The Four

(such as the New York Times) until it was too late. Google only
reinforced this with nice Summer of Love philosophical statements
such as “Do No Evil” and images of employees sleeping in their
cubicles with their dogs.
But behind the curtain, Google was undertaking one of the most
ambitious strategies in business history: to organize all of the world’s
information. In particular, to capture and control every cache of
productive information that currently existed on, or could be ported
to, the web. And with absolute single-mindedness, the company has
done just that. It began with the stuff already on the web—it couldn’t
own that, but it could become the gatekeeper to it. After that, it went
after every location (Google Maps), astronomical information (Google
Sky), and geography (Google Earth and Google Ocean). Then it set out
to capture the contents of every out-of-print book (the Google Library
Project) and work of journalism (Google News).
With the insidious nature of search, Google’s absorption of all the
world’s information took place in the open—and potential victims
didn’t seem to notice until it was too late. As a result, Google’s control
of knowledge is now so complete, and the barriers to entry by
competitors so great (look at the marginal success of Microsoft’s Bing),
that the firm might maintain control for years.
Every company on the planet envies Google’s position at the
epicenter of the digital world. But the reality is less happy. Leave aside
the likelihood that once the company becomes old news, Congress and
the Justice Department might just decide the search engine is a public
utility and regulate the firm as such.
Google is a long way from that fate—but notice that it too is
basically a one-trick (and one trick only) pony. There is search
(YouTube is a search engine) and there is... well, Android—but that’s
an industry smartphone standard, devised by Schmidt to counter the
iPhone, and its biggest players are other companies. All of the other
stuff—autonomous vehicles, drones—is just chaff, designed to keep
customers and, even more so, employees pumped up. To date their
contribution is less than Microsoft’s fading Internet Explorer.
There are other parallels between Google and Microsoft. Microsoft
at its peak was notorious for having the most insufferable asshole
employees in American business. They were arrogant, smug, and