

Schmidt: "We Have Not Yet Found The Evil Room." - edw519
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/07/schmidt-we-have-not-yet-found-the-evil-room/

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JCThoughtscream
The responses in TechCrunch disturbs me a little. While Google's occasionally
stumbled over its informal "Don't Be Evil" policy a few times (China, I feel,
will forever haunt them, along with everybody else that's ever been tempted
with its forbidden fruit of 1.3 billion seeds), their business model is so
deviant from the Microsoft propriety method that trying to accuse them of
being the next Evil Empire misses the mark by a wide margin.

It's not as if Google can't be more open, more altruistic, better about
intellectual property management and better about privacy concerns. But
there's a pretty big difference between demanding for more and dismissing them
for not being "perfect" in the eyes of their critics.

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mediaman
The threat of vilifying anyone who commits any sin -- no matter how ethically
good their average performance -- is that it decreases the incentive to strive
for good behavior.

There's a huge perception gap between being perfect and being very good, but
it often seems the perception gap between being very good and no good at all
is surprisingly small.

Given that it's nearly impossible for a very large company to be perfect all
the time, it becomes easier to give up trying so hard to be very good.

