Become successful, become big – become evil!

Has the demonisation of Google started? They have been in the news a lot over the last few days and mainly for the wrong reasons.

Scoble highlighted a new web site “Google: Evil or Not?” joking that Microsoft wanted it’s evil back the other day.

Today’s Guardian is running an article: Should we fear Google? which highlights resent press coverage:

Since I began writing this piece Google has been in the headlines several times: for governments’ complaints about the spy-friendly -potential of the all-too-detailed satellite maps in Google Earth; for a new feature called Music Search, which does what it says on the tin; for announcing a plan to take a 5% stake in AOL; for being vulnerable to “black hat” tactics from Search Engine Optimisers, who specialise in boosting Google results; for hugely expanding its nascent Google Video service; for a dispute with the US government over data; and for this week’s rollout of a restricted Google site to China. The media are obsessed with Google, not least because they are so worried by it. (The general consensus is that Google, having once been seen as a technology company, should instead be regarded as a media company. You may not think it matters, but money people like to see things through the prism of a “business model”.) Other recent stories have concerned the company launching Google Talk as a potentially disruptive way of making free phone calls over the internet, pressing on with its ambitions for Google Book Search (formerly Google Print) to “make the full text of all the world’s books searchable by anyone”, and launching Google Base to take over the world’s classified advertising market. In the meantime, the company has launched a Toolbar, including a Desktop Search tool that searches for information on users’ own PCs – something Microsoft, the world’s biggest software company, has been trying and failing to do for a number of years.

It has an interesting conclusion too:

Google is cool. But Google also has the potential to destroy the publishing industry, the newspaper business, high street retailing and our privacy. Not that it will necessarily do any of these things, but for the first time, considered soberly, these things are technologically possible. The company is rich and determined and is not going away any time soon. It knows what it is doing technologically; socially, though, it can’t possibly know, and I don’t think anyone else can either. The best historical analogy for where Google is today probably comes from the time when the railroads were being built. Everyone knew that trains and railways would change the world, but no one predicted the invention of suburbs. Google, and the increased flow of information on which it rides and from which it benefits, is the railway. I don’t think we’ve yet seen the first suburbs.

It has always fascinated me that organisations that become big and successful soon get to the point where they are regarded as evil. Google has grown big faster than anyone else before them and have met the evil tag earlier than anyone too. One of their problems is their tag line, all tag lines are a target. So when you say ‘Don’t be evil’ people, and the press in particular will take it apart piece by piece and you’d better be sure it hold true. That’s one of the reasons organisations like Nike choose a line like ‘Just do it’.

A few years ago we had a prime minister (John Major) who’s tag line was ‘back to basics’, by this he meant that we should return to all that was moral and good. The press used it as an opportunity to take apart his government through a series of scandals and revelations. Google, you have been warned, mind you Microsoft seems to be doing OK with it’s evil.