This post is a work in progress and reflects my current thoughts and fillings about the great Google experience.
Let me clarify up front: i do not think that Google is evil despite what Krugman says. Granted, I would never choose a motto that emphasize what not to do, in a way, Warren buffet strives to achieve the same effect by asking his CEO’s to imagine their decisions on the front page of their community newspaper which has a much stronger effect, though not quite catchy as a motto.
No. this started as a feeling that all is not well in the happy place, services quirked, there were blackout periods and i even got some JavaScript errors(oh, the horror!), in main web pages (such as the search front page),I was starting to think that Google had recruited just a little bit too much newbies and let them get on production code just a little too fast.
Then I heard Eric Schmidt at this podcast and it left me excited but also extremely concerned, Google does store all this data…
this feeling did not crystallized to anything specifically until i stumbled upon this little (extremely technical) article by Nicholas Nassim Taleb(the Black Swan, not an excellent book, but a very good point) and then it hit me : Google is not evil, it is simply too big to fail.
Let me elaborate, Contrary to other software giants like Microsoft(Bad Bad), Oracle and even Internet Giants like Yahoo and Amazon, Google second motto is to crawl and index ALL the data that is out there, not just your surfing and shopping habits, simply everything, your cellphone location and direction (Latitude), through your search history, shopping behavior, media habits, investment preferences,mails, meetings,documents, health,images,social network connections. If its online it will be indexed, if not Google will go to great lengths to get it online.
In the podcast (minute 29), the moderator (Edward Felten) asks Eric “to what extent do this privacy issues limit your ability to get new business.. i might say I’m a little scared of all the information that Google has about me..personally I’m not so worried but if Google fell into evil hands i would be pretty concerned to what happened to all that data” to which Eric promptly answers “We have a rule of don’t be evil” then he elaborate: the entire Google business is based upon trust, if Google will fail to honor this contract, the business will go elsewhere immediately.
While that’s just plain wrong, users are bound to Google services and will find it extremely difficult to migrate to competitors, Google will suffer tremendously from such a scandal.
But here is the case, Eric refers to Google as a single entity while in fact Google is the sum of all it’s workers, datacenters, code, bugs and users. as Nassim Explains simply in the article, a rogue trader can take down a bank, a malfunctioning machine can take down a software service (Gmail was down numerous times lately) and a rogue employee can take down a company.
Later that month Simon Johnson coined the phrase “Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist” in his article at the Atlantic, which summed things up pretty neatly.
Google is a wonderful organization, which invest heavily in wonderful innovations that will benefit all mankind, it holds though, ever increasing hidden risks, that can and will affect all of its users.
For the latest funny bug, check out this link in ie8 (the Firefox version is less buggie but still have some weird behavior) now scroll down as much as you can, really, now go back up, i get a big wide white gap. I was not looking or bugs just stumble upon it.
