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The Summer Google Became an Arrogant Monopoly
Jack Flack loves watching a couple of snowflakes join together and head downhill, adding lots of friends along the way, until suddenly everybody is doing their part to help build a massive thematic snowball.
Hot as it's been this summer, Jack Flack has still noticed a few such sticky snowflakes gathering on the subject of Google, now a 3-year-old stock and the natural acquirer of You-Tube, Double-Click and other recent rockets.
The head and sub on Brent Schlender's current Fortune piece nail the theme --
Don't Be Arrogant -- How Google is starting to act like a garden-variety monopoly.
While the "arrogant monopoly" chatter has been a web subject for several years, Jack knows that the theme breaks through to a new level of "assumedness" once it starts echoing around the once purely star-struck MSM.
The other MSM symptoms?
Rob Hof's BWs April cover story tip-toeing out the them by posing it as a question, and getting CEO Eric Schmidt to play defense in a laborious Q&A.
Then Google starts being routinely compared with the previous generation's of evil empire.James B. Stewart allowing that natural monopolies are usually pretty good stock plays.
Holeman Jenkins launching not just one, but two, nicely composed loogies right at the forehead of the search dominator.
How the MSM get started on this theme? Maybe it has something to do with the Boss Schmidt comment captured by Kevin Delaney and Riva Richmond.
"I'm sure we're arrogant."
That's straight, blunt talk, something Jack Flack always encourages.
But it's also straight, blunt talk that plays back pejorative language, something Jack never encourages.
No matter how humorous that quip may have played with that audience on that day, future history will likely show that Delaney and Richmond have delivered the world one of those great regrettable utterances.
History shows -- and Jack Flack has the personal scars to prove it -- that life usually starts getting very hard for over-achieving companies that get tagged with arrogance label.
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