Cloud computing was another new Google initiative. Like other corporate giants with massive data centers and servers-IBM, Amazon, Oracle-Google was intent on launching its “cloud” of servers. The cloud would allow a user to access data stored in the Google server from anywhere; it would reduce corporate costs because companies could outsource their data centers; and it would subvert more expensive boxed software sold by Microsoft and spur the development of inexpensive netbooks whose applications are stored in the cloud. Because all these software applications can function on a browser, escaping the dominance of Microsoft’s operating system, in the future, said Christophe Bisciglia, the twenty-eight-year-old chief of cloud computing, “The browser becomes the operating system. Applications have outpaced browsers, which is why we did it”-introduced a Google browser in 2008.
While cloud computing offered consumers portability, it potentially offered them less control. Just as a consumer loses access to the Internet every time a broadband connection is down-for instance, when YouTube was silenced for several hours on February 24, 2008, when the government of Pakistan tried to block a YouTube video critical of Islam and wound up shutting down the worldwide video service, or when Gmail’s one hundred million users were disrupted for just over three hours exactly one year later, on February 24, 2009, or when Google search and Gmail went dark for an hour on May 14, 2009. “We’re sometimes going to have problems,” Bisciglia admitted, “just as we do when our hard drive crashes.”
And what is the business plan?
“The more people on the Internet, the more clicks our ads get,” Bisciglia said.
While these aggressive Google efforts resemble those of other corporations’ always angling to continually grow profits, they were also reminders of the “Don’t be evil” idealism that animated the company. In its annual letter to shareholders released on the last day of 2007, Google announced it was entering the energy sector, investing tens of millions of dollars in new technologies with the goal of making renewable energy cheaper than coal-fired plants. “If we are successful,” the founders declared, “we will not only help the world, but also make substantial profits.” Their profits would rise because the energy costs to operate Google’s data centers would fall. They acknowledged that solar power is “more expensive,” yet vow to use it to power a third of the Googleplex and to subsidize it for seven years. Consistent with their fervor to spare the environment, Page and Brin made personal investments in Tesla Motors, a Valley company intent on producing an electric sports car.
They established a philanthropic arm, Google.org, and recruited an esteemed epidemiologist and world health expert, Dr. Larry Brilliant, to run it. They pledged to divert to this foundation one percent of Google’s profits, with three goals: to ascertain the quality of water and health care and other services country by country; to gather enough information to try to predict and prevent catastrophes, whether these be forces of nature or disease; and to make energy-renewable investments. Page and Brin sound more like social workers than hardheaded businessmen when they extol Google Earth as a vehicle to spot imminent disasters and offer to make “a gift” of this technology to disaster relief organizations. Google put up thirty million dollars to fund the X Prize Foundation’s Google Lunar X Prize, which would be awarded to the private team that designs the best robotic rover to traverse the moon’s surface and send high definition video images back to earth.
Google also launched Google Health, an effort much like the one announced by Microsoft and by AOL cofounder Steve Case’s Revolution Health Group LLC. Each aimed to give citizens a safe place to store health records online and share them with doctors, and search for the best medical advice online. Google recruited Dr. Roni Zeiger, a primary care physician who returned to Stanford for an advanced degree in medical informatics, hoping to devise ways to democratize medical information. He joined Google in January 2006, after a typically rigorous interview. “They asked for my high school grades!” Zeiger laughed. He was dead serious about his mission. “Google gets more health questions than anyone on the planet,” he said. Zeiger realized that “Google’s skills could help people organize their own health information.” He vowed, “We’ll never sell anyone’s health records.” And in a March 2008 speech, Eric Schmidt promised to keep the site free of all advertising.
There is a shared, and perhaps blinding, belief on the Google campus that Google was altruistic, an attitude reflected in “Don’t be evil.” On a stage he shared with Page at the Global Philanthropy Forum after Google embraced the slogan, Brin declared that ‘“don’t be evil’ serves as a reminder to our employees,” but it “was a mistake. It should really say, ’Be Good.‘”
One can interpret Brin’s remarks as a reflection of his idealism, or his naïveté-or both. To simply say a corporation should be good ignores the range of choices a company is compelled to make in conducting its business. How “good” was Google when it complied with German laws not to disseminate Nazi literature? Google’s searches were following German law, which is good. It was censoring search results, which is bad. When in 2008 Google closed its Phoenix office and laid off a handful of employees because the company did not believe the office was essential, it was being good to shareholders. But those employees most certainly did not see Google’s action as good.
BUT THE SPEED OF GOOGLE’S ascent and its expansive commercial ambitions came to overshadow its noble ambitions. Google grew up very fast. In their first annual letter to shareholders, in 2004, Page and Brin wrote of Google: “If it were a person, it would have started elementary school late last summer, and today it would have just finished the first grade.” Three years later, Search Engine Land ’s Danny Sullivan thought Google had prematurely entered its awkward teenage years. “The story of Google today is perhaps the adolescent period they are going through. How do they deal with the challenges of the growth they are going through? You are going to go through this wave of people leaving Google. They don’t need to work there anymore. And it’s not going to be fun, which will change the culture.”
“Google’s become a big company,” said Paul Buchheit, who left Google in 2006 to start Friendfeed.com. “It’s a very different environment.” As with most big companies, he said “priorities become based more on what looks good internally. You become distant from the users. When you get bigger, some engineer comes up with this crazy project, but he’s four or five layers from Larry. These layers in between are going to serve up all sorts of weird barriers.” There’s little incentive, he said, for individuals to innovate because the bureaucracy becomes cautious, overwhelmed with a terror “not to look dumb.” Asked for a more concrete example, the engineer who distilled Google into a powerfully simple slogan retreats to this sweeping analogy: “It’s an entire system. Think about the Soviet Union. They had lots of brilliant people. But there was an economic system there that encouraged certain kinds of behavior. They failed to innovate because the system was wrong.” Buchheit’s critique is echoed by Scott Heiferman, CEO and cofounder of the social network site Meetup.com, who has hired some former Googlers who left the company because it got too big. “Google did not invent YouTube. They tried and failed with Google Video. Google did not invent Facebook. They tried and failed with Orkut.” Aside from search, Heiferman said, “Google has actually failed at most things.”