Harvard Business Publishing

second law of thermodynamics applies to companies, too.

ok - but tell us why you think so. what's the driving force?

Why would Google be either Good or Evil? Isn't that a marketing dance that ultimately what tactics drive profitability? Don't we notice Google charging for some things and giving others away for free? How do they make those decisions?

ANSWER: Whatever makes the most money in the long-run.

So, is the question, does foregoing short-term profit for long-run dominance equate to "Good" in a moral sense, I would say is a tragic example of an "academic" being duped by spinmeisters.

I certainly accept better out of Harvard - but have learned to be unsurprised.

So, rhetorical arguments aside, let's be clear. Google is a lying content company.

"We are not a content company" - this is a bold-faced lie. Steve Boriss at Future of News also appears to have been duped by the claim. Comments on his site have some counterexamples.

You are in fine academic company.

Google records everything, indefinitely.

They have so far mostly resisted the temptation to bow down on information request matters.

However, as spook agencies and governments can easily blackmail Google to cough up user data, this poses a problem for them: are they evil if they do not abide by the law? Are they evil if do not protect the

Evilness or Goodness of Google is 99% perception, 1% action.

The perception will break down soon enough in the future, with one or two highly publicized cases where Google has to make a choice.

After that, it's no more 'nice Google', but 'just another company Google'.

Does that make Google inherently evil or good?

Neither.

And that applies to about 99% of corporations out there, I'd guess.

Agreeing to restrictions by the Chinese Govt is an example of doing some evil...

And I don't think companies have to be evil - however corporations driven by their responsibilities to shareholders are deemed to be psychopathic in The Corporation, and certainly put shareholder value above all else. And they have to, by law.

GOOG actually is evil in some areas based on (a) what it does (commissions) and (b) what it doesn't do (omissions).

An instance of (a) is GOOG's pricing on search distribution deals with OEMs. The prices are not based on GOOG internal economics but on those of its competitors, in order to price them out, which constitues an abuse of it market power (i.e., >60% market share). GOOG further abuses its network effects while claiming that lock-in doesn't exist...lying seems pretty evil too.

On (b), I'd say that being hypocritical is evil, which GOOG does often when it wants things to be "selectively open." GOOG as an also-ran in social networking wants data to be "open" (re: Open Social, Social Graph API, etc). GOOG as an also-ran in mobile wants mobile OS source code to be "open" (e.g., Android). But GOOG as a market leader in search query share and search advertising won't allow others access to its index and won't publish its source code for AdSense or AdWords.

Clearly GOOG is just pursuing what is in the best interests of its businesses. If you're ahead, protect your asset, resist change, and remain closed. If you're behind, open everything up, form market-leader-defeating alliances, and be willing to crater a category in order to ensure that if someone other than GOOG wins, the reward is immaterial.

Google is evil because it takes one of the largest collections of extremely bright people on the planet, a planet where millions of human beings don't have food or water, and puts them to work optimizing the ads that trick your auntie em into clicking on them when she's trying to find a bingo game on the google. If the same effort was put into organizing a food distribution system as went into their ad distribution system, there wouldn't be nearly as many starving people. So, yes, google is evil, because of the opportunity cost of stopping the people who work there from solving real problems.

Clean water for everyone. Enough food. These are obtainable goals. If all the smart people aren't at places like google.

Google got a massive infusion of amorality when it bought doubleclick. I've been wondering which culture would win ever since.

This minor-league evil, but Google destroyed a lot of value in their JotSpot acquisition.

JotSpot created a pioneering web app development platform with vibrant edge community and a very open communications line. It was a lot more than just another wiki.

When Google took over, the platform went dormant, nobody communicated any more (by order of Google, as far as I can tell), all the original community is gone, and the only thing that has emerged is Google Sites, which has only a small fraction of the edge production capabilities of JotSpot.

I suspect that pattern has been replicated in other acquisitions.

so the first task is to define good vs. evil in a google context. to me, good means making decisions that put customers first. evil is making decisions that put profits first.

example: good = no advertising on google.com. bad = making $100m+ from running ads on google.com. why is that evil? because those ads are likely irrelevant to the customer experience.

this is a spectrum, of course - handing over youtube data with what amounts to personally identifiable information (IP address) is a lot more evil than running ads on the homepage.

Can you think of instances where Google has violated this principle?

censorship in China, tho i'd argue it's more valuable for goog to have a foothold there than to not be there at all. good and evil aren't black and white concepts -- you have to take context into account when considering whether behavior in a given situation is ethical or not. which is one reason goog takes a lot of crap - we all view the decisions goog makes through our own lens, without understanding the true context.

the actions goog could take in the viacom / youtube case are potentially evil, but i would be surprised if they don't fight the decision to hand over data to the highest level they can. esp now that viacom wants to know what videos were uploaded by youtube staff.

Is Google becoming more evil as it attains more market power?

don't think so, but the decisions they make have greater consequences.

Is the relationship between market power and evil set in stone - will Google inevitably become evil, because that's what happens to companies (and people) as they grow up?

they've consistently shown a desire to improve the customer experience, often at the expense of making short-term dollars. this is antithetical to how most 20th century corporations are run. unless something bad happens to larry or sergei (or both), i don't see this "customer uber alles" mentality changing. it is, as you say, part of their organizational DNA. we have so few examples of companies with customer-first DNA growing (southwest, jet blue, ing direct, semco, etc.), but looking at the examples suggests google will likely NOT become more evil as they grow.

Clean water for everyone. Enough food. These are obtainable goals. If all the smart people aren't at places like google.

In the UK we love to hate success but Google does itself no favours as it builds a greater media fortress,strategically buying companies that aid their goal of domination,and in the process, they seem to suck the life blood out of the business cultures they take over.
Do they care? As the No 1 brand in the world...maybe..

No amount of billions/trillions will buy them the respect they seem to crave - trail blazers they maybe but a rethink, new PR strategy is required, a vision statement that will change the current perception of what they were and what they are becoming..

Another example of Google's style of non-communication with "outsiders". How can you hold an edge community together that way?

http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss/msg/565a13ecd7fde19f?dmode=source

Excerpt:

I'm really not allowed to say anything concrete about the possibility
of an updated SDK at any point in the future. I'm left with two
options: say nothing at all, or try to say as much as I think can get
away with about other subjects, even if that doesn't answer the SDK
question, and even if I sometimes have to answer in an oblique way.

Saying things I'm strictly not allowed to say wouldn't accomplish
anything positive: saying isn't doing, and even if I said something
there wouldn't be an SDK available. Furthermore I'd probably lose my
job over it, and I'd like to think that I contribute enough to Android
that losing my job wouldn't be beneficial to Android as a whole (and
it certainly wouldn't be beneficial to me, in more than one way).

About accelerating the untying or un-gagging: I don't know if there's
much to be done. We've been struggling in those restraints for months,
and no matter how much we try they don't seem to ever get any looser
(but at least they don't seem to be getting any tighter either). I'm
afraid that everyone (both engineers on the inside and developers on
the outside) will have to be patient.

I may call Google evil until I find a tough competitor for it. I run marketing and product management functions for a small software company and you don't want to know how much I am being forced to spend on web marketing. I know I have to spend more because Google is a near monopoly when it comes to bring people to my website.

Secondly, the degenration of "SEO" practices, click fraud and other things have to account for something evil for sure.

Also, whoever is complaining about oil companies should take a good hard look at Google. At least oil companies are selling something they bought from somebody else.

Evil: Google allows competitors to bid on each others trademarks. This certainly hurts companies that established a well-known brand and a lot of goodwill.

Why does Google do that? Because it has a great legal department which cost them less then money they collect from those bids.

Some developers seem to believe that Google is becoming more evil:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/071608-google-offers-android-updates-only.html?netht=rn_071708&nladname=071708dailynewsamal

This adds to Bob Haugen comments above.

regards
Al

I don't think the slide towards evil is a foregone conclusion.

People leave for different pastures as start-ups age into veterans. Their replacements are often people who don't believe as strongly in the same principles that led to the creation of the company in the first place.

One of the bigger factors I've seen in keeping the belief level high is not falling into the mindset of "I have a contract to deliver Product X and I need N number of people working on the project. But there's less than N good people I would like to have here available. Eh, screw it. Bodies are bodies. Hire some schmucks or sub-contract it."

Just like any other company, Google is not inherently good or evil. It's efforts are reactionary to all those craving what it offers. Those "smart" people employed by Google are probably doing more behind their computers than they could ever imagine doing by distributing food and filtering water in the developing world. I mean let's face the fact that most people have trouble finding it is what they want (great restaurant, perfect travel destination, career, dedication to something bigger than themselves) without some third party. And one day, if capitalism allows it, every action man will take will already be mapped out by some third party whose niche will facilitate the process to fruition. If we can claim that our autonomy is something that can be outsourced so to speak then this may be an evil motive, however, the market's motive is not to do away with human autonomy. It's goal is the exact opposite. To understand this you simply need to read about the fallout of the Soviet Bloc in what is now Eastern Europe. To claim that Adclick, obscuring code, and bowing down to government rules makes Google "evil" would be just as erroneous as claiming a dying man a drug addict. It's all reactionary and what it does in the face of these perceived "evils" is nothing more than the prevention of creative destruction. The only it could do would be to fight this theory of "creative destruction" when it no longer is the pioneer in its niche.

"It' not because of the baker, brewer, or butcher that we satisfy our hunger, but rather their self-interest that keeps us from going home hungry.."
-A. Smith.

> Can you think of instances where Google has violated this principle?

Probably. In some cases it is hard to decide because they won't or can't release all the internal discussion that went into certain decisions. We just have to take their word for it...

> Is Google becoming more evil as it attains more market power?

... which becomes a very unattractive option given their current size. No matter how good their intentions, people (and especially institutions that are supposed to protect us from companies doing evil stuff) are just not going to take their word for it. You already mentioned this in a previous post.

> Is the relationship between market power and evil set in stone - will
> Google inevitably become evil, because that's what happens to
> companies (and people) as they grow up?

Nothing is set in stone. Google is just a decade old and probably has a hard time dealing with its own size and growth. They can grow really bad or really good. I also doubt that even Larry and Sergey have enough control over their creation to steer it in any direction, although I hope I'm wrong.

In my opinion the "best" (as opposed to "most evil") thing Google could do is create complete openness. Ideally, they should open source *everything*, including their secret sauces and also have no more secret projects. I think the best way to keep governments happy, make people feel more comfortable and help the world move forward is to make it as easy as possible for a strong competitor to emerge. Ideally a new market player would just have to buy half a million computers, a couple of engineers and marketing team and be able to run a copy of Google, adsense included.

Now this sounds a lot like economic suicide to me, but if they keep growing like this, then if I was Neelie Kroes I would enforce this at some point in the future anyway. So Google could, like Microsoft, wait for that moment or do it themselves right now.

I am sure Larry, Sergey and a whole lot of people working at Google would love this idea, but the shareholders probably won't like it and it might not even be legal. Unless someone can find a way to do that and make a profit out of it.

Or we can enter the realm of my even more far fetched ideas: just start abusing your power and let the government help you bypass the shareholders. I guess most people are happy that I'm not a CEO :-)

Sjors

I wrote:
> No matter how good their intentions, people (and especially
> institutions that are supposed to protect us from companies
> doing evil stuff) are just not going to take their word for
> it. You already mentioned this in a previous post.

Correction: that was an article in the International Herald Tribune titled "Google The New Master of Network Effects", second last paragraph.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/07/technology/07google.php

Google, as well as all companies, will inevitably choose the darker of the two roads. The theory of why this occurs is very simple. The people in Google are not evil, nor are their intentions to do any harm. It’s the mere fact that every employee, manager, and even CEO go to the office every morning with the intention of working for the day, receiving the maximum production and earnings, and then going back home. Without the realization, this overwhelming focus of energy directs the company towards the largest profit maximization, which always leads to a destructive future.

"My choice makes less but supports my ethics. Now if only I had an ehtics bank account."

Google does what any for-profit company would do.

However, with that being said, they have shown in instances that they would protect your private information:

(http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/01/21/google_subpoena_roils_the_web/)

But apparently, just protecting your information is not enough, people are weary about the fact that they actually collect it. In my opinion, Google has nothing to gain, and everything to lose by sharing that information with third parties (Government, or private bodies alike). In countries, such as China and India, where they operate off U.S. soil, they are at times at the mercy of the local government and have to comply to maintain their existence and geographic reach. You and I may not agree with those governments and their practices, but we have to show compassion to a company, that given they could, would side with their customer.

Would you prefer another company, with the stranglehold that Google has, that does not adhere to any positive mantras at all operating in Google's place. I think not.

Do no evil is not universal mantra that Google will always comply with, but we have to remember that this company's assets are its customers. Even with all the growth, Google has a long way to go to fulfill its mission to organize all the world's data. Along the way there will be compromises (that I believe they will fight to defend) but there will also be positives. Check out this link:

(http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080708-google-slams-bell-canada-open-internet-is-extraordinary.html

Any company referring to 'the Law' when abiding by requests made by dictatorships, so they may continue to do business, qualifies for a bit of evilness.

Without going into the specifics whether boycotts work or not, a company legitimizes a dictatorship when stating it's adhering to the law in explaining actions which would be unthinkable in the West.

For the rest, and more specific, Google is an advertising company, pure and simple. All the free Apps and the content they (or have us) generate, function as billboards on which they plaster their ads. Now if anybody would ask you if evilness exists on Madison Ave., would you really need to think long?

GOOG has taken actions that have offended Western sensibilities. But none of these actions are really evil. For instance, take self-censoring search results in a society that places a much lower value on personal freedoms that we do in the West. Is this action alone evil? It doesn't seem so. Is competing, and using your advantage to strongarm competitors (ala MSFT), really evil? Again, maybe not good, but not evil either.

Most businesses are usually neutral at their worst, where the intent is to drive profit, not cause harm. Besides, truly evil objectives would most likely undermine the company's own business goals - the continued expansion of its user base and increased page views.

Sjors Provoost: Why would Larry and Sergei need to steer the company by themselves?

Much like Napoleon, they've managed to create an organization of smart people who can take the basic outlines of a plan, improve upon it and act on their own to contribute. Larry and Sergei's freedom to act comes from giving up the tactical and moving into the strategic realm.

@Tree Frog:
It depends on what they want. If they want to guarantee Google does not turn evil, they need to be in control of it. You can not guarantee that these smart people who you empower will do the right thing. Keep in mind that, after some initial success, Napoleon failed.

In fact, I do not think any one man (or two) can control or even significantly steer a large and complex system. They might be able to initialize and grow it, but at some point they lose control. Just like you can easily start a fire, but need an army of firemen to put it out.

This is one of the reasons I find the obsession of the current US administration with Sadam Hussein and Bin Laden so utterly pointless. They were never in full control and their removal does not cripple the system. It is all nice and symbolic and probably makes for great movies, but in the end it is just a pointless waste of many lives.

google is definitely evil. don't trust them to track your behavior, don't trust their email system (they scan your email), don't let them crawl/index your site!

Until you define "good" and "evil," the entire discussion is moot.

Most of us know good and evil according to an inner moral compass - but the minute we start applying OUR compass to someone else's motives in judgement, we start down that slippery slope towards evil ourselves.

I wouldn't say that Microsoft is evil, even though I'd be in a better position than most to make that assertion (Microsoft waged a character assassination campaign against me - one that was well documented in the media). Some people at Microsoft (including its top leaders) did evil to me, but does that make the company evil? No. Companies have no moral compass. They're machines of profit. Google included. Profit is morally neutral.

Google helps me have a better life, and hundreds of millions of other people. That's good. So when Google starts hurting people instead of helping them, talk of Google being evil or doing evil is premature, perhaps even absurd. Name the victims and then you'll have a discussion worth having.

David B. Whittle
Author, "Cyberspace: The Human Dimension"