The Economist has this beautifully written piece on Google co-founder Larry Page. Titled “St. Lawrence of Google,” the article likens Google to a religion given its founders’ deeply rooted beliefs in the power of “The Algorithm” and Page’s desire to change the world.
If Google is a religion, what is its God? It would have to be The Algorithm. Faith in the possibility of an omniscient and omnipotent algorithm appears to be what Messrs Page and Brin have in common. It’s “in their DNA,” says Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist famous for investing early in both Yahoo! and Google. Whereas Yahoo! was started by two Stanford students who turned a hobby into a business, Google was started by two Stanford students who turned an intellectual obsession into a quest, says Mr Moritz.
As Paul Saffo at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future says in the article “Google is a religion posing as a company.”
It’s an interesting thesis, but the religious metaphors are probably inopposite to the values that really make Google intriguing…and, for now anyway, incredibly successful. Google is different because its founders are driven by a pure form of rational, provable thought, and not by faith in the unknown.
Even more interesting, and unsettling to the business world, is how little the profit motive seems to drive Google. Which is not to say that Google is a charity…far from it. But, unlike so many businesses, probably almost all businesses, Google doesn’t go to great lengths to snatch that extra buck if the effort is morally ambiguous or logically faulty. And it’s willing to spend cash on projects that are little more than intellectual exercises — just for the heck of it.
This is so perplexing to most business executives that it’s no wonder that Google is scary.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:38 AM | Print | Comments (1)The Wall Street Journal has an interesting new feature called “Notes from the Ivory Tower” about trends in academic law that affect business. This debut column, written by Brandt Goldstein, focuses on the “clearance culture,” the rising belief among film makers that they must obtain rights clearance for every snippet of copyrighted matter used in a documentary.
But a growing number of scholars, including academicians from Duke University, The University of Oregon, New York University, and American Universiy, are hoping to ease the burdens of typically underfunded documentary film makers by setting them straight on the principle of fair use. One group, from the University of Oregon, produced a comic book on copyright law (I kid you not) titled “Bound by Law?,” which is intended as a working guide to fair use.
Another group, headed by American University’s Peter Jaszi developed a document called Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, which steers film makers through the pitfalls of using copyrighted material.
One big chicken-and-egg problem: small film makers rarely litigate when threatened, so the case laws on fair use isn’t as robust as it should be. If there were more lawsuits, according to the experts cited in the column, film makers would likely gain greater legal protection because the courts would probably support a lot of cases of “incidental” use, where only stray bits of copyrighted material make it into film.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:19 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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