Google co-founder's professor warns of Google's "technical arrogance: The system cannot fail"

Ken Auletta of the New Yorker discovered one of those rare window-into-the-soul insights about Google in his excellent in-depth expose on Google: "The Search Party -- Google squares off with its Capitol Hill Critics." I strongly recommend reading the full article but it's critical not to miss this insightful gem in Auletta's article quoted below:

• "Terry Winograd, a professor of computer science at Stanford, was Larry Page’s academic adviser and mentor when Page and Brin were Ph.D. candidates...
• He admires his former students, but he describes their impatience as both a virtue and a potential curse.
• “Larry and Sergey believe that if you try to get everybody on board it will prevent things from happening,” he told me. “If you just do it, others will come around to realize they were attached to old ways that were not as good. . . . No one has proven them wrong—yet.”
• Google’s potential weakness, Winograd says, is that its engineers see things “not from an institutional, political point of view but from this personal and engineering point of view. ‘We would never do that sort of thing’—they believe that in their hearts.”
• But the engineers’ passion, he said, also drives them to believe that they “are smart enough to make sure that it won’t happen by accident.” With that, Winograd arched an eyebrow and concluded that this entails “a certain amount of technical arrogance: ‘The system cannot fail, cannot fail.’ ” "

What the mentor of Google's co-founder sees as a problem is hubris.

• Why the mentor called the co-founders "impatience as both a virtue and a potential curse" is that Google's co-founders, at their core, do not believe that the rules or limits that apply to others -- apply to Google.
• They truly have a passionate belief in "innovation without permission" that is deeply embedded in their culture.
• "Without permission" means that Google, at its core, does not respect authority, rules or other peoples' property. I documented this troublesome behavior pattern in detail in a previous post.  
• Google's ethos that the world's rules don't apply to Google is well documented from mainstream sources like the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times The Washington Post among others.

An interesting and relevant part of my personal history is that I was the first expert witness called before Congress to testify and explain what went wrong with Enron. In my testimony before Senators McCain and Hollings among others, it was all about how people did not think rules and ethics that applied to others applied to Enron and their enablers, and how there was a complete breakdown in internal controls.

• Why this is relevant to Google today is that the hubris of Google's co-founders have unfortunately fostered a growing culture of corruption that thumbs its nose at internal controls, rules, laws, ethics that apply to others and are key to protecting Americans from a wide variety of harms.
  • Have you seen this movie before? "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room."
  • Googlers certainly think they are the smartest guys in the room, and fawning media and investors only reinforce this...