technoculture203-09

After watching the video from Switched questioning Google exec Marissa Mayer. I got to wondering if there isn’t a bit of a rebellion going down in terms of how much trust we put in Google. I saw this article a little while ago talking about Microsoft’s ‘Bing’ increasing search share in both the United States and around the world. I wondered what exactly triggered this. Perhaps it is a change in how Google is perceived by the General public. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a bit of a Geek when it comes to this sort of stuff, so feel free to disagree with me in the comments, if you don’t think Google’s image has taken a bit of a bashing recently. It was like Luke said. There was a time when I and others thought of Google as a bunch of hip'ish nerds in San Francisco in stylish offices designing cool logos and eating organic food on Swiss balls.

In more recent times, my perceptions have sort of changed. It started with weird little things like when Google management started charging staff for lunch and ripping employees for childcare services. This tiny stuff began to feel a bit like something we would see from any publicly listed profit-obsessed corporate. There were other things too. When I was in Europe a little while ago, I came across a Google data centre, where the company houses its servers and routing equipment. It was nothing like the offices we see on the front of Time Magazine, or even the Logo on the Google homepage. I don’t know where I thought they stored all this data, but when it’s put right in front of you, it really seemed to bring it back into focus. Add to this the Google brain drain, with loads of employees jumping ship, even in an economy this bad, it sort of makes me wonder, Is Google changing, and do we care? Or is Microsoft just finally making an impact in search with Bing?

I was thinking about a Women’s role in Technology after reading this article about the performance of new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz. Whilst the content of the story is fairly mundane I’m interested in the content of the comments section. She seems to be constantly criticized for her age. But there are lots of of technology companies that have older CEOs. Amazon(Jeff Bezos), eBay(John Donahoe), Apple(Steve Jobs), Microsoft(Steve Ballmer), and Barry Diller from IAC Interactive, to name just a few.



Still insiders of the Tech community seem so opposed to an older Woman taking on the management of Yahoo. I think it’s pretty easy to make the case of elevated sexism in the Tech community, versus a genuine concern about her age. Perhaps because the industry tends to be dominated by Men, it might be the ideal breeding ground for these sorts of sentiments. That said, Yahoo is still significantly more profitable than Microsoft's 'MSN' which makes a huge loss every year, despite its head start over Yahoo (having itself set as default on the lions share of new PCs). Yet Microsoft's Ballmer faces significantly less criticism than Bartz. Whilst it looks like a lot of Programmers seem to mourn the age in which the founder of companies were also CEO that looks like it is compounded when the CEO is a Woman.