Does Google Get a Bad Rap?
Google was once the darling of Silicon Valley. It could do no wrong, and almost everything they touched turned into gold. But more recently, the media seems to delight in all their failures. Every step and falter is analysed, with proclamations that Google's reign is coming to an end.
With it's huge portfolio of products, Google search is the one thing that people can't dispute as THE web innovation of the last decade. Launching when the first Tech bubble was imploding, Larry Page and Sergey Brin (with help of course from Mr Schmidt) steered the young Google.com to being one of the most profitable companies in history. But make no mistake, Google still makes enough money for some to wonder if indeed they have money-growing trees in the Google Plex. But what of their reputation for being the ethical, "Do no Evil" company that made them the darling of the tech world?
Their ongoing spats in China bring them publicity, both positive and negative. But how many companies out there are going to ignore a billion potential customers? While Google are publicly accusing China of hacking attempts on Gmail accounts, other companies are possibly making back room deals with the Chinese (and no doubt compromising their principles in the process).
More recently, Eric Schmidt spoke publicly about Google's facial recognition patents and how the company had decided against releasing it. With Google's immense database of the planets websites, such a technology could be used to recognize and persecute people under repressive regimes. Meanwhile, Facebook released a similar technology without so much as an announcement.
So does Google get a bad rap? In my opinion yes. They might be more miss than hit in recent years, but they are a company who have not yet rested on their laurels. In only the past few months they have announced or released Instant Search Results, the Chromebook, Voice Search and Music beta. And if any or all of these endeavors fail, they've still got their search engine with adWords to fall back on....
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