Google's worst nightmare [Brad Fitzpatrick]
Google's worst nightmare — Our spy cameras have penetrated the inner sanctum of the Googleplex! Sneaking up on Brad Fitzpatrick from behind, we caught a picture of his "epic" Halloween costume. "He is dressed as one of Google's largest fears!" an informant whispers.
Context & Ripple Effects
Valleywag's snapshot of Brad Fitzpatrick in costume lands in the middle of a running press arc about Google's power: the San Francisco Chronicle asked who's afraid of Google in May 2007, and the Times of London followed in October with a piece on who is looking at you, part of the same privacy-and-scale unease that pushed Google to launch a YouTube privacy channel on October 30.
The timing sharpens the joke. Days earlier Google had positioned its new OpenSocial API against Facebook in the social-networking power struggle, the company sat as the fifth-biggest US company by market cap at 55 times trailing earnings, and here a Googler is photographed dressed, per the informant, as one of Google's largest fears — an inside-the-campus echo of the outside-the-campus anxiety.
First-order effects
- Fitzpatrick becomes a public shorthand for Google's own anxieties at exactly the moment the company wants to project confidence around the OpenSocial countermove against Facebook.
- The photo gives Valleywag and its readers an unscripted view of Googleplex culture, feeding the same fear-of-Google framing the Chronicle and Times of London had been building through 2007.
Second-order effects
- Facebook and other rivals in the social-networking fight get free ammunition: a Googler joking about Google's fears undercuts the assured posture of the OpenSocial launch week.
- The image complicates the defensive messaging of the freshly launched YouTube privacy channel, which was meant to explain Google's policies rather than dramatize them.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, offhand employee behavior at scaled internet companies stops being private culture and starts being read as corporate signal — grist for the regulatory and press scrutiny that follows any top-five market-cap platform.
The trend: As Google's scale turns it into a standing object of public dread, even a single engineer's Halloween costume becomes a data point in the fear-of-Google narrative.