I like Google. I really do. They make some great products and they do some wonderful things, such as Gmail, Search, Maps, Chrome, Picasa, Grants, Google.org, Youtube, Google Earth, and their latest go at the universal translator and so on. Some of those products there were acquired, but they managed the steward them well after they were bought
I also dislike Google. They do some really bad products and some really crappy things. They censor results in China (about to stop, but they still did it for about 4 years), Dodgeball, Jaiku, Video, Orkut (outside of Brazil/India), Notebook, and so on.
As you can see I’m in two minds about the company. On the one hand I feel that they are a good force in the world. They’re using their position to create competition and spur innovation. They’re using their money to fund worthwhile projects and goals. In general they seem to be the gentle big lumbering behemoth with only good intentions, and when they do something bad, you can generally see it in their eyes that they didn’t mean it.
However at the same time, Google is becoming a bit of an overlord. They are so big that they have their finger in almost every pie. Search, email, photos (Picasa), social networks, video (Youtube), translation, phones (Android), browsers (Chrome), computer OS (Chrome OS), location based services (Latitude), health records (Google Health), blogs (Blogger), hardware (helping design the hardware of the android phones), Fiber connections to the home etc. The list goes on and on and on.
I had my first Holy Shit! moment with Google a little while back after they had launched a few things, with the second 3 being launched at the same time. They launched Chrome OS, Chrome browser, and Android, Google translate as you type, automatic transcription/captioning on Youtube videos and translation of Youtube videos. When I saw all these releases I realized what a force Google is in the world. These are only sideline projects. Google makes over 90% of its revenue on Ads, and most of that comes from search ads. All these other things are just periphery and while you could argue that the reason Google is so successful is because they host this range of other products, the point still remains that these aren’t money spinners and aren’t likely to contribute majorly to Google’s overall income so they should stay classified as sideline projects.
When you consider that they released such well formed and featured projects, with such direct impact on people. Which featured a major bound towards universal translation, (via speech-to-text, text translation, and then text-to-speech), and this isn’t even their main aim. It really hit home for me that Google is truly a force to be reckoned with.
But even if we assume that Google is good, and all they touch is gold, and they’re guided by Larry and Sergey’s loving care as well as their motto ‘Don’t be evil‘. What happens in 10 years when Google is not so divinely guided? What happens when the founders have left and the businessmen start to get in? Or people with a different vision and purpose take the reigns. Google will still have their fingers in all these pies. They’ll still have so much of our information that they could hold it hostage.
Even if we trust Google today, why trust Google tomorrow, or next week, or 10 years from now?
And yet even after all of this, I still use Google services. Gmail, Search, Wave, Apps, Translation to name but a few. I know it a cliche. But in this case only time will tell! I still have my hopes that Google will stay in our good books, but I’m also very wary of what changes are going on, in and around Google, and how they react to them.
(All sources and references are linked to in the text above)