Friday November 11, 2005

Update: Corrected many grammatical errors due to a rush to beat my flight from San Jose. It was bugging the hell out of me.

Can Google do no evil (see #6)? Personally, I like Google. I use it every day. Many times a day. Many times an hour. It's practically my home page. If it wasn't for the Google toolbar, it probably would be. Everywhere I go, I hear Google. News sites. Podcasts. Blogs (guilty as charged). People loved Google when it was the underdog. Today, Google is everywhere. IMHO, it is becoming a challenge for them. I am starting to hear some grumbling - signs of discontent.

I have this underlying feeling that a majority of people don't like successful companies. I'm not talking minor success, I'm talking major success. Whopping success. 800lb gorilla success. $400+ stock price success. At some point, a successful company crosses boundaries (expanding into new markets) that some people just don't like for one reason or another. Different boundaries for different folks. We can talk privacy. We can talk copyrights. We can talk blogspam. We can talk real estate. Lots of reasons for folks to justify concern. Some valid, some overblown. From a competitive perspective, a market leader has many targets on it's back. Google's not alone. Let's see. Microsoft. Walmart. Exxon-Mobile. IRS :) The list goes on.

I love Googles' service(s). I pay $0 and get a tremendous value in return. IMHO, Google is trying to be socially responsible. But you can't make 100% of the people happy 100% of the time. Sometimes I wonder if a good business strategy is to be a close #2.

On a side note, I wonder if Google is going to link OpenOffice to their "digital library". Makes sense to me. I'd love to find some snippet of verbiage (along with credits) to include in this blog entry. I often write my blog entries in StarOffice.

Gotta go. I've got to google for something.