A couple of days ago I posted on Google’s evil scale and although the post was mostly meant to be light-hearted, I also suggested that, at some point, Google was bound to start behaving like a big company, and that this was likely to be triggered by increasing criticism of the company by journalists and activists. It appears that Michael Arrington at Techcrunch agrees with me. He wrote the following today under the heading of “Will 2008 be Google’s end of innocence?“:

2008 may be the year that Google’s innocence ends, as media and governments start to cast a less forgiving eye at the behavior of the company that controls 60% of the search market and perhaps as much as half of all online advertising revenue.

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There’s no getting past the fact that Google has out-competed everyone in the search game, and is justly collecting the economic rewards of that effort. But society loves to tear down their heroes just as quickly as they supported them as underdogs.

This may be the year that things change for the ten-year-old Google. Their days of innocence may be over - perhaps Yahoo, or Firefox, are the apples that they should not have bitten into.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, at some point Google will cross over from innovative upstart to established incumbent, and many other changes will follow. I tend to agree with the assertion Arrington makes here: I think when that happens, which is a shift that will happen in people’s minds as much as in the corridors of the Googleplex, Google will find itself facing many more challenges than it currently does. And how it weathers that shift will be the indicator of whether Google is likely to be the next Altavista or Mapquest (companies which once dominated but then declined) or the next Microsoft (a company which, for all its faults has nonetheless remained tremendously dominant and very successful).