Being a boss at the most powerful tech company on the planet is a prized job. But it brings its own set of challenges as Google’s EMEA president has found out – from ethical dilemmas to facing questions from MPs about tax and his salary.
Had I been researching this article 20 years ago, it would have been a considerably more arduous process than it remains today. The task would have begun with a trek up to the Press Association library on London’s Fleet Street and a request for the files on Matt Brittin, Google and its commercial rivals. The brown manila folders would have taken half an hour to arrive from the filing cabinets and contained a large number of carefully folded newspaper articles. (All would have been in English.) I would carefully have unfolded each one, read it, and if it was of interest, placed it to one side for photocopying.
In 2017, I sit here in MT’s office and put the keywords into a search engine and hey presto. Google ‘Google’ and you get ‘about’ 11,470,000,000 results. Brittin himself merits 45,800. (Incidentally, when you type ‘God’ into the box you only get 1,630,000,000 results. So, Google is seven times bigger than God. At least in its own deep, algorithmic mind.)
Such numbers bring their own sifting problems. What is wheat and what is digital chaff? It is one thing having so much information at your fingertips but judging which bits are relevant to you, the reader, is another matter altogether. Who has decided which are the most important citations? Who knows what proportion of those results are post-truth, fake news? But you cannot take it away from Sergey and Larry. What Google has achieved since its creation in 1996 is quite amazing and, as such, it is probably the most important company to have been created since the Second World War.
This story is from the February/March 2017 edition of Management Today.
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This story is from the February/March 2017 edition of Management Today.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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