Next time you're walking around town, stop someone on the street and ask them if they've heard of Google. They may look at you like you're crazy or they may simply brush you off with an "um...duh!". Google is a household name at this point. Heck, it's been a verb for over two years now.
But as we know, Google hasn't always been a household name. Google has almost a decade behind it now and many of the original employees have left for bigger (or smaller) and better (or worse) things. In an average week these days, you can expect Google to be purchasing a company or two. They have over 10,000 employees now and the question forming in many minds seems to be "Is Google getting too big?".
Google is huge no matter how you look at it - assets, financials, labor, physical space, number of servers, computing power, etc. They have offices all over the world doing all sorts of things for all sorts of people (and often getting into a blitz of privacy debate). They stand for openness, for doing good, for serving users, and for generally making the world a better place. And in the past 10 years, they have. There's no doubting that. But what about the next 10 years?
Is Google becoming evil? Are they already a little evil and becoming more so? Will Google become big enough that some dose of evil is inevitable?
(All research for this post was conducted using Google.)




Comments
On there way to being a half
On there way to being a half a TRILLION dollar company, and I'm pretty sure they own most of the web, or at least most of the tubes that consist of the web...
Hey, Found my way over here
Hey,
Found my way over here by way of Future Buzz. Yes, Google definitely owns most of the tubes on the Internets.
I've been thinking lately about Google too, especially since Homeland Security said it could seize laptops from people entering the US without suspicion of wrongdoing. Writing that post got me thinking about a column I wrote for an alternative newsweekly back in 2004 about potential privacy issues with Gmail. Seems some critics were concerned about potential connections between Google and the NSA.
I just added that column as a page on my blog. You can read it here if you like.
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