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How to be a Big Corporation

Google isn't good at being a Corporation with a capital C yet. It's starting to act like one, swaggering around the industry and snapping up tasty morsels like YouTube, but can it deal effectively with corporate inefficiency, antitrust, and the declining cool factor? Corporations as well-adjusted as Apple are few and far between, and Google doesn't currently look like the next one.

Once upon a time, Google could depend on word-of-mouth and militant fan support from the young-people crowd, the techies, and the open-source diehards. But since then, it's been pushed around a bit by the Chinese government, poked and prodded by antitrust alerters, and it hasn't really done anything life-changingly cool since Google Docs (which remains not useable for sensitive content). And have you played with Google Maps recently? The way it sorts locations into separate Saved Places and Maps is positively stupid. Gross.

The fact is, it's hard to stay indie-cool when you're swallowing little companies whole. And it's hard to stay at the top when people are realizing, slowly but surely, that maybe you were on the cutting edge--one year ago.