October 9th, 2006
Google: Should we cheer it or fear it?
Every day seems to bring another reason to cheer “everyone’s favorite garage band,” Google: Multi-billion dollar acquisitions (YouTube), strategic alliances (Intuit), product introductions (Google Apps)…
Now may be the time to stop the cheering and start the fearing, however. Fear Google? Unthinkable to most, but real to many. Why? Google is steadily realizing its unflinching objective to control the world’s content (information) and then use that content of others to its own strategic and profit objectives while determining how it is made available, stored, manipulated, accessed…
Google proudly proclaims its desire for worldwide domination.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Google Q2 conference call:
we are in the search business, so we need all of the information. We want to partner with people to get information so our search end users can see it. We’re also in the advertising business, and we’d like to provide advertising services to people who have their own proprietary content.
So depending on where we are in that spectrum, we either do an advertising deal or a content deal or a hybrid deal.
But ultimately our goal at Google is to have the strongest advertising network and all the world’s information, that’s part of our mission.
Google defines “all the world’s information” literally.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in August:
If you think about it, all the world's information includes personal information.
Isn’t it time we started thinking about the long-term consequences to businesses and individuals of a consolidation of every piece of public, private, and personal “information” within one $122 billion (and growing) market cap corporation’s “cloud” and worldwide server farms?
