Google is failing the Microsoft litmus test
If you want to evaluate the "evil" quotient of any company's strategy/behavior, consider how you'd feel about it if it were Microsoft in the driver seat. — Robert McLaws of Windows-Now.com fame reminded me of my "Is Google evil?" litmus test in his post, "Google: The New Big Brother."
Context & Ripple Effects
In May 2007 the 'Don't Be Evil' question has moved from Google's own marketing into its critics' toolkit: Robert McLaws of Windows-Now.com revives it in his post 'Google: The New Big Brother,' arguing that any strategy should be judged by how you'd feel if Microsoft were doing it. The timing matters because there is fresh material to test — a Google-Dell partnership to preinstall Google software on consumer PCs, which even sympathetic observers describe as bordering on spyware because the components are hard to identify and remove.
The critique also draws on governance optics rather than products alone: Google is confirmed to be financing the start-up founded by Anne Wojcicki, co-founder Sergey Brin's wife, and the company's recruiting process is drawing complaints about heavy-handedness. For Microsoft-watchers who spent the late 1990s cataloguing Redmond's distribution tactics, the argument writes itself — the behaviors being flagged are ones they already know how to name.
First-order effects
- Dell customers receive machines carrying preinstalled Google software that critics call difficult to find and uninstall, putting Google's consumer-trust reputation on trial at exactly the moment its desktop footprint grows.
- Microsoft-aligned bloggers gain a ready-made rhetorical frame: McLaws' litmus test lets them attack Google with the same 'bundled defaults' arguments once aimed at Microsoft.
Second-order effects
- OEM preinstall economics come under scrutiny — if Google pays Dell for default placement, the arrangement invites precisely the channel-exclusivity criticism Microsoft absorbed during its antitrust era, and other PC makers face pressure over what they bundle for search money.
- Google's 'Don't Be Evil' motto stops functioning as a shield and starts working as a target, raising the reputational cost of each new distribution deal, investment, or hiring practice its rivals choose to publicize.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the moral vocabulary of tech-industry criticism migrates wholesale from Microsoft to Google: dominance in one era gets audited by the standards set in the previous one, regardless of which company holds the position.
- The episode foreshadows a structural shift where platform companies are judged less by product quality than by their control of default settings and distribution channels — making OEM contracts and preinstalled software a recurring battleground for whoever leads search.
The trend: As Google displaces Microsoft as the industry's dominant platform, the antitrust-era critique built around bundled defaults and distribution power is being retooled and pointed at Mountain View.