Another Google Jibe
March 15, 2010
Poor, poor Google. From top of the world to a punching bag in less than three months. This new decade is proving to be a challenging one for Google. I just read “Six Delusions of Google’s Arrogant Leaders.” I want to disclose that I too have been accused of being arrogant. Now I don’t have any good reason to be arrogant. I just find that approach works for me, but, please, keep in mind that I am an addled goose, live in rural Kentucky, and am wandering slowly toward being 66 years old. I am no sports car in today’s NASCAR ego race.
But Google! According the write up, Google is coming across as “cocky”. I don’t want to run down the six delusions. I inveigh you to go direct and suck up the juiciness yourself. However, I can point to two of the examples and offer a comment.
The first is “users are hungry for Google synergy.” I am not sure what synergy means. I know that the Google platform is one that works like a giant plastic bag wrapped around the earth. The idea is to put everyone in the bag and keep them there. This is mostly complete, but about 25 percent of Web users are outside of the bag and Google wants to get them in one way or another. The notion that users want this is irrelevant. What this delusion makes clear is that Google is retrofitting public relations baloney to match what the company has been working on for about decade. What’s interesting is that it has taken mavens, pundits, and “real” journalists 360 months to figure out the Google game plan. Who’s delusional? Google which has mostly accomplished its mission or the folks just figuring out that Google has been and will continue to push the Google PR line?
The second delusion is that “Google is a worker’s utopia.” Okay, when you take money to do work, by definition, this situation is not utopia for the workers. Companies can make work less onerous or more meaningful, but it is work. I don’t think the Googlers I know are doing much more than drinking the Google Kool-Aid, trying to build their knowledge value, and get some money. Like Apple, Google operates a reality distortion field, and, let’s face it, having Google on one’s résumé is arguably more impressive than a degree in Harry Potter studies from Frostburg College. My view is that Google manipulates its workers as effectively as it manipulates the media. Like the media, Google employees play along. It’s a game with high stakes, but it is a game. Google knows exactly what it is doing.
Now what’s the arrogance? The arrogance is not unique to Google. I call this the Math Club Syndrome. Here’s how it works. A group of folks with specialized interests and skills bond, sort of like a golf foursome from Sigma Chi fraternity. The difference is that no one understands the Math Club and most people understand and envy the Sigma Chi golf foursome. As a method of coping with a world that simply does not understand math, the math club becomes insular. The club’s rules are insider rules and act like a protective barrier. No problem until the math club becomes the first next generation supra-national company jousting on an apparently equal footing with China, the Department of Justice, and giants like Microsoft.
What do we expect from the Math Club? I expect Math Club behavior, complete with the insider jokes about janitors in patent documents. (Oh, janitors is a way of describing Google’s semi autonomous agents which “clean up” statistical anomalies in petascale flows of data. Snort, snort, get it. Janitor equals Dilbert’s garbage collector, the smartest person in the comic strip. Oh, you don’t get it? Well, there you have it. A mismatch between Math Club humor and you, gentle reader.)
My view is that it is time to quit worry about Google’s power and time to start figuring out how to surf on Google. My column for KMWorld and this month’s column for the Smart Business Network address two different ways to surf on Google. I don’t grouse. I accept that over the last decade Google has emerged as a new ecosystem. You can’t kill it because the Googlers who leave the company spawn Google-centric entities. My last count tallied a couple of hundred of these Xoogler ventures. And Facebook is not much more than a “legacy” of Google. Maybe Facebook will become the new Google, but that won’t change the arrogance.
Math Club is congruent with arrogance. Reality. Live within it; don’t deny it.
Stephen E Arnold, March 14, 2010
No one paid me to write this article. Because I have not been paid and I refer to psychological behavior, I will report my writing for no pay to the Surgeon General who understands such esoteric notions as delusions.
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