In 1998, nearly a quarter century after its founding, Microsoft found itself facing a legal challenge. The hearing in the United States v. Microsoft case began in May, with district attorneys challenging the company’s strategy of bundling its Internet Explorer browser with its Windows operating system, making it the default choice for users who want to browse the web.
Around this time, 25 years ago, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Stanford University professors Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd was working on a paper titled What Can You Do with the Web in Your Pocket? The primary goal of this paper was to explore ways to automate the process of extracting data (mainly related to books and authors) from around the World Wide Web using lines of code.
A secondary goal of their research was to develop a global ranking of Web pages—which they called PageRank—based on the link structure of the Web. There was a third goal: to use PageRank to develop “a new search engine called Google, which also makes extensive use of anchor text.” Google was founded in October 1998, a few months after Microsoft’s antitrust trial began.
It was named after the number googol (1 followed by 100 zeros), to indicate that the search engine would serve as a gateway to all information.
The next few years were heady. In 1999, the now-defunct search engine Excite turned down an opportunity to buy Google for as little as $750,000. Soon after, the startup moved out of marketing director Susan Wojcicki’s garage and into offices in Mountain View.
Google was the beating heart of the new Internet economy, the coolest place to work, the company that was changing the world, the company that survived the dot-com bust not just unscathed, but stronger. The company’s slogan “Don’t be evil” seems to herald a new corporate culture.
In 2000, Google started selling ads, but they were pure text. The company imposed strict restrictions on what can and cannot be advertised. In 2004, Gmail was launched – a service that was by no means revolutionary, but offered a whopping gigabyte of free storage. Accounts were initially provided only by invitation. A Gmail account meant that the person was online, unlike friends who used Hotmail or Yahoo Mail.
Google has capitalized on the blogging boom with its acquisition of Pyre Labs’ Blogspot. They acquired YouTube, which is a giant in its own right. They launched the Chrome browser, breaking Microsoft Internet Explorer’s grip on the market.
Then came the Android mobile system from Google. They even confronted the Chinese, by telling users in that country that their government was censoring information, and to stay away from the lucrative Chinese market after Operation Aurora, a state-sponsored cyberattack on Google and other technology companies that targeted, among other companies, China. Gmail accounts for Chinese dissidents.
A quarter-century later, Google faces the same kind of regulatory scrutiny and criticism that Microsoft faced in 1998. Among these issues: bundling Google Search as the default search engine for Android and iOS, which essentially covers the entire mobile market.
Microsoft has used its position as the primary operating system for personal computers to sign contracts with OEMs to make its Internet Explorer the default browser on Windows devices, and Google has paid smartphone and web browser makers ($26.3 billion total in 2021 alone) to make its search It is the default, allowing it to monopolize the online advertising market.
There’s also the ongoing lawsuit from Epic Games. Epic introduced a patch for its popular game Fortnite, which allowed players to purchase in-game currency with real money, bypassing the 30% fee that Google would have charged if the same transactions were made via the Google PlayStore. Google responded by pulling Fortnite from the platform, and Epic responded with an antitrust lawsuit.
There are other issues, including the growing perception that although Google has become adept at scaling, it has stopped innovating; Its highly paid employees have become part of an increasingly risk-averse bureaucratic system. It is said that company culture rewards people who work on new products and services, not those who maintain products once they are launched. The Google Graveyard website (killedbygoogle.com) tracks discontinued Google products and lists 146 products since 2007, with four more likely coming soon.
There are issues around people. Two years ago, Timnit Gebru, the leader of Google’s ethical AI team, was fired for co-authoring a paper that highlighted issues of bias in large AI language models, and the massive amounts of energy and resources needed to create these models.
Earlier this year, when Google announced mass layoffs, employees were appalled at the way they were being carried out (some found out when their corporate ID cards flashed red instead of green as they tried to enter their offices in the morning).
Right now, antitrust issues represent the biggest threat to the search giant. In the United States, both political parties, which are usually diametrically opposed on every issue, seem to agree on this: the idea that Google is a monopoly, hurting the market.