Has Google Created A Monster?

And then something more interesting happens (or, more accurately, is happening). Everybody’s favorite mountain to blast, Microsoft, has been blasted so low that they’re an unexpected underdog.

Or, to mix my metaphors further in honor of the upcoming Kentucky Derby, Microsoft is (it’s so strange to say I doubt it each time) the dark horse.

Now I’ve never been one to hype the power and potential of Google – oh wait, yeah, I have, lots of times. But it’s especially eerie to watch those prognostications come alive, especially as we all championed it all along. Everyone has sensed it for some time, that Google could and probably will, permeate all aspects of our lives.

Google Search, Google Ads, Google TV, Google Movies, Google Newspapers, Google park benches, Google satellites, Google ISP. Expect to see that brand on the side of a lot more property to come.

After acquiring DoubleClick, which already has Microsoft and AT&T ironically crying antitrust, there is talk Google is trying to cut News Corp. out of a deal for Dow Jones. And that makes Google followers pause to reassess.

They learned their lesson after not buying MySpace when they had the chance. All this wasn’t too long after Schmidt shrewdly buddied up with Apple – the lowest, hardest punch the company could have thrown at the Beast of Redmond.

Has all that Google hysteria, the IPO, the cheering on, the multi-nationalization, the creeping into every facet of media, the first real challenge Microsoft has faced in a while, combined to create a monster we’re all not certain we can control? Were the French right? Sacre bleu!

I’m not the only one that thinks Microsoft is becoming more endearing to the public than before. Microsoft is a giant we’ve already gotten comfortable dealing with.

Times Online Writer Jonathan Weber calls Microsoft "the great underdog," and expounds on why we need Microsoft in the age of Google.

Google has changed the way of the web in less than ten years. Without a strong Microsoft, its dominance will only increase.

Not that Microsoft doesn’t deserve it. They’ve been the shrewdest competitors the world has seen till now. But Google’s rise to challenge, though we all hoped for it, is getting a bit frightening. Who knew the lighthearted Lego Googtopia would become the fortress that it is?

Weber concludes:

And strange as this would have sounded ten years ago, the industry needs Microsoft to be a viable player in the Web 2.0 world, lest we all be bit players in the universe according to Google.

My only real conclusion:

It’s a strange, strange world when you can think of a company like Microsoft as the underdog. 

When Wordspy.com included google as a verb among its log of neologisms in 2003, Google’s legal team was not amused and asked that it be removed from the online dictionary:

A note after the definition now informs the reader “that Google is a trademark identifying the search technology and services of Google Technologies Inc.” But google the verb, a genuine reflection of the language, is still there among other new phases like “Google bombing,” “Googleverse,” and “Googlejuice.” They forgot Googtopia, Googler and Googlite.

Google’s branding team still sends out haughty emails asking it be made clear that a person cannot just go around googling on any old Internet search engine (I got one of these just last October). In November, Rose Hagan, head of Google’s legal team, told Managing Intellectual Property Week that the issue is still at the top of her mind.

“Genericization is a concern and something we have to face,” said Hagan. “We haven’t got to the point of running an ad yet, like Xerox, but it is definitely something we do consider.”

Their fear is that Google will go the way of the escalator (moving staircase), of aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid), or the Allen wrench (hexagonal screwdriver), being included among lists like this one as google (to search).

The power of the Google brand is no doubt a Catch 22 to the experienced marketer. The goal at the outset is to make your brand a household name, but not to the extent that it loses its majesty by becoming “common.” Coca-Cola struggles even in its own home of Georgia where Coke can refer to any brown carbonated beverage. If not from the South, you may be confused after ordering a Coke and the server asks “what kind?”

Adobe has a grammatical guide for how to use the brand name “Photoshop”:

But is Google really in danger of that? The same crew that sent very serious-sounding emails to those who would abuse their brand were conspicuously silent when Pontiac instructed commercial viewers to “google” the Pontiac brand name. In fact, Google consented beforehand. Pontiac and Mazda hoovered up a crock pot of publicity, and Google was further validated as the King of Search.

No one yahoos; there’s no MSNing anything; some may Ask Jeeves from time to time (even if he was encased in carbonite shortly after retirement). None of them, though, has the command of the search world like Google consistently maintains.

In their chronicling of the etymology of “to google,” Wordspy notes that it first appeared in print on January 14, 2001 for the Telegraph-Herald in an article entitled “Googling is newest date thing,” penned by Amy Gilligan. Five years later, after successfully infiltrating the English language, it is commonly understood what is meant by the verb “to google,” and that it is impossible to google anything on Yahoo!

But who can say for sure? It took escalator, invented in 1892 and trademarked by Otis Elevator Company in 1899, until 1950 to become officially generic. But these are different times, and we are reminded of that when we see a 12 year-old using Google as his start page and never considers searching anywhere else.

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Inside their spanking new utopia, two of the wealthiest executives in the world are still fiddling around with Lego blocks in t-shirts. Larry Page, who carries with him two chief claims to fame–building an inkjet printer out of Legos and co-creating the most effective, speedy, and monitizable search engine on the planet—looks past Google’s token stuffed shirt to Sergey Brin and suggests building a Lego version of Eric Schmidt.

And you have a hunch they could do it, too, complete with animatronics and consciousness.

But it also begs the question: When they’re playing with Legos, who’s running Google?

Some speculate it ain’t Eric Schmidt, who pulls the airy corporate giant back to earth with his serious looking glasses, side-parted hair, shirt and tie (and by blacklisting journalists). Even when Time queried the Head Googlers about that, Schmidt answered with the aloof certainty that only enormous wealth will allow:

“My answer is simply to let the company’s results speak for themselves.”

That’s an answer and a non-answer at the same time. It’s very Zen. The nuts and bolts of Google is that it works, regardless of what its founders are doing, like its own organism. They’ve recruited the best there are to run their company and rewarded those star recruits with a self-propelled Disney-style feel good environment.

Check out this photo essay detailing life at the Googleplex. For most of corporate America, that type of ecosphere is unimaginable. How long is it before Google makes it way out of the collective minds of computer science students and into business management classes? These guys have propagated a model that damn well shouldn’t work, if you listen to some old school profs. But it does work. It works incredibly well and will have reaching effects on future academic theory.

Though Brin insists that the sudden accumulation of wealth hasn’t made him any happier, one might wonder if he’d still think so without the world he’s made with his old college roommate.

Silicon Valley’s new resident tabloid, Valleywag, is making celebrities out of Google employees, and has managed to only find one photo of Larry Page without a smile on his face. The same site reports of “harems” of gorgeous executive assistants to go along with the new Magic Kingdom.

Besides a reported Page meltdown in front of a bunch of engineers, the two boy-wonders-turned-high-powered-executives appear to be living it up, complete with fluffy puppies, and a goal to eradicate all things evil in the world-a seemingly latent comic book superhero fantasy that most of us bright eyed dreamers are forced to abandon for lack of funds.

One thing’s for certain, they’ve carved out an enviable place in the world, even if fame is the price (as well as the bringer of more good things). For even if many of the purer souls out there don’t covet that kind of bank account, they may covet more being in the position to do a tremendous amount of good in the world.