Kadin2048's Journal: On Google, Jan 26, 2006

[This was originally posted here, but I wanted to retain it after it falls off my Recent Posts page.]

I think you summed up my feelings on the issue quite well.

I'm pretty cynical when it comes to companies and their mealymouthed "corporate values" statements. Publicly held companies exist to make money and generate value for their shareholders, and they'll basically do it in any way that's legal. In fact, they'll do everything that's legal and then some, according to a formula that takes into account the risk of getting caught times the possible reward. (I doubt any major corporation would admit to doing this, and I'm not suggesting that they sit down and actually run through some algorithm to figure out whether to buy a judge, but if you look at the outcome they might as well have.) I accept this. As an investor, I'd expect this. I wouldn't want some ex-hippie executive's personal hangups getting in the way of his job, which is making me money. If having their product line manufactured by indentured 14-year-olds in Thailand will increase the share price, and it's legal to do so, I expect a CEO to either do it, or step down (or be voted out) in favor of someone who will. I would have greater personal respect for the person who refused to do it, but my opinion of the organization wouldn't change -- companies are amoral; or are moral only to the extent that their investors require them to be, which isn't much.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco, IBM -- they don't go around touting themselves as the corporate equivalents of Mother Teresa. So when I see them contributing to government oppression somewhere in return for the proverbial fat wad of cash, I accept it.

But when Google sold itself to the public as a new kind of company, one that was going to be run by people who hadn't exchanged the concept of "evil" with "bad for shareholder value," I have a lot less tolerance. Especially because they sold many of their services to the public, which people might have otherwise been uncomfortable with (GMail's advertising, search history, etc.), on the strength of this reputation.

Although Google's technological innovations were obviously the key to their success, I don't think that their reputation should be easily discounted. They sold themselves to the public as a new kind of company, under a new kind of management, and that means we held them to newer, higher standards.

How popular would GMail have been -- software which unabashedly scans your emails in order to target ads -- if it had been run by IBM? I'm willing to bet not as much. Would you have signed up for a service that retains everything you've ever searched for, if Microsoft was going to have the keys to the data? I wouldn't.

They made a decision earlier this week to burn that reputation. Someone decided that, in the end, marketing to China is going to be worth a lot more to the bottom line than whether they're well-liked by a bunch of Americans or not. This doesn't surprise me; obviously a lot of other companies have decided the same thing. I find their decision distasteful, but from an analytical position they're almost undeniably right.

I forgive -- if forgive is the right word; as Google isn't actually a person or anything else, it's not as though there's anything there to forgive -- Google for working with China. What I don't forgive, and see now as the height of arrogance, was the lengths to which they went to convince everyone that they were saints, come to show I.T. the path to rightness.

It was a nice show, boys. P.T. Barnum would have been proud. But then again, I -- like many others, I think -- were easy marks. We wanted to believe that a company could both be insanely profitable and remain morally righteous. You fooled us good; just don't expect to do it again.