

On Google and evil - danilocampos
http://johnaugust.com/archives/2011/on-google-and-evil

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guelo
I find it disturbing that people get so caught up in the marketing spin and
counter-spin of these amoral giant corporations that their personal self-image
becomes tied to the companies they root for and they create these moralistic
interpretations of their actions. Grow up. Corporations are just money making
machines, they don't have your or anyone else's interest at heart besides
their shareholder's.

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redthrowaway
Google's just reached giant status. They're no longer the plucky little
underdog, and we shouldn't expect them to act like one. As far as large
corporations go, they're on the "less evil" side of things. They still do some
shady things, but I would call Apple and Microsoft far shadier. Google only
looks bad in comparison to their stated motto, not by real-world actions.

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pohl
_When Microsoft has a big success — Kinect, for example, is amazing — I find
myself rooting for them._

I was amazed to find myself doing the same thing, and if I had gone back in
time to tell my younger self that I would be doing that, the younger me would
have suspected that the older me was pulling his leg.

~~~
danilocampos
Everything in Xbox land has that kind of tint for me. The 360 has been a great
console and the Kinect is a wildly impressive bit of technology, not to
mention a great user experience. If you can remember to stand in front of your
TV, it's hard to do anything wrong.

It's fun, it works well, and it beats the hell out of anything you could do
with Wii nunchucks and the balance board.

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ergo98
What kills the warm and fuzzies I have about the 360 (a game like Assassin's
Creed 2 is just...gorgeous. To see it running so incredibly on 5 year old
hardware is a marvel) is Xbox Live. The operations of that service take an
enjoyable platform and put a greasy, scamy salesman in front of it.

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jdp23
back in 2006 when i first moved into the "game changing strategies" role at
Microsoft, we spent a lot of time analyzing Google's culture. one of the
things we spotted was that "Don't be evil" isn't sustainable. there are a lot
of situations where any option is at least somewhat evil; and business
pressures have a way of forcing you to do evil things.

Of course I was very careful about saying this around Microsoft. People there
are very competitive, and being evil used to be a core competency. I didn't
want to get into a situation where folks were saying "hey we have an
opportunity to can be more evil than Google!"

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jinushaun
I agree. At some point, when your company gets so big and entrenched, it
becomes necessary to make decisions to do what ever it takes to keep the
machine running. Some may interpret this as being "evil", but I see it as a
natural instinct to survive. Self preservation is not inherently evil. It's
one thing to be the underdog fighting a giant, but it's another thing to
become the giant yourself and having to defend against new underdogs. The
Animal Farm analogy is apropos.

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protomyth
I don't think it has anything to do with Apple or Microsoft or competition. I
think it is Google's reliance on algorithms over people that caused them a lot
of problems when human interaction is needed.

I see Google's bad PR as pretty much in line with Paypal's problems. A
blackbox that people depend on. Paypal is that way because of fraud detection
that errors on the guilty side. Google is that way do to lack of support
infrastructure and a deep belief in the supremacy of algorithms. Add to this a
motto that is easily mocked and makes for great link-baited headlines and you
have Google's situation today.

The only thing being a competitor to Apple has influenced this IMHO is that it
places Google in the consumer arena where they are not well structured to deal
with customers. More avenues for interaction is the problem not the companies
they compete against.

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gawker
Google Wave - under thought and over engineered? And this is coming from a
screenwriter - NOT a designer. NOT an engineer.

I thought it was a great experiment. Shut down yes, but it's being open-
sourced and I can see people will pick it up. Poor performance but I am sure
the code and lessons can be used somewhere else.

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meatsock
so what should the google movie be about then?

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ergo98
_"But it’s remarkable how much my appreciation for Google has shifted over the
last year or two"_

I suspect this shift in sentiment has more to do with Google evolving from
being Microsoft's competitor (back when Microsoft was the boogeyman to Apple),
to Google being _Apple's_ competitor.

To many who hold Apple so dearly to their heart, this causes a serious
conundrum. Suddenly every move by Google can only be seen with incredible
suspicion and assumptions of worst intentions. See the recent raging about
WebM as a perfect example.

 _The Android operating system it makes for mobile phones has become a viable
challenger for Apple’s iOS. But for all the talk about it being open, they’re
not giving it away out of the goodness of their hearts_

The link provided to purportedly demonstrate this undermines the point,
because it is, demonstrating the point above, nothing but the raging
conspiracy by an Apple fanatic who abhors any perceived threat to his love
Apple.

Nonetheless, as a consumer I am fully aware of Google's ambitions with
Android, which is the same reason why I don't use Chrome. However Android is
the _best available option_ in the space for my rights, and the best
opportunity to stop those rights from being trampled, however many ridiculous
scarequotes are used to express the author's total misunderstanding of open.

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jinushaun
Why all the hate for Apple? This article is about how opinion of Google has
soured.

My theory is that "Don't be evil" isn't sustainable if society defines "evil"
as making business decisions in the interest of self preservation. Society
likes underdogs, and Google is now clearly the top dog fighting to survive
instead of fighting to get the top. Once a company gets big enough, it becomes
easy to be perceived as a bully because anything you do will have all that
power and leverage behind it. And underdog entering a new market is
innovative. A big corporation entering a new market is invasive. Firefox
supporting WebM is practical, but Google supporting WebM is evil. Even Apple
is generally perceived to be the evil Big Brother they so famously advertised
against a few decades ago.

~~~
ergo98
_Why all the hate for Apple? This article is about how opinion of Google has
soured._

There's no hate for Apple. There is, however, perspective on human behavior,
one of which is a "with us or against us" mentality.

