Greed vs. Principles

I’ve been having a lively email discussion with John Krystynak comparing Microsoft in its heyday and Google now. Both are tremendously successful (near?) monopolies that dominate their industry, make tons of money, and change the landscape far beyond their own business. JK and I agree that their motivations feel different – when we dealt with Microsoft in the 90’s, it seemed to care about winning and about making money, but it changed the world while it was doing that. Google today seems to care more about changing the world, although they win and make a whole lot of money along the way.

Which motivation is better? It’s hard to argue that greed and paranoia are better in the moral sense than Google’s goofy idealism. When Microsoft was trying to buy flyswat (a toolbar that added hyperlinks to pages on the web, much like IntelliTXT or Kontera today (only better!)), they told me “We’re getting sued for antitrust because we’ve used our dominant OS to gain control of the browser market. People wonder why we haven’t used our dominant browser share to gain control of the internet. With your software integrated in IE, we can.” That’s pretty scary.

At least I knew where I stood, though. If Microsoft was interested in the business and could steal it for less money than they could buy it, they’d steal it. So to work near them, you had to understand what they valued and how you could create value in a way that made it difficult to steal. That was very clear, and it’s a common case in capitalism.

Google, on the other hand, is trying to “do no evil.” “Evil” can be a subjective standard, though, and it’s tough to apply consistently when you’re determining what it is from first principles. We know killing people is wrong, even from first principles. Is violating a dead author’s copyright evil? We know it’s illegal, but is it evil? Less clear. The subjective standard has led to Google Law. With regular law, you get a whole court system that allows appeals and generally develops some consistent reading and application of the law. You know where you stand and how to behave so that you stay on the right side of the law. A fair and independent legal system is a major foundation for capitalism because it’s tough to build a business if you don’t know which side of the law it will be on next year. Sometimes, that instability is the situation Google Law creates (as the AdSense arbitrageurs are learning with the Quality Score updates).

If I had to pick, I’d rather work for Google today than Microsoft in the 90’s. Their heart seems to be in the right place. That said, I think building a company near Microsoft’s space in the 90’s might have been less risky than building one near Google’s today.

Related Tags: google, microsoft, google law