It’s the wisdom of crowds—your crowd of friends. “Google is just
focused on CPU—central processing computers—and ignores the
processing of the human brain.” He believes this makes its search
vulnerable. Google obviously has come to share this concern for a
senior Google executive confirms that they tried—and failed—to
acquire Twitter.
Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan identifies
another variation of this threat. “If I were Google I’d be worried
about vertical searches,” he said—searches that tap the knowledge
of experts. Jason Calacanis, a Web entrepreneur, started a niche
search engine, Mahalo.com. The problem with horizontal search,
Calacanis said, is that it spews out too much information and
assumes that the most linked sites are best. “The ‘wisdom of
crowds’ is great to find trends,” but there is such a “mob” of
voices on the Web that search results produce too much useless
information. He said he raised twenty million dollars to hire
experts who produce targeted sets of no more than seven results—the
seven best hotels in Paris, for instance. He hoped experts in
various fields could produce answers to twenty-five thousand
questions and computerize these. He vowed not to assign cookies to
track a user’s past searches, and said he’d be content in ten years
if Mahalo had ten percent of all search traffic. He saw Google more
as a partner than a competitor; the AdSense program generates a
good deal of his site’s income. The competition he worried about is
from old media. “I would have been afraid if the New York Times or Bloomberg took a bunch of editors
to compete with us.” Calacanis still can’t understand why they
didn’t enter vertical search themselves. With experts in food,
wine, movies, art, Iraq, finance—you name it—big newspapers might
have been a search contender.
Of course, Calacanis
himself might not be a contender. Perhaps a challenge will come
from Wolfram Alpha, which was launched in May 2009 and does not
search the Web or rely on experts but instead relies on databases
to provide answers and offers additional links on the side of the
search results. Unlike Google, these vertical search engines do not
offer a universal search, which raises this question: how does a
user anticipate which subjects are covered in the vertical search
index? To date, with exceptions such as Expedia .com for travel,
Monster.com for
job searches, and HomeAway.com for vacation retreats, vertical
searches have not thrived. And as Google moves toward better
comprehension of the information users seek, it too will produce
fewer and better-honed results. Google will have competition from
Microsoft’s renamed and reengineered search engine, Bing, launched
in May 2009, which in July 2009 finally succeeded in merging with
Yahoo search.
One could argue that
the ultimate vertical search would be provided by Artificial
Intelligence (AI), computers that could infer what users actually
sought. This has always been an obsession of Google’s founders, and
they have recruited engineers who specialize in AI. The term is
sometimes used synonymously with another, “the semantic Web,” which
has long been championed by Tim Berners-Lee. This vision appears to
be a long way from becoming real. Craig Silverstein, Google
employee number 1, said a thinking machine is probably “hundreds of
years away” Marc Andreessen suggests that it is a pipe dream. “We
are no closer to a computer that thinks like a person than we were
fifty years ago,” he said.
Sometimes lost in the
excitement over the wonders of ever more relevant search is the
potential social cost. In his provocative book The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr notes that Google’s
goal is to store 100 percent of each individual’s data, what Google
calls “transparent personalization.” This would allow Google to
“choose which information to show you,” reducing inefficiencies. “A
company run by mathematicians and engineers, Google seems oblivious
to the possible social costs of transparent personalization,” Carr
wrote. “They impose homogeneity on the Internet’s wild
heterogeneity. As the tools and algorithms become more
sophisticated and our online profiles more refined, the Internet
will act increasingly as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop,
constantly playing back to us, in amplified form, our existing
preferences.” We will narrow our frames of reference, become more
polarized in our views, gravitate toward those whose opinions we
share, and maybe be less willing to compromise because, he said,
the narrow information we receive will magnify our differences,
making it harder to reach agreement. Carr also expressed concern
that search extracts another toll. “The common term ‘surfing the
Web’ perfectly captures the essential superficiality of our
relationship with the information we find in such great quantities
on the Internet.... The most revolutionary consequence of the
expansion of the Internet’s power, scope, and usefulness may not be
that computers will start to think like us but that we will come to
think like computers. Our consciousness will thin out, flatten, as
our minds are trained, link by link, to ’DO THIS with what you find
HERE and go THERE with the result.‘ The artificial intelligence
we’re creating may turn out to be our own.”
The fear was that
Google and its online brethren shortened attention spans and
trivialized ideas by simplifying them. This was the thrust a
quarter century ago of Neil Postman’s influential book,
Amusing Ourselves to Death. He was
writing of the public harm when television supplanted print. I
can’t suppress a smile when I think how this communications
scholar, were he still alive, would react to the Internet, to the
thousands and sometimes millions of answers Google offers to a
search question, or to an online text-messaging tool like Twitter,
with its insistence that no communication be more than 140
characters.
Increasingly,
teachers admonish their students that a Google search can be too
easy, allowing them to bypass books that broaden the context of
their thinking and surprise them with ideas their search words
don’t anticipate. Tara Brabazon, a professor of media studies at
the University of Brighton, in England, published a book,
The University of Google, that caught
the attention of the press, in early 2008. Google, she told the
Times of London the day before she was
to deliver a lecture based on her work, “offers easy answers to
difficult questions. But students do not know how to tell if they
come from serious, refereed work or are merely composed of shallow
ideas, superficial surfing and fleeting commitments.” She does not
let her first-year students use Google or Wikipedia as research
tools because, she warned, “We need to teach our students the
interpretive skills first before we teach them the technological
skills.” These social costs will matter to the company if they
erode the trust Google has earned and if generations of college
graduates and their instructors are dubious about Google’s veracity
or worth.
The other external
threat to Google is government, a threat engineers have difficulty
understanding; the Silicon Valley bubble can be as insular as the
Beltway’s. Google had fair warning when the Federal Trade
Commission held up its DoubleClick acquisition, and when the
Justice Department threatened antitrust charges if Google did not
relinquish its advertising deal with Yahoo. And these challenges
were under the anti-regulatory administration of George W Bush.
There is, with merit, a common belief at Google that the
administration of Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership in the
House are more sympathetic to Valley companies and technology
issues. Eric Schmidt was an important economic adviser to Obama,
and other Google executives, like David Drummond, were early and
fervent Obama supporters. But Google would forget at its peril that
Democrats traditionally favor more regulation, not less; that
Google has made some powerful frenemies that command attention in
Washington; and that Google juggles nuclear issues—privacy,
concentration of power, copyright—that could explode at any moment.
In May 2009, the Obama administration’s new antitrust chief,
Christine A. Varney, announced that her department would more
rigorously police tech firms like Google.
There are court
threats and festering opposition to Google’s Book Search
settlement. By the spring of 2009, the settlement was separating
Google from members of “the tribe,” as Lawrence Lessig dubs them,
who treat openness as a cause and crusade against those who advance
their own narrow commercial interests and choke competition. The
federal district court judge who must sign off on the agreement
between Google and the publishers and the Authors Guild received
amicus briefs from various groups asking him to address their
antitrust and monopoly concerns. Under the terms of the settlement,
Google was granted nearly exclusive rights to millions of
“orphaned” books, or those books still under copyright but whose
copyright holders are unknown. Because only Google would be granted
the right to digitize these books and to sell them, the judge was
petitioned to prevent a Google monopoly Librarians expressed
concern that Google would monitor reading habits and compile data.
Some literary agents protested, as did Charles Nessen and a group
of Harvard lawyers, that Google did not have the right to abrogate
an orphaned copyright. And with Google effectively locking up the
right to digitize all the books ever published, including orphaned
books, the claim was that competitors would be shut out. Safeguards
were required, they asserted, to ensure that Google would not one
day jack up the prices it charges universities and others. The
federal judge gave opponents until October 2009 to register their
complaints. Seeking to head off growing concerns among libraries,
in May 2009 Google reached an agreement with the University of
Michigan to grant libraries a say in pricing decisions and to
settle disagreements by arbitration, a model it hoped to extend to
other libraries. Ominously, the Justice Department also opened an
antitrust inquiry. Many who petitioned the court or lobbied Justice
acknowledged that Google’s effort to digitize books was salutary.
Yet the din grew louder that Google was a mechanized
steamroller.
And the U.S.
government is not the only government Google must contend with. The
European Union held up the DoubleClick merger, and may well object
to Google’s worldwide book deal that was made with American
companies and authors. China censored their search engine and, in
early 2009, blocked YouTube for a time from appearing before the
world’s largest Internet audience. As the Iranian government
brutally suppressed street demonstrations in June 2009 not just
with clubs but by jamming the Internet, the government of China had
ordered PC makers to load filtering software on all machines sold
after July 1. China claimed this would block pornography, but it
would also grant the government a weapon to block political content
it considered subversive. Not surprising, many governments are
hostile to the idea of a free and open Web that Google advances,
believing their national values—or the governing regime—are
threatened. I soured on attending the World Economic Forum in Davos
several years ago because I found too many panels there to be
insufferably polite and boring—designed to bestow backslaps on
corporate and government attendees. But what is mind stretching
about Davos, and different from most conferences, is that attendees
come from all over the world and bring with them different sets of
values and assumptions about the meaning of words. I remember a
panel in the late nineties moderated by Esther Dyson, an early
champion of the Internet. She opened by extolling the democratic
values—freedom, liberty, access to all information—advanced by the
Web. The former foreign minister of Denmark chimed in with his
agreement, emphasizing that the Web gave individuals more freedom.
He and Dyson thought they were taking the unassailable moral high
ground.
For the next several
minutes, they sat slack-jawed as Singapore’s ambassador to the
United States challenged them. He said his government licensed
Internet use with the idea that the Web must serve society, not the
individual. “By licensing you are asking for responsible use,” he
said. An Egyptian diplomat educated in America chimed his
agreement. He favored regulating “human dignity” situations, such
as expressions that might be construed as “racist.” He urged the
adoption of international standards to prevent freedom of speech
from being too free.
Astonished, Dyson and
the former foreign minister challenged these ideas as threats to
“liberal values.”
“I am not a liberal,”
a member of the Iranian Parliament shot back, declaring that his
government opposed the “pollution” of Western democratic values
spread over the Web. “A nonliberal system does not equal
intolerance,” he said, explaining that his country favored
“community” over “individual” values.
This exchange was a
reminder that “common values” are not always common, and that
Google, whose mission is to share and make the world’s information
accessible, will always have government bears to contend
with.
THE THREATS FROM
WITHIN GOOGLE are as significant as those from without. “What
Google should fear most of all is hubris,” said Yossi Vardi, the
Israeli entrepreneur who funds start-ups and is a friend of Page’s
and Brin’s. “If you are successful and young and everything plays
in your direction, you feel you can do anything.” When Marissa
Mayer said that Googlers love to battle over ideas but “everyone”
shares “a similar motivation to do good for the world,” or when
chief cultural officer Stacy Savides Sullivan said, “What separates
us is that our founders care about users, not making money,” they
sincerely meant it. But history is littered with examples of people
who believed too much in their own virtue and lost the humility
that is a counterweight to hubris. Page and Brin, observed
Stanford’s Terry Winograd, “are utopians,” believing deeply that
“if people have better information they will live better lives....
They are technological optimists in the sense of saying, ‘Let’s
produce this technology and things will work out.’” They don’t
always work out, and some of the clashes Google has had—with book
publishers and the AP, or with ad agencies and governments—resulted
from an inability to hear.
In the 1990s a
coterie of math whizzes that included Nobel Prize winners Robert C.
Merton and Myron S. Scholes crafted formulas they were certain
would allow Long-Term Capital Management to consistently
out-perform the stock market; they failed spectacularly because
their computer programs lacked common sense. This is the same
mechanical thinking that often overlooks the needs of workers when
designing assembly lines. In the same way, Google’s engineers can
get too wedded to their algorithms. As Google search has become
more dominant, a chorus of complaints from media companies that the
PageRank algorithm penalizes them has grown louder. By giving so
much weight to the number of links a page received rather than the
quality of the information reported, members of Google’s
Publisher’s Advisory Council, which includes ESPN, the Wall Street Journal, Hearst, and the New York Times, complained that their links often
appeared on page three or lower in the search results. Nat Ives of
Advertising Age reported that the
Times senior vice president, Martin
Nisenholtz, told of doing a search for Gaza after the Israeli army launched an invasion to
stop rocket attacks around New Year’s 2009. “Google returned
links,” Ives reported, “to outdated BBC stories, Wikipedia entries,
and even an anti-Semitic YouTube video well before coverage by the
Times, which had an experienced
reporter covering the war from inside Gaza itself.” While it’s true
that judging “quality” in news is subjective, it’s also true that
Google’s proclaimed desire to offer the best information often
conflicts with algorithms that reflexively push to the top of the
search results those sites with the most links. If such complaints
received wide currency, they would sabotage the trust essential to
Google’s continued success.
Hubristically, Google
engineers were convinced they could devise a system to successfully
sell ads for YouTube. So far at least, they’ve failed. Why? They
failed to comprehend the fear major advertisers have of placing
their ads alongside potentially unfriendly user-generated content,
and they failed to sufficiently anticipate that users would find
ads intrusive. In early 2008, when Eric Schmidt envisioned
employing a Google sales force of a thousand to sell ads for radio,
Danny Sullivan was dubious. “They have no experience,” he said,
echoing Mel Karmazin’s comments from his 2003 visit. “They may be
able to cut costs, but a lot of people at Google don’t understand
that selling other ads is not like a search auction. They don’t
understand it is an art, not a science.” In late 2008 and early
2009, a somewhat humbled Google canceled its print ads and its
audio ads programs, and pared two hundred sales and marketing
jobs.
Frantically, Google
adopted a new approach to YouTube. With the site then on course to
lose about five hundred million dollars in 2009, Schmidt
transferred Salar Kamangar, who had crafted Google’s first business
plan and shepherded AdWords, to YouTube headquarters to work
closely with its founders to design a monetization plan. And the
management team at Google recognized that to attract advertising,
YouTube could not rely on user-generated videos or three-minute
clips from the networks. They needed long-form content, and in
April 2009 made ad-sharing deals with the Universal Music Group,
the world’s largest music company, to create a music video channel
on YouTube, and with several Hollywood studios and CBS to air
movies and a library of TV shows. More ads appeared when Google
accepted that YouTube needed more professional content, and its
losses were shrinking.
Size is a concern for
a company with more than twenty thousand employees. Venture
capitalist Fred Wilson, a principal in Union Square Ventures,
unhesitantly believes Google “is a great company.” But he also
believes: “They are a big company Maybe they can’t innovate
anymore. It takes them meetings and processes to make decisions.
Things don’t get launched as quickly. They missed the whole video
thing. YouTube beat them to it. They had to buy YouTube. They
missed the whole social networking thing. Facebook beat them to
that.”
Losing focus is
another danger for a company this large and wealthy. “My sense is
that Google is like that fourteen-year-old who suddenly gets to
wear grown-up clothing and maybe looks old enough to get a drink at
a bar,” said Strauss Zelnick, CEO of ZelnickMedia, which invests in
and manages an array of media properties. “There’s really nothing
that doesn’t look cool and interesting to a fourteen-year-old with
an Amex card and no spending limit. Do you remember Michael
Armstrong?” Zelnick recalled that Armstrong, the former CEO of
AT&T, once boasted of spending a hundred billion dollars on
acquisitions over four months. “I said, ‘He’s done.’ No one does
that well. Focus. Google has done a
phenomenal job. Right now they can afford to, but at some point in
time they are going to need to have a crisp vision of who they are
and where they’re going, and focus on that.”
Although Mary Meeker
believes Google is a great company, she offers another caution: the
power and precariousness of a culture shaped by its founders. When
founders stay involved in the enterprise—she cited Steve Jobs of
Apple and Larry Ellison of Oracle—they often maintain the core
values and mission of the business and bring something invaluable
to the enterprise. But Jobs and Ellison lost focus, and watched
their companies suffer. They also profoundly learned from their
ordeals, while Page and Brin have yet to “experience nasty failure”
and its concurrent ability to teach, as Al Gore also noted. And now
with wives, and a son born to Brin in early 2009 and Page expecting
his first child in the fall of 2009, and with incomprehensible
wealth and two huge airplanes more conveniently at their
disposal—Brin and Page persuaded NASA to waive its prohibition on
private planes parking or using the nearby NASA facility—both young
men are in the office less, jumping on their planes to take
photographs in Africa, to explore the wilds of Alaska; Page likes
to tool around in his Tesla electric car or fly his own helicopter
and Brin to spend time building his own kite-powered sailboat. Will
their attention wander from Google?
Today, Google appears
impregnable. But a decade ago so did AOL, and so did the
combination of AOL Time Warner. “There is nothing about their model
that makes them invulnerable,” Clayton Christensen, Harvard
business historian and author of the seminal The Innovators Dilemma, told me. “Think IBM. They
had a 70 percent market share of mainframe computers. Then the
government decided to challenge them. Then the PC emerged.”
Seemingly overnight, computing moved from mainframes to PCs. For a
long while, Microsoft seemed unstoppable, he said, only to be
diverted by government intervention and the emergence of Linux and
open-source software. “Lots of companies are successful and are
applauded by the financial community,” Christensen said. “Then
their stock price stalls because they are no longer surprising
investors with their growth. So they strive to grow but forget the
principles that made them great—getting into the market quickly,
not throwing money at the wrong thing. When you have so much money
you become so patient that you wait too long. Again, look at
Microsoft. No one can fault them for not investing in growth ideas.
But none of these have grown up to be the next Windows.” Maybe, he
added, we are now beginning to “see this at Google.” The company
has poured money into YouTube and Android and cloud computing and
the Chrome browser, but has yet “to figure out the business model
for each.”
Of course, these are
the what-ifs. Today, and for the foreseeable future, few of
Google’s detractors would disagree with Fred Wilson, who said of
Google, “There is no end in sight to the value they are creating.”
The value can be measured in rising profits and searches, but to
quantify Google’s success just in this fashion is to view the young
company through a zoom lens rather than a wide-angle. The close-up
misses how Google has transformed how we gather and use
information, given us the equivalent of a personal digital
assistant, made government and business and other institutions more
transparent, helped people connect, served as a model service
provider and employer, made the complex simple, and become an
exemplar of the oft-stated but rarely followed maxim, “Trust your
customer.” Because it is free, Google
will be difficult to assail.
No one can predict
with certainty where Google and the digital wave is heading, when
it will crest, or who it will flatten. If the public or its
representatives come to believe Google plays favorites, aims to
monopolize knowledge or its customers, invades their privacy, or
arrogantly succumbs, in the words of Clayton Christensen, “to the
falsehood that you can grow and grow because of network effects,”
then it will be more vulnerable. If Google maintains its deposit of
public trust—continuing to put users first—and if it stays humble
and moves with the swiftness of a fox, it will be difficult to
catch.
Other companies have
profoundly disrupted the business landscape. Think of the Ford
automobile or the Intel chip. We can, however, be certain of this:
Nowhere in the three billion daily searches it conducts, the two
dozen or so tetabits (about twenty-four quadrillion bits) of data
it stores, the more than twenty million books it plans to digitize,
will we find another company that has swept so swiftly across the
media horizon.