Google's evolution into a do-gooding whale

The first book finished in the bowl here in 2012 is Steven Levy's In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. Reading the book straddled the birth of my daughter — I was halfway through when she was born and have since been too busy to get much reading done — which leads me to at least consider what sort of company Google will be in her lifetime.

That Google still in some way considers itself the little company that could, the scrappy new kid that won't do any evil is a little absurd. Google long ago passed into behemoth stage, and despite the ability to develop good products — we here at America's Fish are particularly big fans of Gmail, Analytics and Webmaster Tools, as well as a little script that tricks pre-9 versions of IE into displaying HTML5 properly — is slow and prone to missing the seismic shifts in technology. Just as Apple in the late '80s and early '90s missed how dramatically the PC-compatible hardware movement was going to push software development away from Macs and just as Microsoft missed the importance of the internet and then, while playing catchup first following the AOL model of all things and then later crushing Netscape, missed out on search, Google missed out on social media, failing to recognize the important of products it had in the pipeline that could have competed with Facebook and Twitter.

Like Microsoft, Google has been able to use the blunt force of its size to overcome some of its mistakes, or at least attempt to — what eventually becomes of Google+ is to be determined, but just as Microsoft battered Netscape with IE and its tie-in to Windows, Google seems to be making up ground by integreating + with Gmail and search. What separates the two companies is that while Google can no longer claim purely good intentions -- even if the company means no harm when it wanders into projects like its attempt to scan all of the world's books, it can still inadvertently be doing harm because such a move by a company of its size will necessarily have a lasting impact on copyright law — there does seem to be a lingering commitment to keeping the internet open. It helps that Google has found a way to make billions in an open internet.

Interesting that I finished the book just as SOPA and PIPA became big news. It's certainly not a coincidence that the tide turned dramatically against those bills just as Google became more publicly associated with the opposition. Being a behemoth does have it advantages, and the internet needs a few bullies to be able to stand up to the entertainment industry, which has far too much sway with lawmakers when it comes to intellectual property.

So while I have my suspicions now and again about what Google really wants to do with all the data it collects, I know, too, that much of what I count on each day relies on that data. Just as Pandora has used my tastes to help me find music I like, my search history makes it much easier to find what I'm looking for everyday. Google and Apple — two of the bogeymen when it comes to privacy scares -- provide the platform for all my work today, and I have chosen that path with full awareness that the two companies want to look over my shoulder while I'm working. I work on a Mac, iPad and iPhone, and I rely on great tools like Gmail and Google Docs, the latter of which was essential to me in my first year or so as a small business. Aside from their privacy questions, neither company is exactly at the cutting edge of innovation — Apple was not the first company to make an MP3 player and the idea of tablet computers has been around seemingly for ages, and Google's best product after search is arguably Gmail, which is merely a reinvention of something that already existed. But what both companies lack in innovation in their gigantoid coporate states, they make make up for in making products that are useful in the way their predecessors were not.

Google has now given way to Facebook and Twitter. The former will cash in its IPO soon and it, like Google, will become slow to respond to new trends but will remain a force by the shear force of its size. Twitter's financial future is not as clear, but it's force as a news ticker — it has replaced the gaping hole left in my life that lack of access to the wires in my old newsrooms has left -- certainly speaks to its staying power. My little fish is likely to see those two much as she does Google — big, dated and not nearly as cool as they seemed before she was born.