Googled and star struck

Over the last few days, I have been reading yet another business biography on the world's most talked about company, Google.

This one was written by Ken Auletta and titled: Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It. Auletta seems to have had unprecedented access to the two founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and a special bond with CEO Eric Schmidt.

I have not been able to put the book down and admit to really enjoying the progress of the business - from ideology to steamrolling business giant. The book has some of the very quirky anecdotes about the three men running Google, but most of the time it comes across as a little star struck.

Auletta talks about the founders as demigods, coming from a place of fellowship for human kind.

There is no doubt that Google has been an incredible story, coming from stealing computing power from Harvard's networks, to the ingenious giant it is today.

Media companies, mobile businesses, Internet organisations and countless other businesses stand in awe and fear of what started out as a good idea. But Google has been dragged to court over its advertising issues, publication of copyrighted books, news stories and, with YouTube, now also over video content.

I have a hard time believing that a multibillion-dollar company really has my interests at heart.

Candice Jones, ITWeb telecoms editor

The information age has proved just how valuable data and information can be. All that most companies have left is their intellectual property, and it seems quite clear that Google has little to no understanding of how important that is.

And yet, its famous search algorithm remains a secret - the company's real intellectual property.

While the company has been through the halls of the court more than once, Auletta has decided that Google and its founders are not at fault. They are simply engineers, their brains function in a different way to ours, and they should be held to a different standard to ours.

But I have a hard time believing that a multibillion-dollar company really has my interests at heart - even one as pioneering as Google. The company's latest product, Buzz, is a case in point.

Less than a week after its release and the Web is flooded with serious and warranted privacy concerns. It seems that the company's good idea was less than well thought out and has left many unhappy with the concept.

Buzz is similar to micro blogging service, Twitter, with Google providing all the set-up required, and the user really doing nothing at all to allow the service to run. Earlier this week, I received a nice button in my Gmail account asking me to try out Buzz, which I did - only to find that I am already following all the people I mail most in Gmail.

A nice thought, but not very practical. One woman, I think in Canada, was mailing her ex-husband the most. Trouble is, she has a restraining order against him, and he can't know where she is or what she is doing. With Buzz basically publishing everything you do on Twitter and similar services, she found herself in a spot of trouble.

Like Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, Google seems to have forgotten that most users are concerned about privacy. It's hard to believe that Google's founders, after so long in business, are still simply the geeky idealists without a notion of how other people think.

Which makes me wonder if Auletta was not fooled by Brin, in his baggy shirt, sweeping into a meeting on roller blades, late again. Have Google's founders not simply been pushing the envelope to see what they can get away with?