A Company, Google is Not

by phil on Friday Feb 6, 2004 7:09 PM
Google

I was going through my old entries, categorizing them, and I realized that I have so many entries talking about Google. I even created a separate category for it, and I think by the time I'm done archiving, I'll have 20 entries in it over the course of my blog. This is a big deal because when I create categories, I try to pick things of cultural significance, like Orwell, philosophy, and emotional intelligence.

And this process made me think, we shouldn't look at Google as a company anymore. We should put Google on the same plane as social institution. No wait, that's too small. We should treat them on the order of magnitude the way that the Greeks treated their Oracles. Hell, they even deserve a place of worship side-by-side the Internet itself. There's the Internet and then there's Google, two separate, yet intertwined, and equally powerful components.

When we speak about them going public, or them having to work on financials, or other minutae, it seems to demean them into just another "dot-com." Really we should treat them with the same interest that we treat the sanctiity of TCP/IP.

What action should this entail? I'm not sure, but I'm just trying to clear the air that, "A Company, Google is Not." A cultural icon, perhaps, but more like a group brain we all feed into.

Comments

Phil Dhingr said on February 9, 2004 12:21 AM:

Strange-Loops discusses my post and emphasizes that we shouldn't forget the socially negative potential in large corporations. Link to his post