Comment by fjabre | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fjabre | Hacker News Reader

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Google's only obligation is to its shareholders. AMP serves its interests. So does building covert search engines to help root out chinese dissidents.

That 'cat and mouse' game is the natural order of things. There is no stopping that other than making things anti-competitive which is what Alphabet clearly wants to do.

Google has become evil and we should expect nothing less from a multibillion dollar conglomerate like Alphabet. This isnt the Google we grew up with. This is the publically traded company Alphabet which will do anything to increase their bottom line whether its ruining the internet with things like AMP or selling search services used to imprison chinese citizens.

Google should be ashamed of itself. Would never take a job at a company like Alphabet. It conflicts with my sense of ethics and morality.

What is a "company like Alphabet"? Can any company of the size and scale of Alphabet, or aiming to be such one day, avoid these pressures? Why isn't this the Google we grew up with, given that this is what Google was growing up to be all along?

A serious question is whether a young company in roughly the state Google was in the early '00s can reasonably commit to never becoming a multibillion-dollar conglomerate.

Probably not. I think going public ruins the ability of such a company to maintain a moral compass. It certainly vanquished any idea of maintaining their 'don't be evil' motto.

They simply could have committed not to becoming a publicly traded company. I know every YC investor looks at going public as the end all be all for every company on earth but I think the pursuit of the public market at all costs mindset typically espoused by communities like this one is morally devoid and obviously has long term consequences in the tech community at large.

Go public at all costs is the mindset here and in most VC communities. Make money at all costs is really what they mean to say. Get rid of that mindset.

Google used to have a moral compass. That was the Google I grew up with. Before all the pressures of being a publicly traded multibillion-dollar conglomerate got to them and now they are basically no better than ATT.

If every YC investor looks at going public and only one has ever gone public, they were looking in the wrong direction. Most VC funded companies either get acquired or go bust.

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