With our new Insight polls we’re looking at policy beliefs, attitudes, election support, and other issues for center-left and liberal opinion leaders, as they’re called. But we’ve also been looking at attitudes toward the big corporations that dominate different aspects of public life in the U.S. One example is attitudes toward the big tech giants. We recently looked at three tech behemoths (Microsoft, Facebook and Google) with the question of whether you think the given company’s best days are ahead of it or behind it – a general question that gets at attitude perceptions about the future, trust, relevance, and so forth. The results were eye-popping.
Microsoft is a 40-year-old company. No one can know the future. But there’s at least a decent argument that its greatest dominance in the culture and economy was in the late 1990s. Facebook meanwhile is 11 years old and has been growing wildly for years.
So here are the results that surprised us a lot. The results are the product of 2000 qualified respondents for each question.
These results are totally perplexing – so perplexing in fact that we ran the entire poll a second time just to make sure there wasn’t some technical issue we were missing. There wasn’t. How is it that Facebook can be more or less on par with Microsoft as a company of the past and Google – in fact a slightly older company than Facebook (founded 1998) is clearly perceived as having its best days ahead of it?
We have yet to do follow up polling to get a handle on that question. So for the moment we’ve just speculated about a few possibilities. One is that Facebook is, right or wrong, the poster boy for invading your privacy. There’s a good argument that because the public knows less about Google’s role using user data, they view the company’s future more optimistically. But all companies collect and store huge amounts of information about you and use it in various ways to make money. In perception terms, however, I think there’s little question Facebook has more problems on that front.
Then there are things like self-driving cars. Certainly you’ve seen all the news about Google’s work on mapping technology and AI dealing with self-driving cars. Scary or cool, that definitely feels like the future. So I would speculate that Google’s well-publicized role developing this kind of technology creates the public perception that they’re sort of moving on from search and what we think of as the Internet of today to the technologies of tomorrow. That definitely supports the idea of their being a company of the future.
We have a member of the staff who has invested in Facebook stock (like numerous other people) and this person points out that Facebook is itself doing all sorts of new technology stuff and last year they bought the much- and seemingly properly-hyped Oculus Rift virtual reality technology. So maybe this is all a matter of perception rather than an underlying reality. To be clear, everything here but the hard data in that chart is just speculation. But whatever the theories as to why this big cleavage exists, there’s no question that people view the two big tech and Internet behemoths of the early 21st century quite differently.
Is this how you see these two companies? And whether or not you do, can you explain it?
