Success breeds contempt

Dave Winer riffs off Google Checkout being “baaad mmkay” because one day his “idea of Google soured, it was an instant flip”. He says they started to act like Microsoft. I’m wondering when they started this and in what ways. I know people have a lot of opinions about Microsoft and their success has certainly … Continue reading “Success breeds contempt”

Dave Winer riffs off Google Checkout being “baaad mmkay” because one day his “idea of Google soured, it was an instant flip”. He says they started to act like Microsoft. I’m wondering when they started this and in what ways. I know people have a lot of opinions about Microsoft and their success has certainly brought them contempt (and Dave is absolutely right that their success made them arrogant and left us with browsers that were malware-riddled as well as behind the times.)

Google on the other hand doesn’t seem, in my opinion, to have done anything like Microsoft. I don’t hear stories of Eric Schmidt throwing a chair across a room in a fit of rage. We don’t have embarrassing videos of Larry Page dancing around at a developer conference. Google have not been convicted of leveraging a legal monopoly to illegally destroy competitors. Or did they bundle Orkut with Sketchup and Google Maps so that we’d be forever nagged at to use their branded products?

Dave makes it out to be a trust issue. That he doesn’t trust Google. I don’t trust Google either. Nor do I trust Microsoft. I don’t even trust Apple (and that’s the devil I do know). And I certainly don’t trust Dave Winer. Never met the bloke.

I just get the feeling that Apple dominates the headlines when they’re popular because everyone wants to see them and the iPod take a fall. Similarly with Google we have some wanting to be the person who predicts their downfall.

If you’re going to criticise a company, be less vague. Does Google Checkout mean that Google wants to be the identity czar of the Internet? Dave really complains about companies being untrustworthy.

It’s not the companies, Dave, it’s the people. If someone doesn’t pick up the hotel bill they promised, it’s because a person didn’t do their job. It’s not a big conspiracy. There might be a reason – maybe you pissed off the CEO. Maybe someone who looked like you hit on his wife. There’s always reasons and it boils down to people.

Anyway. I just realised I totally missed the summer solstice. It must be all the world cup fervour. I can honestly say I’ve spent less than 5 minutes watching some men kick an inflated bladder around a field and that it was more than enough.

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