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Comment by stephenhuey | Hacker News Reader

I was excited by “Don’t be evil” back in the early days. But maybe they should’ve chosen “Don’t be stupid or evil” because their amnesia, arrogance and carelessness remind me of so many hilarious sad stories from the early days in the tech industry as recounted in this book which I own:

In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters

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“Don’t forget not to be evil”

I don’t believe the founders have had personality transplant, so why has google become evil?

It's not evil it's shareholder... value... optimisation ! I blame corporate on that one.

Seems like given enough time, any company will lose whatever value it tried to uphold in the past in favor of shareholders.

Once it reaches that point, every business optimization is in detriment of either the final user or society, quite often both.

Shareholders= You and your parents and your grandparents retirement.

This need to have 7-13% yearly returns force companies to grind their employees and customers.

I like capitalism, but I can easily see capitalism doing evil things to create short term profit.

"I can easily see" sounds like it's a hypothetical, but destruction of real value for short term monetary gain is plainly visible all around. I've probably ran into 1000s of real world examples.

Don't the founders have a majority of the voting stock? Do they have a legal obligation to "maximize shareholder value" for the other shareholders?

Partly they're stepping back a bit and partly they've drunk their own koolaid?

Most of the evil on this world is caused by too many levels of abstraction.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely

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