Google & Larry Page focus piece in the Economist.com

You know you’re truly hot tamales when The Economist decides to run a feature piece on your company. This week’s feature in the mag’s Business section? Google. Of course.

One particular paragraph in the article - which was glowing in its overall review of Google’s progress - particularly caught my interest. It resonates with a growing theme I am reading online: that Google’s immense size and power is starting to bite into its own great “do no evil” PR.

Despite rapid growth—from about 200 employees when Mr Page was chief executive to nearly 5,000 now—Google has lost none of its puritanical fanaticism.

This zeal is starting to annoy some people. One visitor to the company’s “Googleplex” in Silicon Valley “felt as if I were in the company of missionaries”. A consequence of the theory that Google is aiming to run the world could be that “Google may be less liked in the industry than Microsoft inside 12 months,” says Pip Coburn, a technology analyst. Bloggers have started accusing Google of hubris and arrogance. Paul Saffo at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future says that “Google is a religion posing as a company.”

From my experience with Google’s staff, they truly are evangelists for the company. It’s a great corporate culture if your staff are your own biggest supporters. They must be doing things right, other than just great search algorithms.