Google is a Big Company Now (Google and Privacy)
posted in Business |Fun headline, right? Most of you out there are probably saying “duhhhhh”.
Matt Cutts wrote a good piece on his reactions to Privacy International’s rating of Google’s privacy as the worst. And I agree with most of his points (with a disclaimer that I’m not an expert so I don’t know first-hand which specific claims are true or false). However, the bigger story is that Google is going through a similar transition to what Microsoft dealt with in the late 90s when you have an internal group of people dealing with a widening perception gap between themselves and the greater community.
Now, Microsoft didn’t have a tag-line like “don’t be evil”, but for the most part I personally witnessed very little of the kind of thing that people complained about as Microsoft’s evil practices. Sure, we competed vigorously with each products direct competitors, but that’s just business/life. I can’t vouch for other parts of Microsoft like the sales teams or licensing, but for the technical folks in product development, we were all about building great products for our customers and trying to do some great technical innovation. When people started bashing us in public our reaction was very much like Matt’s. We were just doing the same stuff we had always done, doing the same stuff that all the other competitors had been doing, and now all of the sudden we were the evil empire and everyone was out to tear us down, usually (it seemed) unfairly. We would go build something cool and do the quick to market thing, and then get roasted over some security hole, or privacy implication, or impact on some strange enterprise scenario. We would sit around at lunch and gripe about how unfair it was that we got horrible press on some obscure security bug, yet some major hole from someone else got barely a blip of attention.
There are a couple of things going on at Google right now that relate to the extra scrutiny they are getting and some advice that I wish we could have figured out at Microsoft back in 1997 before it all got much worse.
First of all, suck it up. This is an inevitable result of being on top. The way the press and public treats you changes, and you just need to accept that. David vs. Goliath is the most popular story that the press likes to repeat over and over. Folks at Microsoft suddenly realized that while we had thought we were David (Exchange was #2 to Lotus Notes at the time for example), everyone else thought we were Goliath. Once you realize that everyone thinks of you as Goliath you need to do your best to focus on being the gentle giant. David gets to whine about how tough his situation is, Goliath doesn’t.
Second, realize that now that you are on top, you need to execute to a higher standard. Its not just good enough to be more careful than the other guy, you need to lead. Its assumed you have the best infrastructure, best ability to execute so the scrappy “lets throw something out there and see how people react to it” stuff doesn’t fly anymore in the press. If you need any more evidence of both this point and the previous one, I’ll just point out that there was a nice long segment on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart about the Google Street Views feature. To me Google Street Views is fairly innocuous- it doesn’t show anything that isn’t technically in the public sphere, but it has been roasted across the board. If some scrappy start-up did this feature the reaction wouldn’t be nearly the same.
Of course one implication of the previous point is that you now can’t be as agile, or at least its a lot harder. Microsoft hasn’t been slower just for the fun of it, but because they had already learned this lesson, at least somewhat.
Finally Google has one unique problem here. Google’s main initiative on things like these privacy issues are is “don’t be evil” slogan. However, while I hear that the communication inside Google is amazingly open and transparent, Google is a very secretive organization with respect to the rest of the world. Matt is one of the few exceptions, which certainly relates to why his blog is one of the more popular ones on the Internet. So the rest of the world hears a slogan like “don’t be evil” but doesn’t get to see how things actually work. What measures are being taken to make sure that the log files (which have personal information for 18-24 months) are kept safely? Who does information actually get shared with? What policies really are keeping this stuff private? Could a Google employee look at my private Google Spreadsheet “just to debug something”? I’d assume not, but we don’t really know. Or maybe even if they can’t look at my spreadsheet, can they do aggregate analysis of all the data that might leak keywords or something that is confidential?
So it all comes down to Google asking us to “trust us, we won’t be evil”. But given a society where the administration asked us to trust them that they wouldn’t break any civil liberties protections in their pursuit of terrorism (and their political enemies), most people are understandably a little bit skeptical. What happens the first time the Google execs are looking at the possibility of missing a quarterly earnings target? They have had an awesome run of growth, but the more you grow, the harder further growth gets, and the temptation to bend a few rules, cross a few lines to keep that stock price afloat/rising becomes incredible. Keep in mind, that while you can argue that Bill Gates, Sergei and Larry don’t personally care about the incremental net worth, many people in their organizations DO, and they all know that if it goes south they risk the whole organization unraveling and any of these guys would resort to extreme measures to stop that from happening.
All in all my best wishes are with the Google guys on this one. They have built a great company amazingly quickly and have so far had a decent track record getting out in front of other growth issues faster that Microsoft did, although at the same time their growth has been so meteoric that they have to react even faster. It will be interesting to observe how they tackle this- come to embrace that they are a big company and adapt to that, find some novel way to tackle this huge business challenge, or ignore the whole thing and go down in flames (or at least suffer a little bit).