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?
Speaking to the Financial Times recently about the future of Google, founder Larry Page said he thought the company had outgrown its initial aims and needed a new mission statement. But when the FT asked what that might be. Page didn't have an answer, saying "We're still trying to figure that one out."
Well, maybe Micro Mart can help with that. Let's take a look at how Google has grown, whether its original values still apply and, if not, what they might want to adopt instead...
Don't Be Evil
In theory, 'Don't be evil' is a brilliant principle to have. The problem with it, though, is that while it's concise and snappy and friendly-sounding, it's not always obvious what it means. After all, what seems evil to one person might seem perfectly reasonable to another. After all, even supervillains tend to think they're doing the right thing. Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has voiced his reservations about the rule; according to him, when he first joined the company, he thought it was "the stupidest rule ever", precisely because there was no universal definition of "evil". So might it be time for Google to drop it?
There might be advantages to getting rid of such a broad rule: being more specific might be easier to stick to or at least easier to measure. Right now, can we assess whether or not Google has done anything evil? Some people seem to think its StreetView photography is morally questionable or that Google's ubiquitous advertising isn't entirely on the up. The amount of information Google seems to want to store about its users feels suspect too; while it might be handy to have services tailored to our news, most of us still resent companies using our personal information to market things to us, and we're all especially paranoid about our personal details nowadays.
To date, Google doesn't seem to have done anything especially sinister with the information it hold about us, based on our emails, Google searches, maps usage and literally everything we do on an Android phone or tablet, but that doesn't mean we don't feel a bit nervous about it. Is the 'Don't be evil' part of its corporate brand enough to reassure us? Maybe a set of specific rules and promises would be better.
On the other hand, because 'Don't be evil' has been around for so long, getting rid of it now might seem like a tacit acknowledgement that Google couldn't live up to it - or didn't want to. Google is the only company out there to make such a bold statement about its intentions, and it certainly hasn't stopped it from becoming massively successful. Ditching it might feel a bit like the future of Google is in evildoing, which won't make anyone feel better about the company. So while, yes, it is a bit simplistic, even idealistic, and feels like the kind of thing a group of very young and optimistic engineers might have come up with, for our money, Google ought to hang on to those three little words.
Organising The World's Information
Quick pop quiz: how many Google services can you name? There's Search, Gmail, Maps, Android, Earth, Docs, YouTube... and the list goes on. So yes, it seems fair to say that Google has outgrown its initial mission to organise information and make it accessible.
It's impossible to really overstate just how much of a difference Google Search made to our lives, though. It might not have been the first search engine, but as soon as it launched, it became clear it was going to be the best. Google's algorithms are kept secret, but they manage to return accurate results for pretty much everything you can possibly imagine. Google Search is so ubiquitous that getting knocked off the first page of Google results for your business's purpose can be catastrophic to your profits, because so many people rely entirely on Google Search. (We won't go on about people who seem to use the Google search bar as a navigation bar, typing in 'facebook' there instead of just navigating straight to www.facebook.com, but you know they're out there, and they're probably your parents.)
According to Google's list of "ten things we know to be true" on its corporate website, it's better to do one thing really well than lots of things not very well. And according to that list. Search is Google's top priority. "We do search," the article reads. "With one of the world's largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better.... Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we've learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps. Our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives."
If you squint, you can see the logic. After all, one of the main selling points of Gmail was that you never had to delete anything, and you didn't have to categorise your emails because you could always search them. And Google Maps is about searching too - searching for locations, directions and nearby features. But while it might be nice to focus on doing one thing really well, Google has definitely moved beyond Search now.
What Else Does Google Do?
Although Google Search is the product that saw the company's name turned into a verb ('to Google' = 'to search for something online, usually using Google's search engine, though not always'), but from the very beginning the company tried to resist. Right from the start, Google's founders knew they wanted to do something more with their company. And while organising all the world's information sounds like an ambitious goal, it's nothing compared to some of Google's other projects.
Like driverless cars. Google has been working on developing robotic cars that can navigate busy traffic safely since around 2005, and thanks to the company's efforts, some US states have changed their legislation to allow driverless cars on their roads. Google reckons these new cars will be safer and more efficient than human-driven cars and that it'll have a version ready to be sold to the public by 2017. Amazing, but clearly nothing to do with search.
Neither, really, are the health monitoring nanoparticles Google is also working to develop. The idea is that miniscule magnetic particles could be packed into a pill: users would swallow the pill, the nanoparticles would make their way through their body and then would be able to identify risk factors for future diseases. They could, for example, flag up cancerous cells or weakness in the user's heart that might lead to heart disease.
It's one of those ideas that sounds like pure science fiction (specifically, like Fantastic Voyage, only with magnets instead of scientists) but which Google reckons it can make a reality in the next few years.
And speaking of science fiction, what about Google's project to build elevators into space? The company's secret research and development arm, Google X, was working on ways to build a space lift that could take users into orbit, but it's been put on hold for now because in order to build that kind of massive structure, Google's engineers figured out they needed a material a hundred times stronger than steel, and that just doesn't exist. Yet. Now, you could maybe categorise space exploration as 'search', as in searching for life on other planets - or just searching, to see what's out there - but since Google's original mission statement only involved categorising all of this world's information, this is another project that exceeds the company's original goals. Doing one thing really well is a nice idea, but it's one Google seems to have left behind in favour of revolutionary, life-saving, planet-escaping ambitions.
A New Motto
Looking at the big Google picture, then, it's not hard to see why Larry Page might reckon it's time for a new mission statement. Having ticked "organising all the world's information" off its to-do list, Google has moved on to bigger projects. And those projects, should they come to fruition, stand to change the world just as Google's search engine changed the internet.
So what should Google's new mission statement be? It should be something that encompasses the company's grand ambitions without sounding too ridiculous (although as a bunch of cynical Brits, we'd probably find most mission statements giggle-inducingly grandiose, even as Google's busy destroying disease and building sentient robots). And ideally, it'd promise that Google will only ever do things to make the world better, rather than worse - insidious advertising aside.
Something like 'Using technology to make the world a better place' might work. Or 'Creating the tools for a better world'? To be honest, at this point, we'd take 'Google: Saving the world, because someone has to.' But Page and со would probably prefer something a bit more specific; Google might have outgrown its original mission statement, but it's nice to be able to say you've achieved something and moved on, rather than needing a new statement because the last one was too vague to mean anything. The problem Google is going to have is identifying the unifying factor that makes all of its projects make sense. 'Making things better' seems to be a good start, but it needs to find something beyond that to give Google a cohesive identity again.
Or they could just go with a Star Trek reference and promise to boldly go where no company has ever gone before. That'd be kind of cool.
Other Companies' Mission Statements
You might have been able to quote 'Don't be evil' as Google's motto, but other companies don't tend to have such iconic mission statements. Here's what some other tech companies think they're doing:
Microsoft
Microsoft's mission statement used to be 'A computer on every desk and in every home.' Last year, though, it updated that to the rather longer To create a family of devices and services for individuals and business that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most.'
Apple
Originally, Apple went for To make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance mankind.' Currently, there's no mission statement published on the company's website. Bah.
Yahoo!
Yahool's mission is the super ambitious 'To be the most essential global internet service for consumers and businesses.' At the moment, it seems to be falling rather short.
Amazon
Amazon's mission statement isn't as catchy as you'd imagine; it's 'We seek to be Earth's most customer-centric company for four primary customer sets: consumers, sellers, enterprises and content creators.'
Facebook
Finally, 'Facebook's mission to to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.' Anyone who's had to wrangle with its security settings after finding out some of their posts were more public than they'd intended might find that less fluffy than it sounds.