High Availability on the new search engine startup Blekko competing against Google, and uses Machiavelli as analogy to the search engine business. “Google is the Ottomon empire. Allegiance is given to Google because people are getting paid. Defeating Google will take total war, assuming the prince has not turned the people against him, but once defeated ruling will be easy.” Very interesting view point.
Scott Yang's Playground
Faith, Technology and Randomness in Life, According to Scott
Jan 5 2008
Funny how people are now starting to talk about knocking Google over. With power comes great responsibility which Google has been fairly good over the years. With the gigantic power and influence Google has over the Internet (and their responsibility to the shareholders to keep the price moving up !), It is becoming harder and harder to be responsible and been seen as not evil !
Hi Felix — long time no see!
Re: power and responsibility, a private company will definitely be much easier to follow a motto such as “do no evil”. However as a public company whose primary focus is growth and rewarding the share holders, I am not sure whether Google can still keep it up.
However “good” and “evil” can be very subjective on the Internet, and in a lot of cases you can argue both ways. One thing for sure though, that people will try to knock over Google whenever they can, not because they are evil, but just because they are big.