Google's Not-So-Extreme Makeover

Is it OK to start liking Google again?

The pendulum shift in how the press and the public feel about the company has been in bizarre parallel to the approval ratings of the Bush administration. In the early part of the decade, it seemed as if Google could do no wrong. But a backlash that began in early 2005 has gotten to such a point that the company is hit with either criticism or cynicism about every significant move it makes.

Things have gotten so bad that if you had played a drinking game at Google's press day last week, taking a shot of Wild Turkey every time a journalist flung the three magic words -- "don't be evil" -- into the faces of Google's triumvirate, you'd do some serious liver damage. One of the entertainment highlights of the event was when a reporter from the Asahi Shinbun asked the trio, "You say, 'We are not evil.' But nobody believes they are evil. How can you guarantee you are not evil?"

It's a testament to Google's unique nature that reporters feel free to launch a philosophical thumbsucker like that at its executives. On the one hand, who hasn't scoffed at Google's naïve, hackneyed motto? On the other, who's not getting tired of seeing this poor dead horse being flogged again and again?

Sure, Google brought it on itself by trumpeting "don't be evil" in the founder's statement that prefaced its IPO prospectus and pointing investors, analysts and reporters to it time and again. But given all the flak the motto has generated, the company deserves at least a little credit for not abandoning it as a core principle.

In all of this back-and-forth, an important nuance has been lost -- one that appeared in a January 2003 Wired magazine story that gave birth to the "evil" meme. The writer of the piece, Josh McHugh, asked Google CEO Eric Schmidt what exactly the company's credo was supposed to mean, and Schmidt replied cryptically, "Evil is what Sergey says is evil." In other words, Google never intended "evil" to have a meaning everyone could agree on.