Earlier today, Google’s Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt held an informal press conference of sorts (see my live notes), touching upon pretty much everything under the Google sun. One issue that kept on coming up was Google’s growing power in general. Google touches so many parts of the Web and our lives that concerns are rising that Google will use its power and all the knowledge it collects about us inappropriately.
Every time the suggestion came up that Google’s power is too pervasive, Schmidt knocked it down: “If we went into a room and were exposed to evil light and came out and announced evil strategies, we would be destroyed. The trust would be destroyed.”
He was, of course, speaking metaphorically (about the room, not the trust). “We have not yet found the evil room on our campus,” Schmidt assured everyone in the room (which was a bright and cheery conference room above Chelsea Market,not dimly lit or evil at all). Later on, he prefaced another discussion of the (hypothetical) evil room by saying, “There are many reasons why we will not be like Microsoft.” Maybe he thinks the evil room is on Microsoft’s campus.
Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land pressed Schmidt on the fact that “you seem to have data other people cannot get because you give away free tools.” Google knows not only what you are searching for, but if you use Google Analytics, it knows about the traffic to your site, and if you use Google Checkout it knows about what you are selling. Isn’t there a closed loop here, he asked, where Google gives away free products, and then collects all the data which makes its search engine smarter?
Neither Schmidt nor Brin addressed the question of whether or not Google uses data from its non-search products to improve search in this manner, but Schmidt rejected the idea that customers are locked in. “There is no closed loop,” he said, “there are competitors and we make it possible for you to get out.”
Brin elaborated on this notion, pointing out that the entire source code for its new Chrome operating system is open sourced. Schmidt picked up on that and argued that Google’s open nature will protect it from the evil room (which doesn’t exist anyway):
“Today we have zero market share in Chrome OS because it is not shipping. Imagine a scenario where we got to 80% market share with a free product, which I think is unlikely. Let’s say we go into the evil room and decide to start charging. A competitor would be able to take the code that we had and continue to offer our business model, while our new business model runs us into the ground. That is why open source provides a protection.”
Google won’t be getting to 80% market share in desktop operating systems anytime soon. Even its Chrome browser seems to be barely making a dent, although Schmidt disputed that notion as well. When I asked him if Steve Ballmer was wrong to call the Chrome browser’s market share a “rounding error,” Schmidt snipped, “I don’t respond to Steve Ballmer questions. Next question?”
(Photo credit: Flickr/Typicalgenius)
I agree, Google cannot go evil
, but still it holds the potential 
Microsoft should “open up”(heard anywhere?) the search text ads, and offer “free” or nominally priced search ads to advertisers.. This is to counter free OS offer by goog.
I will buy search ads if MS offer it for free
If they offered Bing PPC ads for free then you’d be paying what they are worth.
How can you buy something that is free? Logic, you missed it : (
You caught the bait. MS can give “free” ads on a nominal yearly fee.
I dont know how exactly search keywords are auctioned. MS should drastically reduce the starting price of the bid, so that they get more volume.
That’s why Google will never be like Microsoft- because Microsoft actually concerns itself with how it’s going to make money.
However, most people have been assuming that Google is making a ton of money simply selling all our data to the NSA and CIA.
they are a corporation.. they will be whatever makes them the most profit. nothing more, nothing less
Oh please. Google learned from Microsoft and has taken it much further and that has been common knowledge among many for years. See the I, Cringely post The Next Microsoft: Google is Learning Too Well From the Master at PBS.
Google now controls the majority of traffic and sales to most businesses that use the Internet. They alone have the power to make their portion of that traffic and sales go away. I have had access to dozens of Google Analytics accounts and that percentage is typically 60-80%.
How long do you suppose those businesses will survive if 60-80% of their traffic and sales dries up? And what about the other 20-40%? How much of that also relies on Google. If they really had the desire they could target sites that link to you too. Then only those that know the URLs or have saved the links somewhere can find you.
I know many will think this sounds paranoid but it is simple common sense. When one company controls that much of your business they are extremely dangerous.
Think that won’t happen to you? It happened to ProBlogger. Check out the post I’ll link to this comment where I collected the various posts Darren wrote over several years that all occurred during the prime holiday shopping season.
One other point. Do you know anyone that is really honest? I do. They don’t say “we’re not evil” because evil isn’t on their agenda. Only those you can’t trust like used car salesmen feel the need to say “trust me”.
A monopoly is never ideal, but Google are a long way from Microsoft in the way that they do business…Get back to me when this changes
Really? How does Google treat their competitors any differently than Microsoft?
“There are many reasons why we will not be like Microsoft.”
It really irks me that whenever I read any interview with Schmidt in it he can’t help but bring up Microsoft and hold them up as an example of evil-
1. Hiding behind another person/company to stop everybody seeing your own flaws is a bully tactic and won’t work for long yet it’s all he can ever fall back on it seems.
2. Microsoft has been de-clawed for many years now, Google is arguably more powerful because of their (relatively) unquestioned power… it’s the best sort of power to have. That trust that people have in Google means their products get (perhaps unintentional) bias in both coverage and critiques- Microsoft lost that trust, with largely itself to blame and suffers for it… yet I don’t recall seeing Ballmer saying how Google is evil and locks up all your data.
3. It’s just bad form
They are a business. They are there to make money. They have gained the ability to be evil by putting out tons of great product for free. Just because they have the power to be evil doesn’t mean they are in fact evil. Plus, like was pointed out, if they started to use that power to be evil they would loose the power.
agreed
+1
I’m not saying I love all the data Google collects about us, but I just have to ask: Has Google committed the sorts of breaches of privacy or breaches of trust that we’ve already seen from (new kid on the block) Facebook?
I suppose one could say that Facebook has committed “obvious” breaches (meaning we instantly saw the effect) whereas the worry with Google is that its breaches are “hidden” or “as yet unknown”. Is that the worry?
“I don’t respond to Steve Ballmer questions. Next question?” CLASSIC!
Maan! I love these Google Guys.
What actually annoys me in google is that they just want to rule everything.
They started with a search engine. Build the whole iGoogle thing to compete with Yahoo. Build GMail to compete with hotmail.
Then they were envious at NASA worldwinds so they created Google Earth.
They saw that alternative browsers gained in importance, they created Chrome.
Knol because wikipedia was successful.
They also had a second life clone for which I can’t remember the name. Babelfish, Google Translate, same with maps, google video (once, before they took over youtube).
They wanted to compete with mobile phone platforms like iPhone/blackberry OS and windows mobile, they created android. Now they are going after the OS market.
Google just wants everything, they aren’t satisfied with just controlling one market, they want to rule the world and want to compete with every single trend on the internet. Eventually being written on the black book or not being fully trusted by microsoft, twitter, Apple, Palm, Yahoo, Mozilla, …
There’s nothing wrong with this as some will notice but I’m just of the opinion that it’s better to concentrate on what you are good at. Don’t want too much, and google is becoming increasingly greedy.
Competition fuels innovation, don’t you want better products & services, and wouldn’t it be better if they were free/Open Source?
You can look at it in that way and competition is good. But there is competition and there’s unhealthy competition and what google is doing is in many places unhealthy competition.
If all would be open source than this wouldn’t destroy the big titans like MS, Apple and . But it would destroy tiny developers who try to make a living of their coding skills. Many of which have led to big things, let’s take google itself. Ok, in fact everything started small. So by making everything free and open with the potential for it to be free you destroy the hair vessels of the IT, thus only making way for non-profit open source firms and big corporations. IT will loose its profitability hence creating an entire new world for the best or for the worse, but without place for honest small developers who try to make a living out of developing and can’t adapt to the new support based revenue system which open source brings with.
Open and free is good, but too much competition is unhealthy and that’s my opinion on that matter.
Google gave us many nice things but they are overreacting. Every internet service which pops-up is in a matter of days mimicked by google.
I find your vision to be judgemental and clouded. The competition is far from unhealthy. At the very most, it is merely sparking minor innovation at the moment. I hope to see more great things evolve from these sparks.
Don’t get me wrong, opensource is great but it attacks the wrong companies, unwillingly. Do you think that linux distro’s like ubuntu are really decent competitors of windows and OSX on the desktop?
They are more competitive with Haiku OS, BSD, and eacht other since 90% of their target public is experimenting with all kinds of free operating systems.
Same with browsers, alternative browsers are more competitive between each other than they are with internet explorer. They are cutting out IE but they are mostly trying to overpower each other.
Same with other stuff, real photoshop/illustrator designers aren’t going to switch to GIMP or inkscape. So GIMP and others are only competing with other free alternatives.
It’s a war between alternatives and the market leaders only loose tiny amounts of marketshare.
So is Open source successful in its goal to bring down the high and mighty?
and google is not only trying to compete with paid services and closed source software. If you look closely you will see that most of Google’s direct competitors provide free services and are in fact open source organizations. Eg. Chrome takes chunks from IE but also from Firefox and Safari which both endorse open source.
So open source or not is actually irrelevant. Google attacks everything, good or evil.
It was called Lively.And it still inexplicably comes up #1 on a Google search for “lively”.
You just described Microsoft, not Google.
The only difference between MS and google is that google has other ways of making profit. It may come as a surprise but they are both harmful and they both want to destroy all small players and competition.
With all the products that Google offers, there are alternatives both paid and free. Google isn’t malevolent, its just mostly indiscriminate.
Honesty and evil have nothing to do with each other. An evil entity can be entirely honest about being evil. Trust is based on honesty. I think Google is doing fine on saying what it means and doing what it says. That’s all we can expect from anyone or any company.
Google doesn’t lock you into anything like M$ does. There’s no compatibility issues when you switch search engines. Your Google Docs are exportable to Office. Analytics is relatively easy to switch to another offering. Google’s product aren’t necessarily better than what’s on the market, they’re just easier to use. So stop complaining and be happy you don’t have to dish out $10 a month for gmail or 0.10 per search query.
If you don’t want Google to know what you’re doing, don’t use their products. Every single company looks at what their users do with their products so they can improve them. Google does it for that, and to monetize them through advertising and other such activities. The “evil” would be very different if they were charging you for the products and selling you advertising… like the cable companies.
Bottom line: google isn’t evil; they’re injecting a measure of “good” into traditionally evil business models.
Obviously the Kool-Aid at Google is drunk in bucketfuls from the very top down.
Concluded from reading the Q&A with Sergey/Schmidt on the earlier post:
http://www.tech...th-sergey-brin/
@Gebadia Smith: they are a corporation.. they will be whatever makes them the most profit. nothing more, nothing less
The responsibility of a publicly held company is to maximize shareholders wealth, but there are many ways for a company to actualize this goal. There is the Microsoft way, lock end users into a close-ended ecosystem, or you can be like Google which let the users decided to use the product based on their own desire.
The problem with this is they are a publicly held company and they do have the trust factor going. I can only imagine as Google continues to grow what the future has in store for us when someone steps in with a much different mindset.
The context of the question was, about data usage and consequences.
He answers with:
“Today we have zero market share in Chrome OS because it is not shipping. Imagine a scenario where we got to 80% market share with a free product, which I think is unlikely. Let’s say we go into the evil room and decide to start charging. A competitor would be able to take the code that we had and continue to offer our business model, while our new business model runs us into the ground. That is why open source provides a protection.”
So charging Money, bad. Using data right or wrong, good.
In other word evil is in the eyes of the beholder, and as long as Google doesn’t charge anything they are just Angels.
Did I capture that right?
Having the source of a good sized Program means exactly what? Just take a look at OpenOffice.
That’s pretty much it.
Their corporate strategy is pretty clear that they offer the service, and in exchange for free… you give up all privacy to your data (but only to Google).
But somehow, allowing them to access your data fits in to “don’t be evil”, the same way going in to totalitarian countries and helping those governments find potential disidents fits in to “don’t be evil”.
It’s so hilarious. Google just keeps chanting that they, unlike the big boogieman Microsoft, will do no evil.
However, I trust MS far more- at least MS is honest that they are in business, and will sell you what you want in exchange for money. With Google… they give you things for free, and ask for nothing… yet tell you to just trust them, because how could they be evil, when they take every opportunity to tell you they aren’t?
Google could be evil if they wanted to. They could, as someone above suggested, shut down traffic to certain sites and cause whole businesses to collapse. But of course they won’t do this because they are not stupid and know they can make a lot more money in the long term by being good. Giving away free things and using anonymized data to improve products is fine by me. If Google started being evil they would slowly begin to collapse and they know this.
Is a Steve Ballmer qusetion an evil question?
According to Eric Schmidt it is.
there’s no lock-in with Google. They’ve made it very simple to walk away. This a great and effective way to handle all the power that they have earned.
The biggest threat to Google is Facebook.
Microsoft will have to focus on software and services, they won’t win the platform war this time.
Google Checkout is horribly named. Checkout is a vendor concept. You don’t see a “Visa Checkout” sign at Target.
> there’s no lock-in with Google. They’ve made it very simple to walk away. This a great and effective way to handle all the power that they have earned.
Though I can’t help but wonder whether no lock-in is an infinitely more effective method of retention than any tangible form of lock-in. The user/customer stays because they know they could leave if they wanted to.
It’s going to get to the point with Google where you can’t. Where you are literally and figuratively hopelessly locked in. I think this is what Google is working toward and wants to achieve. You have too much coming out of Google now in the way of search, online services of all flavors, OSs, browsers, and so on to believe it could be any other way. Please tell me what Google is trying to achieve with all that- it would take another page just to list all that they offer right now, another half a page easily to list what it still on the back burner, and about one second to explain why I think they’re doing all that: to take our computer experiences over completely. If this idea doesn’t creep you out, it should.
How can you leave Google?
They know who you are, where you bank, where you work, and who you know.
If you leave… they still know who you know, that data isn’t going away. Also, are they REALLY getting rid of your information, or are they simply denying you access to your now deeply archived data?
There is a great deal of speculation that everything Google has access to feeds directly into the NSA. I looked into it a bit… and considering how many former spooks came in along with Schmidt, it’s really not as far out a claim as it might at first seem.
Then, look at the changes they put into Picasa. It uses face recognition on all your pictures, and ties it into your contacts. So now, Google even knows what you look like… and you have no control over that, since you have no control over whether someone lists you as a contact.
Well, that’s why I don’t use Picasa. Or Google search, for that matter, unless I block cookies, anonymize cookie IDs and rewrite links to point outbound instead of to Google’s clicktracking service, block Google ads and Analytics and… *sigh* …and even with all that, my IP is still exposed…so sometimes I hide that, too. Google certainly knows who I am since I told them a long time ago in a way that can’t really be mistaken, but as Rhett Butler once told his wife, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.
Sergey Brin has a net worth of US$18.7 billion. The median world income is in the region of US$850.
Anyone who feels a compulsion to arrogate to themselves two hundred and twenty million times the average yearly consumption rights of a normal human being is a sociopathic monster. So the evil is already there.
Sergey didn’t arrogate anything. He started a company and did not seize anything by force. The market is what values him at $18.7 billion. It’s potential, not income. There is a difference between paper assets and yearly income.
> and did not seize anything by force.
Tell that to Yahoo.
So what are you advocating? Communism?
Harping on billionaires like Brin and Page makes you look ridiculous.
Their net worth comes from legitimate business. If you want to wage a crusade against unjust wealth, I suggest you do so against people who derive their income off of corporate corruption. Moreover, reform the system that leads to corruption. The industries of health “insurance,” oil & coal, pharmaceuticals, and military contractors, to name a few, come to mind.
If you’re a US citizen, start with voting out blue dog democrats and basically the entire republican party. The GOP gets their marching orders straight from corrupt corporate interests more than anyone else.
Elect some real liberals in 2010 and we’ll see some good progress.
Wow, leave it to a liberal to make this political. Leave the politics at the door. We are talking about Google not about Democrats or Republicans.
Leave it someone named “Dont Care” who uses the word “liberal” in a derogatory sense to not understand that I was responding to a comment, not the TC post.
> Their net worth comes from legitimate business.
Is that what you call all their government contracts for giving the NSA access to your email, contacts, web history, etc?
Google is one of the few companies that has actually legally fought handing over data and has won in court. MS, Yahoo, AOL, the rest of them just handed their data over.
Other than that, you’ve apparently got Google confused with AT&T and other ISPs. Search Engine vs. ISP: different entities.
Their evil rooms are every place their little princes of darkness (the legal team) march. Sergey, David and Eric, your lawyers are evil and shame your company’s otherwise good name.
I dare you to ask your lawyers if they have ever lied in court for the company or asked others to do so. If they say they haven’t…..
“If you don’t want Google to know what you’re doing, don’t use their products.” The products are free and I don’t think there is a single user who is unaware that they are sharing their information with a corporation.
Whether a corporation has multiple products or one, the responsibility to be careful with information is the same and the capacity for abuse is still present regardless. Especially when its your information. Google unlike Facebook appears far more forthcoming and transparent about user data and interestingly Facebook has had a few instances where it ran afoul of its users in relation to user data. For this reason it is far better to write about what has happened versus what could happen.
As corporations go, I won’t fault Google for being successful at getting people to share data, nor using said data to improve its core business while adding value to users. How do we know value is added, because users keep handing over yet more data. Users will decide when a company is too pervasive by taking a pass on having a relationship with said company or furthering that relationship. Google clearly has a handle on data that well so many others just didn’t get.
What they have accomplished is stunning. And to think, they did it without trying to sell a Windows IIS server in the process, go figure.
dude, Google is going soo evil — but in a good way, in that way where it’s like damn, my girlfriend is evil (especially with the whips and handcuffs)… I hope people get that one..
Anyway, Google will become evil, for they are getting far too massive although they will keep on giving amazing tools for free while making more and more money.
To paraphrase: “We’re not evil. Now just give us all your data.”
It cracks me up when people say Microsoft is the evil empire. Microsoft was the fuel that got us to where we are today.
Any of you, ANY of you if presented with the opportunities that Microsoft was presented with would snatch it in a second. We live in America, the land of the free.
Well, for now that is. Pair Google with Obamanation and you’ll see how far your information can go.
Isn’t Schmidt on the Trilateral commission and the council of foreign “relations”, didn’t he also attend recent bilderberg meetings? Not evil my ass, they will be pivotal in the censoring of the internet, thank goodness for microsoft.
Their evil room is where they make Android Market. I can’t buy apps because I spent extra money getting a SIM unlocked phone to use in Africa. Yeah not evil, no….
Want to put pressure on Google: just don’t click on the ads.
If we all stopped clicking on the ads Google will be out of business soon.
Open source is of little value if it has to run on a multi-billion dollar cloud.
First, there is no evil room because evil is internal, not external, to the human being.
Second, I don’t understand the pants wetting panic over Google. If you are worried about your privacy then unplug your computer and pick up a good book.
I spend money every day with locally owned businesses in my home town. None of them depend on the internet – most of life has nothing to do with the internet.
Turn off your computer and Google is dead. You aren’t required to use their stuff.
I’m actually impressed with Google’s integrity; it’s certainly more profitable, in the short term, for them to serve bad search results, since that gives users more reason to click on the ads on the side of the page.
There certainly are areas where Google is choked with spam (say, anything about programming for Windows, or anything at all offbeat about medical topics… try a query for two random drugs or two random diseases and you’ll see plenty of medspam) but they maintain a much wider margin of quality than they need to with the sad competition that they’ve got.
We have a saying, “absolute power corrupts absolutely” and I don’t know why this wouldn’t hold true for google.
As far as internet companies are concerned, Google is an absolute power. They know everything we search for, everything that’s on our mind, everything we say to each other (gmail and gchat), the list goes on.
Maybe Schmidt, Sergey, and Larry are going to keep Google clean for their tenure. But what happens when they are succeeded? What happens when someone of ill moral is named to the new seat of the CEO? What happens then, when a future CEO of google sells out behind closed doors for a billion dollar check?
I guess we’ll find out some day.
Evil is the person, He He.
Becomes clearer and wide in yo ~
what about censoring content relating to democracy in china? that’s evil if you ask me…
The video on youtube on which an Iraqi man threw a shoe to Bush was very popular the day it released. It got millions of views and thousands of smments. Youtube kept changing the view count at short intervals of time to play it dow, while i think atleast 5 billion ppl in world seen it and discussed it. So google can interfere with natural proceedings….
lololol. Get out easily? Yea.. Cloud based software anyone? What’s the bet that they’ll have a format all of their own. =P
Not evil.. Dude. Everything you do in Chrome is sent to google servers to be used in targeted ads. It’s not that they use the data, it’s that they send it to companies. EVERYONE has your personal info.
And c’mon.. MSFT is one of the best software companies in the world, but they’re a monopoly so no-one likes them. Google is worse. Someone did a “blindfold” test on search engines recently, Yahoo search won, Google and Bing tied. So.. Google has a monopoly on search, but they aren’t even the best.
They were in court recently over having a monopoly in search, their response was “We’re not in the search sector, we’re in the advertising sector, and we don’t have a monopoly in that”. I’m still trying to figure out how that got them off. MSFT got sued by EU because IE is bundled with WIndows. Safari with Mac OS, Firefox with most Linux distro’s, it’s what you do, but MSFT has a very large percentage of the browser market so they have to bundle it seperately. Why does Google get away with having a monopoly on search? On web video? On cloud software? On.. Well, it’s Google, on everything IT if they get their way.
How are they not evil?
Side note: The comment box, I lol’d.
“Commenting Options
Enter your personal information to the left, or sign in with your Facebook account by clicking the button below”
Enter a fake name and a free email with no personally identifiable info or sign in with facebook, which happens to be a complete profile of you.. Does anyone else find that funny?