Why Google has already passed its peak

If you happened to be scripting a James Bond movie and were looking for a role model for a fabulously sinister corporation, there can be little doubt where you would look for inspiration today. Gold no longer matters to the global economy, oil is running out, and old-style media magnates are too busy fretting about tumbling circulations to threaten the free world. Right now, only one company has the right combination of fabulous wealth, hidden power, global reach and slightly crazed megalomania that made Ian Fleming’s villains so memorable. It is, of course, Google.

Since it was founded in September 1998 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the California-based search engine has become the world’s most breathtakingly successful business. More recently, however, it has also been getting stranger and stranger. It agreed to allow its Chinese site to be censored to stop Chinese surfers stumbling across sites mentioning such dangerous things as democratic elections. It has been threatening publishers with destruction by putting entire books online for nothing, and sending out lawyers’ letters to anyone who uses ‘google’ as a verb. In effect, Google is showing signs of the corporate hubris that often afflicts organisations that become very successful very quickly. Most worryingly, perhaps, some people in the technology world are starting to wonder if the mighty Google edifice might not have a few cracks in it.

Take Henry Blodget, for example. At the height of dotcom mania, the Merrill Lynch analyst was a famous cheerleader for the internet — until he earned himself a lifetime ban from the securities industry. He is still reckoned to be one of the more intelligent observers of the industry, and he has turned into one of the leading Google bears. ‘The single source of revenue is a weakness, although given the strength of that revenue, most companies would obviously kill to have this problem,’ he said recently.