Google too powerful? (BusinessWeek)

BusinessWeek has a great cover story this week on the rise and apparent omnipotence of Google. Lately, Microsoft has been looking very fallible, forcing us to look around for a new company to demonize. Google has assumed that mantle.

BW did an interesting Q&A with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, and had this telling interchange:

Is Google too powerful?

Too powerful relative to what? I mean that as a question, not as a statement. Some people feel that Google is now or potentially could become too powerful in that it has such sway over where people go online. People worry that Google could become the gateway, and by extension the toll gate, by which people reach the Internet.

I disagree with essentially every half-sentence here. Here’s why: This is all about user choice. And the studies that I’ve seen indicate that a majority of users are choosing Google to get information. That’s great. We could lose that in a nanosecond.

Could you really?

Yeah. Were a better choice to come along, we are literally one search away. This is not like proprietary lock-in models, where users are forced to use Google….[M]y point is that to say Google is too powerful implies that users are somehow making a wrong choice.

Schmidt is spot on in this. Unlike with proprietary software, where if you buy into an ecosystem and a lack of standards or investment costs keep you locked in forever, Google’s “lock-in” on its most important product really is a mouse-click away from bankruptcy for the company.

Compare this to Microsoft. I took a stroll through the company’s License Advisor yesterday, and found the third question on the list to be highly correlated to the first question:

Choose to standardize on Sauron and when you pay really doesn’t matter – you’ll be writing checks forever. You can choose to pay annually, minutely, secondly, etc. But you can’t choose whether or not to pay. That choice is made for you the minute you “centralize” on Microsoft.

Not so with Google (or open source, for that matter). I suppose this is a weakness for Google but then, business really is always about providing superior service or a product. Lock-in is a way for weak products to pretend that their buyers actually like them. Google apparently doesn’t need to resort to cheap proprietary parlor tricks to keep customers.

P.S. I tried to click “Next” on that Microsoft Licensing Advisor page and sign my life away, but since I was using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer, the page wouldn’t work. Thank goodness for lock-in (I mean, lock-out)! 🙂