Gauging Google's Gaffes

conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece looking at some of the recent faux pas of Google and what implications they might have. The articles's conclusion: They should hire a chief marketing officer to avoid such gaffes. From the article: 'Recent missteps that have whipsawed or irked investors include the inadvertent release of sales projections and an agreement to censor its own search results in China. Then on Mar. 8, Google used a vaguely worded blog on its site to disclose a settlement of as much as $90 million in a case concerning click fraud. That came days after the company said the case was without merit and told investors the impact of click fraud on advertisers is immaterial.'"

Comments

Google's Hiring

[Slipgrid]

Don't know if they advertise their "chief" positions, but it looks like they want a whole marketing department.

Re:Google's Philosophy: a love and hate relationsh

[farble1670]

Over the years, the company has proven its worth time and time again with technology advancements cool new features

really, like what? web-based email? instant messaging? web-based maps? a search engine? i hate to tell you this, but all of this was done 5-10 years before google existed. granted, google has (mostly) made advancements in these areas, but please, let's not pretend these ideas are "new".

everything google does is available elsewhere, and in a form such that the quality of our lives would not significantly change if google dried up and died.

Re:Conspiracy

[tehdaemon]

"public corporations are owned and by investors that have one single goal."

Not at all. investors, like any other large group of people, have lots of diverse goals. In practice though you can't satisfy all of these goals. Most are mutually exclusive to some extent. So it comes down to the least common denominator - max profits - like you said. It is the nature of corporate law that is the problem here, not the investors.