Or maybe I should ask: "Where would I go without Google?". Everytime Google creates a new app like Google Mail, Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Calendar and just recently Google Code, I feel like I get more and more dependent on Google. Way too dependent. As a software engineer, I value a good, useful piece of software with a clean and usable UI. If I can use that software everywhere where there is access to the internet, well thats just great. I think companies who put out such products should be supported. Google should be supported. Just that I "pay" Google not with money but rather with information about myself. Sometimes I think I’d rather pay them money to use an excellent service such as Google Mail if in turn I can keep the illusion of privacy. How long can a listed company like Google refrain from doing evil, being in posession of enormous amounts of valuable information about every aspect of our lives? I don’t know. Probably not forever. After all, Google is controlled by human beings and is profit oriented. But would alternatives like Yahoo, AOL or any other competitor be any better? I guess not. If you look at it from a risk management perspective, though, things change a little. The probability of "going evil" might not be much different for Google than for Yahoo. Risk, however, is the product of the probability of the risk event (Google/Yahoo doing evil) and loss (private information being misused). I daresay that given the breadth and depth of information that Google owns, the potential loss would be bigger than it would be for any other of its competitors. The most frightening scenario for me personally is the american government getting access to Googles database, e.g. for reasons such as national security. There are other scenarios, of course. The most well known was put together by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson in their brilliant docu fiction called EPIC. It paints a rather frightening picture of the future path of Google and its impact on Journalism. The docu has gotten so popular, there is even a german version available, now. Definitively worth seeing. Markus Breuers (german) blog also offers a lot of thought about Google.
Where will Google go?
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