Over the last one or two months there’s been a trend which borders on negativity when it comes to Google. And more people have noticed. The company still has a huge amount of friends and admirers but not everything the company does is as instantly loved as it was before. It seems that people start to notice that Google is just another big company.
And you have to wonder why it took them some time to realize that. As soon as a company’s revenue goes north of the 1 billion dollar mark, you can’t just talk about a small company anymore. And when their IPO is one of the most successful in history and makes the major stockholders billionaires, you might think the cat’s out of the bag.
But due to the different kind of company that Google is on both the management side, their approach towards their products or basically anything that has to do with running a company it seemed that people were more willing to give them a pass on things, just because they were Google. But not anymore.
Realization hits that Google has turned into a huge multi-national like Microsoft, Yahoo or AOL. A company that does things that might be considered “evil” and where conservative managers kill of inventive projects because they don’t seem feasible.
It’s nothing new to any large company in the world. Things like this are just part of doing business. But Google is held up to a higher standard, mainly because they’ve set their own. Their main company motto is “Don’t be evil”. If you go with a motto like that, you set yourself a very high standard. So whenever they’ll do something that is considered “large-company behavior” they’ll be reminded of that motto. So something that was celebrated when introduced, could become a public relations/image problem. The only thing they can continue to do is not just saying that they’re not evil but act on it. And that’s going to be a major challenge.
