First, Kevin Drum writes
Just out of curiosity, did anyone ever really believe that "don’t be evil" stuff? I mean, Google’s a big corporation. They’ve been a big public corporation for nearly eight years. Big public corporations are in business to make money and enhance their stockholders’ wealth, and that’s that. Google has long been big enough and profitable enough that they could sort of pretend otherwise now and again, but even that was only bound to last as long as their competition remained weak and ignorable. That’s no longer the case, and Google is responding normally.
I don’t think its immediately obvious whether Google is in the business to make money and enhance shareholder value and that’s that.
They are probably not indifferent to making money and Wall Street will do its best to make sure that they are not indifferent to stock price, over the short term. Whether or not buy and hold forever investors are looked after is another matter.
However, Google is an organization and like most organizations is run by a combination of the moral authority of various leaders and the official chain of command.
What the people who sit atop the chain of command or who command respect within the company want is hard to tell. At one point the dominate interest seemed to be in creating an extremely consumer focused product. Slowly the dominate interest seems to have moved towards empire building.
That is, creating a super massive corporation that leads and is involved in as many aspects of the tech frontier as possible.
For large successful organizations it is difficult to resist the latter pole. This is in part because such organizations attract people who want to build empires. So, slowly the moral authority in the organization begins to shift in an imperial direction.
Second, I appear to be the only person in the world who prefers the new Google suite. Especially, now that you can choose compact.
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Saturday ~ January 14th, 2012 at 10:44 am
Curt Doolittle
Google is a an ORGANIZATION with LEADERS and a BUREAUCRACY. It operates like every human organization – with self interest.
The more insulated from the market an organization’s members can be, the more they will seek to that insulation, and the more they will act as a bureaucracy, and the less they will act in the service of consumers. It’s a simple problem of information and incentives.
Everyone wants the benefits of the market economy. No one wants to actually participate in the market though. It’s hard work and high risk. A bureaucracy insulates members from the market.
That’s why entrepreneurs are specialists in operating in the market.
Saturday ~ January 14th, 2012 at 10:53 am
anon
LOL, you are so wrong – again.
You’d have to define self interest not as “selfish interest” but as “whatever they want to do plus some things they don’t want to do but end up doing anyway”, to be more right than wrong
The libertarian view of human motivations is so simple-minded and wrong – sacrificed on the altar of having a simple (but wrong) dogmatic world view.
Saturday ~ January 14th, 2012 at 1:09 pm
bdbd
Google’s big enough now to change the slogan to “Redefine evil.” It’s part of the new suite, right?
Saturday ~ January 14th, 2012 at 5:29 pm
Mr. Violet (@EuropeanViolet)
Well, at the beginning it seemed a mess, now I got used to it. Anyway, yes, user interface changes by Facebook first or Google now seems always totally mysterious, but I don’t think in this case by Google is very much due to empire syndrome. I think it’s much more about some kind of mix about usability statistics, aesthetics preferences by the graphical employees and by their bosses and some weird decision taken in this or that meeting. Maybe the problem is that even if did something really handy given the assumption that you MUST innovate in order to survive, well you have to change that at a certain point… but what if the original was already most handy solution possible, if you’re already at optimum?
Ok, I am just kidding.
Saturday ~ January 14th, 2012 at 6:38 pm
cgb
I don’t think google started out with just a good product for consumers in mind. Their first product, the search engine, only differed from yahoo and others in the relevance of the results. I doubt they woke up one day and said to themselves ‘you know what this world needs, a search engine with slightly better algorithms’. I think the likely incentive is almost always money, power, or boredom. Altruism in business is rare and I don’t think google is one of the better examples.
Saturday ~ January 14th, 2012 at 10:55 pm
Miraj Patel
Interesting that you post this today given this: http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-thinking/
That is most likely not something known by the higher ups, but it brings up similar questions nonetheless.