Was discussed already. Google is trying to do damage control and entertains that "do no evil" was not a bad idea but thats a thing of the past.
I still think that this problem isn’t resolved: is the problem the existence of violence, its legitimate monopoly by a democratically elected temporary dictator, or that violence is being misused by jingoistic non-sense, and that the US armed forced are controlled by corporate interests? Is evading that question the most moral stance? I feel like it’s mainly an easier one to defend, rather than the better one.
Their motto was never "do no evil" - that's a far harder standard given that undesired side effects happen for most actions.
One's capacity for evil indeed grows greatly when one is given too much power.
Likewise, as Google's power has grown inordinately, their public emphasis on "doing no evil" has diminished
They definitely aren't better than most companies in certain corporate matters related to the employee experience (especially for those who are in one or more marginalized demographics), or in their willingness to be a defense contractor at all (back on topic for this news item). They also make plenty of product and PR mistakes.
Still, many tech companies are notably worse on many important issues: more willing to directly facilitate military weaponry and intelligence for lethal purposes, less top-notch at security, fewer and weaker privacy promises, bad at rigorously implementing and adhering to the privacy promises they do make, more in the habit of voluntarily sharing direct access to your personally identifiable data with third parties, less willing to tolerate employees complaining about privacy/security/harassment/workplace issues, etc.
Overall I think Google needs to be watched closely, forced to do the right thing by some mixture of internal external pressure, possibly split into 2-4 smaller companies, and needs to fix certain culture problems .... but I still think it's among the better of the large trendy US tech companies, alongside Microsoft. And GCP is awesome.
Disclosure: I used to work at Google, including the GCP team; my mention of Microsoft is based on second-hand information from people I know who do or did work there.
I really wonder what is the percentage of employees that read their company's code of conducts. I wouldn't be surprised if it was 5 %.
Imagine that Disney used that motto, would you still send your children to DisneyLand?
Or a restaurant saying "don't poison the guests", would you still eat there?
And yes, I'd like a restaurant to encourage its workers to take steps to ensure the food is safe.
By telling them to not poison the guests?
Do I really have to explain what's wrong here?