Is Google becoming like Microsoft?

Matt's answer:

male: This is a philosophical question from Chris in Somerset, England. I’m going to answer it as a personal person not as a Google representative. “With Google’s size and many offerings, do you think Google is being seen as the new Microsoft by more and more people? Does this worry you as an employee and as a web user?” So, I never want Google to be perceived as a bully or being too big or anything like that. I think one of the things that helps with that is that we’ve made a real commitment to say, “We will never track user’s data.” If you want to leave Gmail, you can just download it via POP or IMAP for totally free. Google Calendar, your data is available for export. Google Docs, we recently launched a sort of one-click batch export where you get a zip of all your docs files. So, we like if people use Google services, but in the same way we use the web all the time, and we, we know it’s annoying if you can’t leave, you know, a particular service. We try to make it very easy to leave if people do want to. Um, we think about our impact on the web, and we try to do a good job whenever there’s billions of people doing web searches and tens of millions of websites and millions and millions of webmasters. It’s very hard to have a one-on-one conversation. And so, how do you do things like support a product well, uhhh, where you can try to get an answer for your questions? That’s a really tricky question when you’re dealing with a scale of the web. I think that Google does a relatively good job at it. I think that we need to keep thinking about how we can do an even better job of talking to our users, helping webmasters, helping web developers, and trying to make sure that if people ever dislike Google it’s very easy for them to leave. Now that’s just my personal opinion, but that’s a quick take on it.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

Original video: