Sunday 7 December 2014

What Will Google's New Mission Statement Be?

google founders

Sarah Dobbs looks at Google's upcoming projects to see how it might have grown past its initial intentions.

Way back when, in the days when Google was a young company and not yet a verb, its founders were trying to figure out what kind of company they wanted to be. Someone - exactly who it was has become muddied over the years, with a few different candidates named in different sources - came up with the simple phrase 'Don't be evil', and that's been at the core of Google's values ever since. Another part of the mission statement says that Google's aim is "to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Looking at what Google has done since it was founded in 1998, even the harshest Google sceptic would be hard pushed to say it hasn't achieved that second part, but what about the first?

10 Years of World of Warcaft

World Of Warcraft

Blizzard’s game director on WOW, Том Chilton, reflects on a decsde of MMO dominance and how Blizzard's experiment created a pop culture icon.

How many game developers can say they created something that impacted the world to the point of being a major plot point in not one, but two different comedic shows in the US? That could help inspire an entire web series (that in turn helped launch and popularise the concept of web TV shows), change the way other game developers think about rewarding players and become so synonymous with its genre that it’s basically interchangeable with it.

Make no mistake, World Of Warcraft has been one of the most extraordinary gaming stories of its decadelong life span and as its latest expansion, Warlords Of Draenor, lands we thought we would sit down with its game director Tom Chilton to reflect on the last ten years and what it has all meant to him.