I recently read an article on Rocky Mountain News about “Google’s growth giving it grief.”

According to the article, “For years, Silicon Valley hungered for a company mighty enough to best Microsoft. Now, it has one such contender: the phenomenally successful Google.”

However, many in Silicon Valley are now fretting about Google’s size and power. The fear is that the strengths that made Google a phenomenon are making it forget about the entrepreneurial culture that produced it.

The crowd seems to hate anything that seems like corporate behavior. And for good reason. This idea, to me, seems strange. After all, it was little more than 5 years ago that Google was launched, and began snowballing into its tremendous success today.

Google is seens as being arrogant. And it’s true. In many respects, Google has gotten too much. Has business been too good to them? Who is a worthy competitor to Google?

Yahoo has a worthy search engine. But the Yahoo Publisher Network (beta), leaves much to be desired.

Max Levchin, a founder of PayPal, said, “I’m surprised at how fast the company’s reputation is changing.”

BillGates, Microsoft’s chairman, said that Google was “more like us than anyone else we have ever competed with.” It’s this culture and this rapid success that is allowing Google to compete with Microsoft on such a level.

If Google and Microsoft joined forces – oh the horror – what would we do?

The article continues:

Of course, Silicon Valley has had past pretenders to the throne.

Netscape, which went public 10 years ago this month, and its Web browser, Navigator, were supposed to fell Microsoft – but it is Netscape that is no longer in business. And while Google is riding high, those closely following the company caution that it is hardly invincible; an inflated stock price, a desire to compete in too many sectors simultaneously or simple hubris might cause it to stumble, they say. Even Microsoft, after all, has had to contend with legal troubles.

Still, similarities between Google and Microsoft are evident to local entrepreneurs, including Steven I. Lurie, who worked at Microsoft between 1993 and 1999 but now lives in San Francisco, and Joe Kraus, a founder of the 1990s search firm Excite.

“There’s that same ‘think big’ attitude about markets and opportunities,” said Lurie, who has visited the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif., many times to see friends who work there. “Maybe you can call it arrogance, but there’s that same sense that they can do anything and get into any area and dominate.”

To place Google in context, Kraus offered a brief history lesson. In the 1990s, he said, IBM was widely perceived in Silicon Valley as a “gentle giant” that was easy to partner with, while Microsoft was perceived as an “extraordinarily fearsome, competitive company wanting to be in as many businesses as possible and with the engineering talent capable of implementing effectively anything.”

Now, in the view of Kraus, “Microsoft is becoming IBM and Google is becoming Microsoft.” Kraus is the chief executive and a founder of JotSpot, a Silicon Valley startup hoping to sell blogging and other self-publishing tools to corporations.

Just as Microsoft has been seen over the years as an aggressive, deep-pocketed competitor for talent, Internet startups in Silicon Valley complain that virtually every time they try to recruit a well-regarded computer programmer, that person is already contemplating an offer from Google.

“Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than Microsoft ever did,” said Reid Hoffman, the founder of two Internet ventures, including LinkedIn, a business networking Web site popular among Silicon Valley’s digerati.

Google, Hoffman said, has caused “across the board a 25 to 50 percent salary inflation for engineers in Silicon Valley” – or at least those in a position to weigh competing offers. A sought-after computer programmer can now expect to make more than $150,000 a year.

David C. Drummond, vice president for corporate development at Google, acknowledged that the company was “very competitive” in its pursuit of talent, but added: “We’re very sensitive to how everybody is perceiving us. We think the Silicon Valley ecosystem is critical for Google’s success.”

Google is also making it harder for some startups to raise funds. In the second half of the 1990s, entrepreneurs often complained that the specter of Microsoft hung over their every conversation with venture capitalists. Today, they say the same about Google.

“When I meet with venture capitalists, or if I’m engaged in a conversation about going into partnership with someone, inevitably the question is, ‘Why couldn’t Google do what you’re doing?’ ” said Craig Donato, the founder and chief executive of Oodle, a site that allows users to search online classified listings more quickly.

“The answer is, ‘They could, and they’re probably thinking about it, but they can’t do everything and do it well,’ ” Donato said. “Or at least I’m hoping they can’t.”

Google has already added free e-mail, mapping, news aggregation, and digital-photo management to its offerings, bringing it into competition in each case with two or more rivals. It recently launched an instant-messaging system and computer phone call system within its e-mail.

And its plans for a new stock issue are fueling speculation that it is preparing to enter many other markets, from services for mobile phone users to an online payment service that would compete with PayPal.

Add to that list the Internet-based phone system and several products that would be directly aimed at Microsoft, including a Google browser and software to compete with Microsoft Office.

“If there’s a perception that we’re exploring lots of different areas, some of which might not be directly related to our core area of search, that’s true,” said Drummond, the Google vice president. “It’s part of our DNA to be always innovating and exploring lots of different areas.”

Yet so driven has Google been in its pursuit of new markets that at least a few in Silicon Valley are using an epithet to taunt Google that people here once reserved for Microsoft: “The Borg,” a reference to an army of cybernetic creatures in Star Trek: The Next Generation that took over civilization after civilization with machinelike precision.

Perhaps a Google backlash was inevitable, given the glowing press the company has enjoyed for several years. Or maybe the carping and complaining are the inevitable reaction to a company so successful that its people cannot help stamping on toes, even if accidentally.

“Hubris is an issue at every one of these Silicon Valley companies that are successful,” said Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal. “I don’t know if it’s any worse at Google than it’s been at other highly successful technology companies.”

Aggressiveness is another signal trait among successful companies like Google – something those in parts of the media world are starting to learn.

Google recently announced that it would not talk to any reporter from CNETNews.com, a technology news Web site, until July 2006, after a reporter for the site wrote an article raising privacy questions about the information Google collects about individuals.

The company also earned the ire of many within the blogging world when this year it fired a new employee who had joked online that the free meals, the on-site gym and all the other perks were a clever ploy to keep people at their desks longer.

“Google is at that inflection point where it’s starting to act like an establishment company, and Silicon Valley is a rebel culture,” said Gautam Godhwani, chief executive at Simply Hired, an online employment site.

Microsoft, of course, has its hold on the Windows world – and a market value about four times that of Google. By contrast, switching to a new search engine is as easy as calling up another Web page – if a new company is able to do to Google what Google did to some of the earliest leaders of search, including AltaVista and Excite.

For the moment, at least, Google is aiming for that most-coveted position in technology: a platform that, like Microsoft’s operating system, is so popular that outside software developers write programs, and Web developers build new Google-related services, that render the Google home page indispensable to the personal computer ecosystem.