“A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.” – Brutus, Julius Caesar: Act 1, scene 2

Google’s former Director of Engineering, James Whittaker, posted a scathing assessment of the company he left on February 2nd of this year on the Microsoft Developer Network blog, owned and operated by his new employer where he is now a ‘Web Futurist’.

In his post, “”, Whittaker paints a picture of social desperation, or perhaps more appropriately, a desperation for social. Gone is Google Labs and the innovative benefit of the fabled 20% time. The techno-playground ‘build it to see what happens’ atmosphere has evaporated, replaced by a buttoned down C-Level driven dictum stating all important innovation involves the simple formula; personal data + ? = greater profit.

According to Whittaker, Google delved deeper than a basic double down in its bid to make Google+ more influential and more user-centric than Facebook. The firm made an existential bet using its greatest sacred cow, algorithmic objectivity, as the make-or-break marker. At stake is dominance over a multibillion dollar content/advertising delivery environment where planetary-scale data mining means advertisers know more about individual consumers than those consumers could possibly understand about themselves. Ideas of controlling the past are bygone passe. This is a game for the immediate future and the definition of the Agora for the next few decades.

Google knows the web has changed and that it, like Microsoft before it, has fallen behind a data cloud that threatens to form into an eight-ball. Facebook knows more about its users than Google does and that pinpoint (and often banal) granularity of knowledge could make hanging your shingle in the closed garden of Facebook more valuable than waiting for explorers to find your business by actually taking the time to search for it. That’s what Google most fears and that’s what they are reacting to this week.

Where Google brought us the mega world by making the world’s information available to all, it today wants to micromanage that information; in turn micromanaging our purchases, our news sources, our lifestyles, our entertainment options and, ultimately, our personal interactions with society. Confirmation bias on a global yet uniquely personalized scale.

Search has been Google’s game to lose since it started its ascendance in 1998. Just like it was Yahoo!’s, Alta Vista and Infoseek’s game in years past. Though Google might be aping the proverbial corporate dodo, search and information availability will always be strong. They say it was said, “Beware the ides of March”. That’s wise but remember the world takes a 365-day, 360-degree view. Watch your back Google, especially if you put all your eggs in the same basket. It only takes one trip to break them.

Jim Hedger

Jim Hedger is an organic SEO and digital marketing specialist. Jim has been involved in the online marketing industry since 1998 and a SEO since 1999. Best known as a broadcaster, interviewer, content writer and search industry commentator, Jim is a frequent conference speaker and organizer. He hosts the search focused radio show Webcology on WebmasterRadio.FM and is a WebmasterRadio.FM conference interviewer. Jim brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, passion and creative thinking to each project. Preferring a teamwork approach, Jim strives to inform and train his clients and their staff to run and maintain their own search and social media efforts.

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