Google is at the top of its game. It presides over, if not ruling outright, enormous swaths of modern life. Its market value has never been higher, and keeps heading north. As the company is demonstrating this week at its annual conference for developers, it innovates and experiments at a breathtaking rate. And it exudes an abiding confidence that the best is yet to come.
If all that doesn't have Google CEO Larry Page and his colleagues absolutely terrified, they're not nearly as smart as I think they are.
I write this from Google I/O, where thousands of engineers and hundreds of journalists have gathered to experience the latest and in some ways greatest advances in modern computing and communications. This year hasn't featured a gaudy product announcement like the 2012 first look – via parachute drop from the skies above San Francisco's downtown convention center – at the (still) upcoming Google Glass heads-up computing platform.
But the breadth and depth of Google's current initiatives is more than impressive. There are far too many to list, but consider Google Maps, which is evolving into a deep and rich offering that leverages the company's other data and services, especially search, and moves it well beyond what once was simply a map. Look something up and you can get a host of information about it, including what people you know from the Google+ social network have posted. Get directions as you drive, and based on real-time information you'll be told of alternate routes if traffic gets too heavy. (That feature has been in the competing Waze map product, and I now expect Waze to be bought by Facebook, Microsoft or Apple as a result of Google's move).
Maps is part of a growing array of Google services that grow more and more personal – adjusted for you and your habits – every day. The powerful integration of Maps and other Google services is testament to the company's core infrastructure: unimaginably vast server farms, industry-leading software development and intra-Google communications capabilities that translate to better and better results for users. It's hard to see how competitors can catch up in some cases, Maps being a key case.
No wonder there's such visible confidence among the employees, and delight among the outside developers who have cast at least part of their lot with Google. It's fine to be self-assured. But when that morphs into hubris, danger looms – and Google, from the outside, looks perilously close to that point today.
The company's engineering culture assumes it will solve problems; that data is king; and that anyone with common sense will use the company's solutions. It's true enough, as Google notes, that its search dominance is always one click away from melting. Competition does exist. But the company's culture has has been a factor in some bad ideas and worse moves, and I suspect it could be real trouble down the road.
There have been several privacy mini-debacles that Google appeared to shrug off a little too cavalierly, for example, and as its influence expands in the markets it already dominates, there's every potential for a situation that will scare everyone, not just privacy and policy wonks.
More worrisome, at least to me, is Google's key role as a re-centralizer of data and services. The internet was, from the beginning, all about decentralizing what we do – moving innovation and, ultimately, control to the edges of networks. Google and others are bringing control back to the center in ways that we all may come to regret some day.
I don't see Google's current leaders as the kind of people who would use their potential (and real) power to clamp down to the extent that they could, but I have no reason to believe their successors won't. I don't see what the company is doing now to prevent such an outcome. If I believe it's happening, I'll do my best to extricate myself from its ecosystem; I'll hope I'm one of millions who will do so, and that our combined acts have the kind of financial impact that punishes bad behavior.
That said, Larry Page's appearance at the end of the long, long keynote on Wednesday was reassuring in key ways. He chided the tech industry for its zero-sum mentality, even as his colleagues fired shot after shot across the bow of competitors earlier in the morning, and called for more cooperation to improve the ecosystem as a whole. Yes, there was an element of hypocrisy, but Page seemed to mean it.
Yet what stuck with me at the end of the keynote was a posting – on another worryingly centralized technology platform, Twitter – by an employee for another Silicon Valley "cloud" technology company that inevitably must see Google as a dangerous competitor. She wrote,
OK Google, please be a benevolent overlord.
— Ashley Mayer (@ashleymayer) May 15, 2013
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