Google Is A Faceless Machine

Being a faceless machine brings with it some comfort, a human is not interfering in your emails, someone isn't reading your documents and a person doesn't check your calendar.

However, there is a dark side to being a machine. It devolves you of having human traits such as compassion, awareness and a sense of justice.

Google isn't alone in this, Microsoft have for years been seen as a closed software factory and that you were either on the "inside" or you were on the "outside". Yahoo! has also suffered but not to such a large extent. In fact, Yahoo!'s purchase of Flickr meant they had bought the poster boy of "being human" where you can, to paraphrase Nat Torkington, "Feel the humanity front and centre". I s'pose it's hard to be a machine when all you deal with is photos as cute as this.
(on a side note, I'm still unconvinced which way the new Delicious has movbed - machine or human?)

Google, however, is most definitely the modern archetypal "corporate machine" famous for not revealing future plans, never talking about the "opposition" and not allowing comments on their blogs.

And when it goes 'Google wrong' for a person the machine can seem quite cold:

• When Google Owns You (original story) + Google Gets Back to Nick
• The Downside of Relying on Google for Everything (Gizmodo)
  
• When Google disowns you (ZDNet)
  

(thanks to Dave for the original link)

On the positive side for Google they do seem to react VERY quickly when they fvck up - and with a human response which proves there are actual humans inside that machine pulling the levers. But it may be a lot harder to build trust.

How does this affect you?
If you work within a "service department" (IT?) answer this question for me:

Are you perceived as being a Google or a Flickr by the people you service?