A couple of days ago, Jonathan Rosenberg, a Google Senior Vice President for Product Management, penned an epic-length paean to 'open' and what it means to Google. Essentially, the essay is 4,000 words of densely packed propaganda aimed squarely at justifying Google's uniquely conflicted position at the crossroad of Open vs. Closed.

Before we delve deeper into the conflict, let's give Google credit where it's due--the company has been a powerful force in establishing and furthering the use of open source software in the world as we know it. In addition, they have contributed many millions of lines of open source code to the world and will likely continue to do so for many years.

But Rosenberg's long-winded attempt to paint Google and it's love of "open" as the second coming of Christ, Our Saviour just doesn't sit well--what a crock. Google serves "openness" only when "openness" serves Google's profitability. Rosenberg even comes right out and admits this in that dreamy, flower-power language that Google PR brandishes like no one else on earth:

Our commitment to open systems is not altruistic...

... While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in. In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users.

So, they won't open their search code just to protect all us little users from the evildoers on the Internet? That would be believable if Google wasn't responsible for directly funding and even hosting these evildoers. It would be even more believable if Google's search results weren't choking on spam and filled with it.

Any serious examination of Google's true commitment to "openness" needs to ask and answer only two questions: 1) Where is Google open and why? 2) Where is Google closed and why?

Where is Google open and why?

Google's moves beyond search over the last three years make this question fairly easy to answer. In a nutshell, Google is ferociously open in all areas where they have no current revenue and in areas where they are looking to enter and compete anew.

OpenSocial is open because Orkut is nowhere and Google is afraid to cede this territory to Facebook and Twitter. Android is open because Google is deadly scared that Apple and native apps will become the dominant entry point to the mobile web. Google's Chrome (browser and OS) are open because they let Google enter new spaces and control more of the user experience by piggybacking on hardware and device manufacturers.

Over 90% of Google's profits come from search and advertising and Google couldn't care less if everything else in the world becomes open and free. They have nothing to lose and they can continue to make money from their core business of search and advertising.

Gartner's Brian Prentice sums it up well in his post, The Truth of Open

The truth is that closed systems still win. Open systems, practically speaking, are basically good for making others lose.

And there we have it--Google is "open" as long as it has nothing to lose.

Where is Google closed and why?

Google is closed tighter than Fort Knox where it comes to its own revenues and everything that those revenues depend on. "Openness," coincidentally, is bad for pretty much all those things which Google depends upon to make money.

Even the most sophisticated Google advertisers cannot tell you when and where their ads will show up or what they will actually cost. All of that happens inside the closed black box of Google's AdWords algorithms. Keywords may be auctioned, but the bid price alone doesn't determine where your ad is positioned or whether it shows up. The bid price is combined with a minimum bid and a quality score to determine whether and where your ad will be positioned. No one but Google knows what quality score is or how it works and how your minimum qualifying bid is calculated. Not exactly what one would call an "open" auction.

Google's search algorithms are not open and neither is their search index. Even if one were to buy the argument that opening up the search code would lead to people gaming the system, what is the reason for the index not being shared? Google's search results would still be better because their search algorithms are better, so why not share the index? As Danny Sullivan points out

If Google’s going to push for those with existing advantages to open up through efforts like OpenSocial and the Open Handset Alliance, an Open Index Alliance just seems like fair play.

Sullivan also points the finger at Google's controversial Book Search, 'if Google’s on an "open" kick, why not join the Open Content Alliance?" instead of keeping "their" scanned and digitised books to themselves? Does being "closed" when it comes to books suit Google's revenue forecasts more than being "open?"

With AdSense, its advertising program for content publishers, Google does not reveal to its publishing partners how it shares revenue with them. Imagine that--the vast majority of publishers participating in Google's AdWords have no idea whether Google sends them 1% of the revenue earned from their own site or 20%. Google probably does this so as to protect these publishers from moving to someone else who will give them a better deal.

And how about the Google File System, Big Table or MapReduce code? All of these are large-scale, distributed systems that are internal to Google, none of which is "open," probably because Google's revenues may be impacted. It's Yahoo! and Facebook that invested to create the open source versions of these systems--imagine that. The operation and even the locations of Google's data centres are held as closely guarded secrets

Finally, let's not even get into Google being open about its user data retention policies or how user data is shared between Google's various different products to enable better user profiling and behavioural targeting. Prying a crocodile's snout open with one's bare hands seems more likely than getting Google to really open up about these things.

So much for "open." "Open," to Google, is a weapon, not a deeply entrenched philosophy as Rosenberg does his best to persuade us. Google's current philosophy can best be described as a ruthlessly disruptive approach, which aims to literally kill players in other markets by giving away their products for free.

No one is expecting or insisting that Google open source every piece of software they've ever written, but we could all do without them spewing this holier-than-thou propaganda at us. Heck, if they really want to be open, they should codify things into a no-BS Google's law of "open:" 'Openness in source code is directly proportionate to Google's ability to profit from said openness.'