Adkins has been around a long time and is well known internally. She has always played it straight as far as I know. She isn't some faceless Voice of Google, she has her own reputation to consider and one she has built.
Now let's look at the people on the other side: a nobody who has been describing her own employer as literally evil in public, to anyone who will listen, but who mysteriously failed to leave of her own accord. Google isn't actually evil or even close to it, only someone seriously mentally unstable could believe that, and would such a person harass political opponents by leaking their private lives onto the internet (presumably to somewhere they hoped would cause those employees problems?). Absolutely they would. Googlers already have form in leaking screenshots of internal sites to highlight political disagreements.
> Google isn't actually evil or even close to it, only someone seriously mentally unstable could believe that
Personally, I think anyone who "trusts" a corporation as large as Google is mentally unstable. There are very clear, well-documented instances of Google being objectively evil, and there's no sign of this changing. Maybe you don't follow that news?
> She isn't some faceless Voice of Google, she has her own reputation to consider and one she has built.
So you're telling me that if her boss instructed her to read a prepared statement or be fired, she'd give up her position atop a mountain of gold just to appease some random fanboys on the internet?
> and would such a person harass political opponents by leaking their private lives onto the internet (presumably to somewhere they hoped would cause those employees problems?). Absolutely they would.
Now you're assaulting the character of a person you don't know for no good reason.
There are very clear, well-documented instances of Google being objectively evil
Look, the English language has a limited range of words for describing malicious acts. We have simple words like bad, wrong. We have more complex words like criminal, illegal, immoral. We have nuanced words like suboptimal, misguided, psychotic, naive. And at the extreme end we have evil.
Is there a word for something/someone worse than evil? I'm struggling to think of it. You'd have to start saying things like, well, maybe Google is evil but Hitler/Mao/Stalin were really really evil. There just isn't anywhere you can go from there.
Google is not evil in any mature usage of the English language. You may not like its business model, perhaps you think Google should charge you money for its services and dispose of the ads. You may disagree with some of the decisions its executives make. But nothing Google has ever done even begins to justify using the most extreme words in the English language, not even close, not even remotely in the same general area. If you describe Google this way you're saying they're the worst thing that could possibly exist, which is foolish in the extreme. It's just crying wolf: why would anyone pay attention if one day you discover an organisation that is actually doing much worse stuff? Nobody will care because they'll just write you off.
Now you're assaulting the character of a person you don't know for no good reason.
The "assault" is simply me evaluating the likelihood of competing claims, based on (in one case) actually having met and had direct experience of Ms Adkins when I used to work at Google, and in the other case public words and actions of someone I never met. Based on that evidence I judge it likely that Google's claims are true, albeit, this is only a weak judgement as it's ultimately he said/she said.
Lol you just wrote three whole paragraphs to say Google isn’t as bad as Hitler. I don’t even know what to say to that. How far gone into fanboyitis must one be to reach that point?
Ok, maybe Google isn’t as bad as Hitler. I’ll give you that. Maybe that’s why they chose the slogan “don’t be evil” many years ago, since that was the lowest they could possibly set the bar at the time. Can we at least agree then that Google is “very very bad”? Where does that vocabulary fall on your quantitative scale of evil? It should be sufficiently far from Hitler to have a focused discussion, I hope.
> actually having met and had direct experience of Ms Adkins when I used to work at Google
So you’re not only biased in favor of Google, you’re also biased in favor of this lady. Doesn’t seem like anyone is going to change your mind then. Good luck with your less-evil-than-Hitler corporate overlords.
Now let's look at the people on the other side: a nobody who has been describing her own employer as literally evil in public, to anyone who will listen, but who mysteriously failed to leave of her own accord. Google isn't actually evil or even close to it, only someone seriously mentally unstable could believe that, and would such a person harass political opponents by leaking their private lives onto the internet (presumably to somewhere they hoped would cause those employees problems?). Absolutely they would. Googlers already have form in leaking screenshots of internal sites to highlight political disagreements.