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Comment by tareqak | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft and Bing never started with the mantra of "Don't be evil". Microsoft also has a much more established history of working with different government agencies and foreign governments. The perceived contrast from what people expect from Google and what Google is doing now is just that much more glaring/obvious.

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Yep claiming to be a force for good when behaving like an amoral organization only concerned with profit optimization is what irks people.

pretending to be something you aren't is whats frustrating

And that is part of the reason why Microsoft has been hated/less trusted than Google for so long (and still is).

Google is making a very big mistake ruining this image and supposedly core principles with the actions it's been taking in the past couple of years. They won't recover for decades from this, just like Microsoft still hasn't fully.

Google's "Don't be evil" has been a huge branding asset, but it seems Google has been too eager to step all over it and throw it in the garbage lately. I wonder if it will be worth it. I hope it won't be.

These days I distrust almost every move Google makes by default, and I imagine there is a growing number of people like me. Google may think "eh, so what, we'll just lose a few percent of our users, but gain all of those juicy killer machines and censorship contracts instead," but now people like me will also be first in line to support governmental action against the company (GDPR, etc), while before I would've been the first in line to defend it. So Google won't be losing just users or even advocates, but it's also turning them into vocal enemies - all in the name of continuing to grow those quarterly profits.

> These days I distrust almost every move Google makes by default, and I imagine there is a growing number of people like me.

Google has lost its way, not just with this, but with AMP/Chrome/URLs, and their impending destruction of one of the great achievements of modern technology -- the decentralized, open WWW. The Web was always under attack but to see the fatal blows delivered by Google is very depressing.

I've already removed Facebook's companies entirely from my life. This year, I'm working on moving away from Google as much as possible.

Google has not lost their way. They walked away from billions in China when the government tried to hack Gmail accounts. Google made it so ALL people can afford a smartphone not just the rich like Apple.

Apple on the other hand

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy... Campaign targets Apple over privacy betrayal for Chinese iCloud ...

Smartphones are not necessarily good things. I think they are damaging attention[1] and causing a lot of negative effects on society (social media, fake information, etc.). Humans shouldn't be online at all times.

[1] https://hbr.org/2018/03/having-your-smartphone-nearby-takes-...

They did it for a reason -- to sell ads. If they truly wanted it so people could afford it, they'd not be making billions of profits each year. They give you things for free at the cost of your privacy. Apple otoh is upfront about it.

The Web would have been dead no matter what Google did. Its death was as inevitable as any human's - just a matter of which organs fail, in what order, and when.

If there's one thing we can learn from all this, it's that decentralization of a network is best understood as a temporary process for electing the monopoly node(s).

The Web is not dead yet, and its death is not inevitable. It has been under attack since at least the days of America Online, and it survived that. Google's market share with the browser (all Chromium-based browsers) puts them in a position where they might succeed in destroying it this time. I wouldn't give up completely just yet. People need to speak up, including Google employees. Other companies like Automattic and Cloudflare need to stop enabling schemes like AMP. Large content publishers should say "no" to AMP, because it is not in their long-term best interests. A visit to a restricted shell of your content on someone else's AMP server/cache is not a real visit to your website.

> support governmental action against the company (GDPR, etc)

The GDPR is a hugely pro-Google law. Large corporations can easily afford to wade through its complexity to find ways to comply that do not have a meaningful impact on profits, up to and including getting the law changed, if necessary, ideally by making it more complex.

Their smaller competitors can't.

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