DOG (Distrust/Disdain of Google) moves in
Fear Of Google. FOG. It's all over the blogs today. I just got done reading my feeds and here's the posts that have FOG all over them: — Mary Jo Foley: Google is failing the Microsoft litmus test. — James Robertson: Is Google Big and Stupid Already?
Context & Ripple Effects
The 'Fear of Google' label Robert Scoble coined in his May 7 post has hardened into something more pointed: distrust. In under three weeks the theme has moved from blog musing to mainstream print — the San Francisco Chronicle's May 12 'Who's Afraid of Google?' — and now to a coordinated round of blogger critiques, with Mary Jo Foley arguing Google is failing the Microsoft litmus test and James Robertson asking whether Google is already 'big and stupid.'
The arc stretches back further than this month: New York Magazine was writing about 'Googlephobia' in November 2005. What is new in May 2007 is the shift from fearing Google's power to doubting its judgment — and Read/WriteWeb's May 16 argument that an open ad network could expose a structural weakness gives the criticism a concrete target rather than vague unease.
First-order effects
- Google's public narrative inverts within weeks: the same blogs that built its halo now frame it as the next Microsoft, forcing the company to manage a reputation problem alongside its product launches.
- Mary Jo Foley and James Robertson hand competitors and critics a ready-made rhetorical template — 'failing the litmus test' — that lowers the cost of attacking Google publicly.
Second-order effects
- Rivals gain cover to position themselves as the anti-Google: the open-ad-network argument gives publishers and advertisers a concrete alternative to rally around if they want leverage over Google's ad dominance.
- Mainstream outlets following the Chronicle's lead can be expected to keep testing the Microsoft analogy, which invites comparisons to the regulatory scrutiny Microsoft faced at a similar stage.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern from Microsoft's history holds, sustained distrust of a dominant platform player tends to precede formal regulatory interest — the blog-level 'FOG' is the early-warning layer of that process.
- The durable lesson for platform companies is that scale converts goodwill into suspicion on a predictable timeline; Google's challenge is whether it can answer the judgment critique before the power critique hardens into policy.
The trend: Tech sentiment toward Google is rotating from admiration to distrust, replaying the arc that turned Microsoft from industry darling into antitrust target.