“Don’t be evil.”
This has been Google’s long-standing motto, and is supposed to embody what the search giant is, but with a recent blog post by Firefox co-founder Blake Ross, there is more than a subtle indication that Google is, indeed, turning evil.
Ross’s Christmas day blog post, titled “Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose,” takes a direct shot at Google’s self-promotion of its own products over the natural search results. He summarizes the issue by saying, “Google is now displaying “tips” that point searchers to Google Calendar, Blogger and Picasa for any search phrase that includes “calendar” (e.g. Yahoo calendar), “blog” and “photo sharing,” respectively. This is clearly bad for competitors, and it’s also a bad sign for Google.”
Broken trust is alluded to, and Ross makes a big point by saying that the tips are bad for users “because the services they recommend are not the best in their class.”
He continues by saying that Google’s new bundling techniques are worse than anything Microsoft “did or even could do.” Ross says this is because “Google knows what users want and can discreetly recommend its products at the right time.”
Clearly, sentiments towards Google are not as great as they could be at the start of this new year. Besides reports about a Gmail vulnerability (which is apparently patched up), Blogger downtime, and the noticeable peak in Gmail capacity, Google has been the target of a lot of bad press lately.
For Firefox, Ross’s remarks come a few weeks after Google began displaying sponsored results promoting Internet Explorer 7, which was seen by some as a jab at Firefox, which has had intimate ties with Google in the past.
Regardless of the correctness of Ross’s blog post, his words give a voice to a quiet backlash against Google. People are quicker and more unforgiving in pointing out the search engine’s falters, and the company is not helping itself with its presumptuous changes and activities, including blaring promotions on its once-always-pristine homepage.
With a stock price that is sky high, it seems that Google is becoming more and more like the company it has sought to challenge: Microsoft. As Google has made steps towards challenging the “evil” company in the Internet realm, and in the online application suite arena in particular, it has fallen into the inevitable trap of becoming big at the cost of losing its small, independent, challenger appeal.
Users were the most important people to satisfy when Google started out as a pure search engine. But as more and more products were dumped into beta stages, and as more online realms were entered, Google has become a powerful, fat, and more heartless leviathan that cares more about the bottom line and its investors than it did at first.
Now, this does not mean that Google has turned completely sour. If it can find the delicate balance between remaining true to its users while buttressing its stock price, Google will continue to dominate and appeal to the general public, and will make these blunders a mere hiccup in its road to even higher grounds.
But if these negative sentiments continue to spread, and if Google decides to turn a blind eye to their corporate motto, the inevitable decline that some have expected will begin to form, maybe as soon as the end of this new year.
In any case, there are more clouds appearing on Google’s horizon, and it should make for news and trends that could be even more interesting than any of their self-promoted products.
Sources:
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-
20070102FirefoxDeveloperCriticizesGoogle.html
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/30/googles-tipping-point/
http://www.blakeross.com/2006/12/25/google-tips/
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