The Tenants of Google
November 26th, 2009 (Web)On This Week in Google: Episode 17, Leo suggested that Google may have a set of rules that they follow when building each of their products. Matt Cutts responded with a few of the fundamental tenants of Google. I have listed these below.
- Don’t be evil
- Organize the world’s data to make it useful
- Don’t trap user data – Eric Schmidt, Web 2.0, 2006
- Be an advocate for users
- Compete on merit (don’t give yourself an advantage – no proprietary APIs, etc…)
- Regarding products…
- Go for a great product first, then figure out how to monetize
- Don’t launch a “me-too” product – add some innovation to your product
I know a lot of people are very wary about Google especially as they grow into a larger and larger corporation. While they do seem to be reaching into more technology spaces, it is interesting to see how carefully they make their approach.
What is your take on Google and their level of “evil-ness” in the marketplace? How well do you think they follow the tenants outlined above? Are there more that should be added to this list?
The only thing I think they are lacking on is google checkout… the selling side of things. They started out offering it free, then it was free to match your adwords fees, so essentially still free, if you were paying for adwords already… but now they raised there rates in May 2009 to 2.9% and dropped the adwords promotions…which is just as bad as paypal.
It’s never really offered something that paypal or a real merchant account can’t do. I do appreciate the open API’s and the functionality, but at the same time I find myself frustrated with the lack of usefulness of the google checkout interface itself. It could really benefit from some better tools for processing orders within that interface. I don’t see any innovation at all, just a lack of features compared to the competition. One of the big annoyances is that you can download a CSV of your orders, but the dang file doesn’t have any shipping info in it, just name and order info… which makes it useless, I have to actually click on EACH order and copy and paste the addresses line by line into an excel file. Paypal just lets me hit the “print label” button. So why do I use it? Well… I don’t, I switched back to paypal!… I only use google checkout now for pre-order or groupbuy items, because they don’t hold my money hostage like paypal has in the past… with GC once a sale is made, it immediately transfers into my bank account.
Rick…good call on Google checkout – it sounds like they did not follow their tenants on that one. Has Paypal treated you a little better since you switched back?
Interesting note about the “be an advocate for the user”. Maybe that is an American thing, because Google Turkey has not been so for people who tried to purchase Google Adwords to advertise their Christian websites. It almost always took extra work (such as contacting Google USA) to get the site accepted in the first place, with odd excuses being levied; and in one instance the site was blacklisted as “evil” by Google, though the content was completely clean. But once the effort was made, the Adwords worked fine. (The one exception I’m aware of is the Christian radio station in Ankara.) I guess Google needs to let their Turkish employees in on their values.