Google: Is Now a Good Time to Be Evil?
November 3, 2014
I got a kick out of “Larry Page: It’s Time to Change Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mission Statement.” I recall the time in 1999 when Mr. Page and I argued about truncation. He said in front of a Search Engine Conference audience in Boston, “Google will NEVER implement truncation.” Well, that notion did not last very long at all.
The Google “evil” tag has persisted for more than a decade. I think that a fellow named Paul Buchheit, who in Google lore, invented Gmail in his Google allocated free time. (That’s a myth for perhaps another Beyond Search post.)
I am fairly confident that “Don’t be evil” quickly became a bit of overused insider humor. “Evil” is a fuzzy concept and almost anyone who has had a brush with the GOOG knows that it is Google’s way or the highway. If the Google steamroller mashes a person or thing, then the mashee becomes part of the information highway in a sprightly manner. (There is a top one percent of the top one percent who actually work at Google in some professional capacity. Think of a modern version of the medieval Great Chain of Being.)
Now to the article. The write up reports:
Google’s chief executive Larry Page has admitted that the company has outgrown its “don’t be evil” and “make the world a better place” mission statement, but that what comes next is unknown.
In the manner of real journalists, the article adds:
Page insists that the company is still focused on the altruistic principles that it was founded on in 1998, when he and co-founder Sergey Brin were aiming big with “societal goals” to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
I love the last line of the article:
Page’s attitude is “well, somebody’s got to do it” and Google’s resources allow it to do more than most.
Oy! Such a burden. Anyone remember George Carlin’s quip about the supreme being:
If God is all powerful, can He make a stone so big that He Himself can’t lift it?
Stephen E Arnold, November 3, 2014
Stephen E Arnold
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