Trust: Google's Google Problem

'Don't be evil' was a bold place to start. Maybe a bit too ambitious, as it turned out, but as a statement of intent, a brand marker, it served notice and garnered attention.

So here we are 15 years later. It's considered a great place to work. A hirer of smart people and developer of intelligent products. While it rarely does anything overtly offensive, the way Microsoft and Facebook have been known to do, neither has it become as beloved as Apple or as feared as Amazon. 

That tends to happen in dependent relationships. And  let's be honest, we are dependent on Google. The company has worked hard to make us so and we have happily, almost giddily responded. Why remember anything when Google will pull up the reference for you? Why try to figure out a map when Google can tell you how to get from where you are to where you want to be (literally and figuratively)? Identify, research, connect, manage. It has become the repository of knowledge we want and the source of that which they know we want before we do.

All of this plays right into our innately human desire to reduce time spent on tasks we'd prefer not to do. It's about convenience and ease of use. We are the cheery beneficiaries of Google's largesse, but we also recognize that there is a price to be paid and that, as the following article explains, we are the product being sold. Or more specifically, our inclinations, interests, likes, desires, experiences, preferences and histories. Because those can be converted, statistically, into cash delivered by merchants anxious to prey, quite legally, on our proclivities. Recent history suggests we dont mind. In fact, we think the trade-off is a pretty good one. But it's not as if we are grateful, so much as it is that we are accepting. We dont believe Google has our best interests at heart. Not by a long shot. Simply that we have made a deal and it works until one of us decides that it doesnt. We know Google may well reach that conclusion and start charging for previously free services or that we will find some alternative who wins us away with the promise of occasional 10% off bargains on items selling for $10 or less. Yes, we can be had that cheaply.

So maybe this is good enough. For Google, for its investors, for its customers and for the rest of us, its human sources and uses. But there remains a lingering doubt that it could be better than this - a more loyal, long-lasting, deeper and profitable relationship. If Google wants it to be. JL

The Economist reports:

Google has asked us to build our lives around it: to use its e-mail system (which, for many of us, is truly indispensible), its search engines, its maps, its calendars, its cloud-based apps and storage services, its video- and photo- hosting services, and on and on and on. It hasn't done this because we're its customers, it's worth remembering. We aren't; we're the products Google sells to its customers, the advertisers.
GOOGLE is killing Google Reader. That may not matter much to many of you; use of Google Reader [a tool, by the way, for reading online content via RSS] was concentrated among a small group of relatively intense users. As it happens, that small group includes quite a lot of people who write for or as part of their living (it's the second tab I open most days, after Gmail). And so Google Reader has been mourned over, angrily at times, a bit more than the many other Google services that have come and gone with little ado.
It isn't that hard to imagine what Google was thinking when it made this decision. It's a big company, but even big companies have finite resources, and devoting those precious resources to something that isn't making money and isn't judged to have much in the way of development potential is not an attractive option. Dropping Reader isn't going to hurt the company's business, and Google may have calculated that it won't even be bad for users in the long run. Someone else will come along to provide the service and, if they give it their full attention, to improve it.
Yet this little contretemps may suggest bigger trouble ahead for Google and big changes in the offing for the internet. One immediate effect is relatively easy to anticipate. John Hempton makes a nice point here:

Google is in the process of abandoning its mission. Google's stated mission is to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. RSS is a way that a small number of us organize our information. Google no longer cares. It seems what they care about is mass-markets...

But as Ezra Klein notes, Google may face a trust issue. Translated into economese, Google has failed to consider the Lucas Critique: adoption behaviour for newly offered services will change in response to Google's observed penchant for cancelling beloved products.

Google wants us to use its services in ways that provide it with interesting and valuable information, and eyeballs. If a particular Google experiment isn't cutting it in that category, then Google may feel justified in axing it.
But that makes it increasingly difficult for Google to have success with new services. Why commit to using and coming to rely on something new if it might be yanked away at some future date? This is especially problematic for "social" apps that rely on network effects. Even a crummy social service may thrive if it obtains a critical mass. Yanking away services beloved by early adopters almost guarantees that critical masses can't be obtained: not, at any rate, without the provision of an incentive or commitment mechanism to protect the would-be users from the risk of losing a vital service.
There may be bigger implications still, however. As I said, Google has asked us to build our lives around it, and we have responded. This response entails a powerful self-reinforcement mechanism: both providers and users of information and other services change their behaviour as a result of the availability of a Google product. You can see this on a small scale with Reader. People design their websites and content based on the assumption that others, via an RSS reader, will come across and read that content in a certain way. And readers structure their reading habits, and ultimately their mental models of what information is available and where, based on the existence of this tool. The more people used Reader, the more attractive it was to have an RSS feed and to write posts in feed-friendly ways. And the more people provided RSS content and structured online interactions around the blogs that pass through RSS, the more attractive it became to be a part of that ecosystem. If you then pull away the product at the heart of that system, you end up causing significant disruption, assuming there aren't good alternatives available.
The issue becomes a bit more salient when you think about something like search. Many of us now operate under the assumption that if we want to find something we will be able to do so quickly and easily via Google search. If I want an idea for a unique gift for someone, I can put in related search terms and feel pretty confident that I'll get back store websites and blogs and Pinterest pages and newspaper stories and pictures all providing possible matches. That in hand, I can quickly comparison shop, again via search, and order online. And if I'm a retailer, I can count on precisely the same dynamic and will structure my business accordingly.
If I'm a researcher, I know I can quickly find relevant academic papers, data, newspaper accounts, expert analysis, and who knows what else related to an enormous range of topics, and I know that whatever research product I ultimately produce will be added to this bonanza. Once we all become comfortable with that state of affairs we quickly begin optimising the physical and digital resources around us. Encyclopaedias? Antiques. Book shelves and file cabinets? Who needs them? And once we all become comfortable with that, we begin rearranging our mental architecture. We stop memorising key data points and start learning how to ask the right questions. We begin to think differently. About lots of things. We stop keeping a mental model of the physical geography of the world around us, because why bother? We can call up an incredibly detailed and accurate map of the world, complete with satellite and street-level images, whenever we want. We stop remembering who said what when about what engagement on such-and-such a date, because we have fully archived email and calendar services for all of that. And we instead devote more mental energy to figuring out how to combine the wealth of information now at our hands into interesting things. Those interesting things might be blog posts or cat GIFs or novels or theories of the universe or personal relationships. The bottom line is that the more we all participate in this world, the more we come to depend on it. The more it becomes the world.
What Google has actually done is create a powerful infrastructure. The shape of that infrastructure influences everything that goes online. And it influences the allocation of mental resources of everyone who interacts with the online world. But there isn't much to the real human world that isn't shaped by the mental activity of the people in it!
That's a lot of power to put in the hands of a company that now seems interested, mostly, in identifying core mass-market services it can use to maximise its return on investment. Now in the short run, that may mostly be a problem for all of us. To the extent that we become worried about this phenomenon, we may go out and find back-up services or other alternatives. This will be less convenient and more costly, in terms of time and money, but those sufficiently foresighted might feel it's a better option than opening up gmail one day to read that the email service, and the 10-year's worth of communication it holds, will soon be gone.
But in the long run that's a problem for Google. Because we tend not to entrust this sort of critical public infrastructure to the private sector. Network externalities are all fine and good to ignore so long as they mainly apply to the sharing of news and pics from a weekend trip with college friends. Once they concern large swathes of economic output and the cognitive activity of millions of people, it is difficult to keep the government out. Maybe that deterrent will be sufficient to keep Google providing its most heavily used products. But maybe not.
I find myself thinking again of the brave new world of the industrial city, when new patterns of interaction led to enormous changes in economic activity, in culture and personal behaviour, and in the way we think. We upgraded ourselves, in terms of education, hygiene, and social norms, to maximise the return to urban life. And the history of modern urbanisation is littered with examples of privately provided goods and services that became the domain of the government once everyone realised that this new life and new us couldn't work without them. I think we, meaning users of the web and the companies that provide its blood and bones, are only beginning to grapple with the implications of a world awash in information.