Google...

Towards the start of the week, User Friendly started a series of strips making fun of people who are all worried about Google "taking over", and poking a little fun at Google in the process. As a person who uses Google almost exclusively for his searches, blogs on a Google owned site, has is primary personal e-mail set up on GMail (Google's e-mail service), and has his browser home page set to the Google Personalized Home, I find all of the flap over Google, some of it reaching the level of paranoia, to be kind of humorous.

Now, don't get me wrong. Google does collect a lot of information, and I don't think that anyone should just blindly trust anyone with that. However, to date, Google has only used that information to do stuff that is useful to me (better targeting of advertisements, for example). Thus far, they have also done a good job telling our government where to get off when they come snooping around for information, too. Thus far, they have done nothing to violate that trust.

Plus, their tools just plain work. Take Gmail, for example. You get a ton of space, and it is trivial to archive things so you never have to delete messages, the labeling works far better than traditional folders, the spam filtering just plain work. In short, it is simply online e-mail done the way online e-mail should be done.

I am not sure why it is, but it seems like as soon as any company becomes even remotely successful, there is a group of people out there just ready to demonize them. I guess they just hate success...