Google’s presence as both a corporate and online entity can be terrifying and intimidating due to its vast scale and influence. They enjoy what amounts to a de facto monopoly on internet searches, and anyone’s brief self-examination of their online habits can serve to indicate to them how important that is. The next closest competitor, Microsoft’s search engine Bing, sees only a quarter of Google.com’s traffic. Besides their flagship domain already being the most visited on the internet internationally, the second-most visited site is also their property, Youtube.com. Ultimately, Google and their associated properties handle over 25 percent of all the internet traffic in North America.
With great power comes great responsibility, and as a company, Google regularly surprises potential critics with a high degree of good corporate citizenship, leaving many to marvel at the company and their unique take on ethics. An article by guest columnist Darius Lahoutifard on VentureBeat.com openly criticizes Executive Chair Eric Schmidt, already the world’s 138th richest person, as “not knowing how his company works” because of Google’s low revenue generation per employee, and compares them unfavorably against the lagging IBM on the basis of the latter company’s superior numbers in terms of the same metric. Lahoutifard continues on to criticize other projects of the world’s preeminent web-based business entity, saying that if they were stand-alone initiatives, “they would likely be dead by now.”
That is likely true. However, possibly the greatest saving grace of Google in terms of public opinion is exactly that they do not seem to exhibit the all-too-common characteristic of viewing profitability as the overriding concern of their company, a popular perspective that runs perpendicular to that of stock analysts and potential investors. As the company regularly generates in excess of $50 billion annually and is the second-highest valued business property in America, one could be tempted to challenge Lahoutifard’s criticism on his own metrics and ask him to compare his bank account to Schmidt’s and see whose is bigger.
Google is a company that often exhibits a human curiosity. They take risks and try things, and that is likely the corporate attitude that seeds the creative environment that values its employees and fosters innovation. In further refutation of Lahoutifard’s analysis, one should consider that Google acquired Youtube.com in 2006 for $1.65 billion. Its current value is in excess of $40 billion, a rate of return that the stock market should find envious.
Also, Lahoutifard seems to myopically miss the point that while Schmidt has been at the helm of a company that goes to great lengths to minimize its environmental impact, philanthropically incentivize non-governmental space exploration, and treat its employees in a way that shows them how valuable they are, the metrics he quoted to criticize them are still perfectly in keeping with the understood mechanics of capitalism. Rather than squeezing their workers for maximum individual profitability, Google engages a principle often cited to explain behavior in competitive practices; that they will take a lower return per unit and make up for it in volume. Considering the facts, it is certainly difficult to see Google as the bad guys.
Opinion by Brian Whittemore
Sources:
Photo by Travis Wise – Flickr License
Discover more from Guardian Liberty Voice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.