14 DAY TRIAL // No one is mistaking Google for anything else than a giant corporation these days; yet, it somehow managed to keep some of its clout from the early startup days when the "Don't be Evil" motto first popped up. There is a rising amount of criticism for the company, but Google is maintaining that its ways are good for everyone, the users, the web and obviously itself. In its latest attempt to spell out what Google is all about, Jonathan Rosenberg, senior VP of product management at Google, tries to explain what 'open' means at the company.
"At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. Many companies will claim roughly the same thing since they know that declaring themselves to be open is both good for their brand and completely without risk," Rosenberg starts off. The real problem, he says, is that there is no clear, universal definition of open.
So, Google set out to clarify what open means for the company, in an internal email for employees which was now published for everyone to see. It says that there are two main components to openness at Google, open technology and open information.
Open technology refers to the way Google builds its current and upcoming products. For software, it means releasing it as open source allowing third-party developers to use any part of the code and contribute to the application as well. This means that app development can move at a faster pace and with lower costs.
There have been critics to Google's approach to open source though. The company starts off a project behind close doors to facilitate fast development, it did this for Android, Chrome and Chrome OS, and it opens up to everyone when the code is mature enough. But even when it does open source its projects, it still maintains a tighter grip on what it releases. For example, while Chrome is billed as open source software, the actual web browser you can build from the sources released is Chromium. The differences are very slight, but they're not identical products.
The other component to open technology is open standards. Google is well known for its support for these standards and is a big backer of HTML 5, for example, and it has also tried to come up with its own solutions if a standard wasn't already in place.
However, when it comes to open information, things get a little trickier. It does have pretty transparent policy on what data it collects on its users and what it does with it, but it still is far from perfect, and Google acknowledges it. "Open information means that when we have information about users we use it to provide something that is valuable to them, we are transparent about what information we have about them, and we give them ultimate control over their information. These are the things we should be doing. In many cases we aren't there, but I hope that with this note we can start working to close the gap between reality and aspiration," Rosenberg added.