the google story

Been ploughing my way through David A Vise's book, The Google Story, the last couple of days. It's mostly hyperbolic drivel - certainly up to 2004 (which is where I'm currently at) - along the lines of, "Google guys good: anyone who disagrees with them, or stands in their way (however big, however small), bad"; with a chapter given over to the One Interesting Guy they could find who used to work at Google (the chef). This is weird, because you'd think - what with all the lawsuits and controversies surrounding Google in recent years, not least major privacy and control issues - you'd think someone somewhere would have a bad word to say.

I'm not particularly pro- and anti- Google, the same way I couldn't give a fuck about most corporations whose abiding interest in generating money. I appreciate many of their services (for example, this very blog tool I am now using), shied away from using Google Mail cos of all the ads. (Do they still have those?) Like anyone. But the smug, congatulatory tone of this book is rapidly turning me against them.

It's taken till page 239, at the end of the chapter discussing Google's digitalisation of the world's libraries, for any criticism of note to emerge. I particularly like these two quotes.

"Massive databases of digitalized books are 'expensive exercises in futility', [Michael Gorman, then president-elect of the American Library Association] wrote, 'based on the staggering notion that, for the first time in history, one form of communication [electronic] will supplant and obliterate all previous forms'."

Meanwhile, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, head of Bibliotheque Nationale, "wrote in Le Monde that the Google venture posed 'a risk of crushing domination by America in defining the idea that future generations have of the world... I don't want the French Revolution retold just by books chosen by the United States'."

Those damn French! Why do they insist on believing there's more than one way to view the world?

And not one word from the millions of creators whose livings were threatened by Google's latest venture... beyond to note that it would be good advertising for them.