A 'Thank You' from Google | Hacker News Reader

A 'Thank You' from Google

google.com

101 pointsdkokelley70 comments

It's sure disheartening to see the majority of comments here say something to the effect of "20 mil is nothing—Google has so much more to give." Well they sure as hell do, but we wouldn't be saying anything if they'd donated nothing.

I don't see why it's Google's responsibility to donate a percentage of their income, or donate relative to other large donors.

I think it's cool Google donated 20 million. I don't know why it's on HN. I'm not going to take this as an opportunity to bitch about how they could have donated much more.

People choose to look at the relative value of money instead of its absolute value. 20 million for Google is nothing - true. However, 20 million as a US currency is huge and can benefit many, many lives. My question for HN is which way do you want to look at it?

Also, a question no one is asking: How much is Apple donating?

Apple's too cool to donate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/technology/09charity.html

That's a misleading article. Apple disallows a lot of things from its in-app payment system. Collecting donations, especially if they then take their 30% cut, probably has some weird tax implications for them. Why not just incorporate PayPal or another payment system into their app? Sure, it's not as easy for users, but it's flat-out untrue to say that Apple is preventing non-profits from soliciting donations via apps.

as I noted below, according to http://www.google.org/ they gave "over $100 million" in 2009.

I think this video came from some specific campaign from google (notice if you go to the youtube page directly, the video is unlisted. also the whole "on behalf of our customers"...what does that even mean?).

maybe the OP can give some context?

I got an email from Google with a thank you note and link to this video. I can't determine if the 'thanks to you...' is referring to me as a (one time) advertiser or as a regular Google user.

Edit (more clarity):

Here is the actual email from Google:

Dear ,

Thanks to you, this holiday season Google is able to donate $20 million to charitable organizations around the world. They in turn will help improve the lives of over 50 million people. Click here to see how.

Thank you for being a part of what Google is today. All this is possible because of you.

Have a wonderful holiday.

Google

Note that my name was not included in the email. I'm guessing they're missing a record on me.

Advertiser, presumably. I didn't get one as a regular GMail user...

It's on behalf of adsense publishers afaik (I received one).

I assume a portion of adsense profit was given.

For the charities on the receiving end, $20 million is fantastic. And so is a video like this, which also helps the included organizations.

Google's job is to pay shareholders. Let the shareholders donate the profits to charity, if they wish.

Most companies recognize that socially responsible activities improve their image among customers, stockholders, the financial community, and other relevant publics. Ethical and socially responsible practices are simply good business, resulting not only in favorable image, but ultimately in increased sales.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_marketing

"Ethical and socially responsible practices are simply good business, resulting not only in favorable image, but ultimately in increased sales."

That's exactly the point. It is not a selfless good deed, but just another transaction. Spend 20 million (not a huge amount for an ad campaign) get some good PR.

I am not saying that it is evil, shady or even questionable. But it should not be perceived in the same way as an individual donating a part of their income.

An individual donating probably means that they value some other things than money. A corporation donating means that they want "favorable image and ultimately increased sales".

The charities are getting actual money either way.

I get your point, but this is a win for two parties (google and the charities) and I don't see any loss for the third party (the public).

Except that they don't pay shareholders. The only way shareholders can get paid for the foreseeable future is to have an appreciated stock price. Just correcting a statement, not commenting on the donation, so take it for what it is. :)

http://investor.google.com/corporate/faq.html#dividend

"Does Google pay a cash dividend?

No, we have never declared or paid a cash dividend nor do we expect to pay any dividends in the foreseeable future."

They gave out $184 million this year. Better?

I know this is a terribly jaded way to look at the world but when I see big corporations boasting of big donations to charity, which have to be only a small portion of their profits, it makes me wonder why they are paying their employees so little or charging their customers too much.

Their corporate voice doesn't speak for me and other individuals would have chosen different charities, so why don't they empower more people to make their own donations instead of taking from us and doing it for us in their own name.

What if instead Google just doubled the pay for all their employees in India (for example) and allowed those people to put the money back in their own economy as they buy things they need?

Yes, you are jaded. And yes it might make some sense if you were trying to fix the economy. But I'd hedge that these charities will do more to alleviate poverty than Google paying some people more and hoping that something good happens.

Take a dollar from the middle, and give ten cents to the bottom. This way the top gets to keep 90¢ and look like the hero!

To be fair, it's what has always done. But this makes ck2 "jaded"? I am disappointed that so many people agree with you. Maybe the bottom wouldn't be so poor if there were some well off people who lived next to them and could help them out when they really needed it. Moving 90¢ from Bangalore to Tokyo / New York / Los Angeles reduces the local wealth a lot more than sending 10¢ back.

Except the "taking" part didn't happen. Google (or, in your terminology, "the top") created that value.

I typically favor the 'hands off' approach to social causes. That is, individuals can do more good on their own than benevolent corporations or governments. That said, Google doesn't exist to do good deeds. It is a corporation designed to make a profit by providing a valuable service and charging for it. Donating was not necessary, and I applaud these 'giving back' efforts. I particularly like how it was quantified primarily in terms of number of people affected, instead of amount of money given.

Personally, I would rather they remove ads from YouTube videos. YouTube is a great channel for learning, but is becoming marginalized by needless, annoying crap popping up. Instead they have done what the rich always do, make a small, visible allocation of their profits to a "cause" that is easily marketed. They will certainly derive more revenue from increased traffic due to this advertisement than it cost them, and they get to feel warm and fuzzy about it at the same time.

This is not HN worthy.

Brin and Page are not exactly the prototypes of profit-seeking corporate overlords, either. This is their type of move. Bravo.

If you look at it from the point of view of charities, they might prefer getting a lump sum donation in big amounts rather than a lot of small contributions. First it is less of a hassle. Second, knowing that they have this certain big amount with them, will help them aim for more ambitious causes and plan better.

And don't worry about salaries in India. I can tell you that most of the people whom Google or similar companies can pay here, are already well paid and have sufficient disposable incomes for contributing to charities if they so wish.

Right. Not everyone deserving of aid is employable either.

Apparently Coca-Cola did that for years. Not sure if this is still the case, but for a while they gave nothing directly. Instead, they offered a lump sum to their employees to distribute however they saw fit.

As a result, there were all sorts of good things happening in and around Atlanta - examples of small amounts going a long way in places where a giant company wouldn't even think to look.

Lets say they paid their employees more, charged their clients less and then still gave something to charity. Someone would still be asking the same questions, "howcome they don't give more to employees and charge clients less?"

Will there ever be a point at which they're allowed to use their money to give to whom they see fit?

Paying your employees more and charging your customers less apparently doesn't look nearly as good as large donations to charity, regardless which helps more. At least in America.

Not being a cynic. There are reasons for this. We make a big deal of charity donations in general, and you get to claim a lump-sum. $1 million donated sounds better than 1000 donations of $1 thousand.

Edit: there's another upside, too. It's a lot easier to make large profits and then give back what you can later, than it is to figure out what you can afford to give up ahead of time and set a tight budget.

giving more to employees in India will just help the growing gap between rich and poor, which is a big problem in these countries.

So it makes sense then that they should actually pay their employees in India less, to reduce the gap.

I like it even better when the big corporation "strongly encourages" its employees to donate to some charity, and then the company collects the donations and takes credit in their ads for donating to said charity.

At least Google donated their own money.

Because to pay one additional dollar to employees they also have to pay the government about one additional dollar in taxes.

In contrast, by paying one dollar more to non-profit charities they can pay one dollar less to the government (within limit).

You're jaded and want to address the problem of rural isolated low-access to education children by giving people in big cities more money? You're jaded by the selfish acts of corporations and yet are encouraging trickle-down in an economy and in reference to a problem that is probably uniquely even less apt to respond to trickle down?

Huh.

Yes, giving money (or cutting taxes) to people who are already wealthy is proven not to work (aka "trickle down economics") because they do not need to spend it locally and tend to only save/invest it overseas to their own benefit.

However it's also been proven that giving money to people of low income (ie. all the callcenter agents in India that Google and other corporations use) will then tend to spend the money immediately as they have little to no savings and need goods/services right away.

This also works for unemployed people in the USA, they tend to spend any funds given to them immediately, locally, which is good for the economy.

I'm honestly curious what they mean when they say "Google's customers". Are they referring to Google's _users_, or the much smaller group of people who pay for Google services?

This isn't just snark. I think that a corporation's responsibilities to its customers are different than the ones it has to its users, and its relationship to its customers should naturally be different than its relationship to its users. I wonder to what extent this distinction exists in Google's culture.

[Edited to fix an error in diction]

They would be stupid to make a distinction.

Users of Google's free services may not pay Google directly, but the currency is different and Google relies on both types of customers to stay in business.

As for responsibilities, they are the same as for any other company: provide better and better value while staying in business. Companies are not supposed to be socially-responsible, and shouldn't be treated as such.

Google customers are the source of Google's profits which is where this donation came from.

The email was sent out to adsense publishers.

Erm… I’m only seeing a “loading” throbber.

Edit after it becomes clear this is because I don’t have Flash:

They are not only blocking out users with Flash disabled and/or not available on their device, but also deaf users — there is no text equivalent provided. There isn’t even an explanation that a plugin is required.

This is also the first YouTube video I've seen, embedded or not, where the position slider doesn't work. I also can't click to view it on YouTube.

You can click on the YouTube logo in the video to go to the YouTube page. (I had to, because there no music played on the original site.)

You might have Flash or JavaScript disabled: it's a YouTube video.

Flash is disabled (not JS).

Boy am I starting to get tired of companies talking about how much they love HTML5 without walking the walk. Google employes Ian Hickson, the “dictator” at HTML5’s helm,† but fails to support <video> with a Flash fallback. It’s really not hard!

Adobe is guilty of this hypocrisy; Google is quite guilty… only Apple is mostly walking the walk (you never need Flash for any of their web properties), and increasingly Microsoft (no Flash or Silverlight is needed for http://zoom.it).

Edit: YouTube supporting HTML5 ≠ this Google web page supporting HTML5.

And FWIW, even the YouTube HTML5 beta is insufficient — Many times nothing at all will play, even though third-party sites like DetURL or File2HD can find .MP4 files for that video, and the video plays fine on iOS(!). And I’m using Chrome with the plugin completely disabled, for Chrissake — Given there is no technical reason they can’t tell I don’t have Flash, it becomes obvious no one at Google cares about walking the walk.

†Dear downvoters: I am not making up, Hixie refers to himself this way. http://adactio.com/journal/1600/

Ubuntu user here, I can't watch any video on apple sites, it says it require quicktime and offers to download safari. Yes, Apple is so walking the walk on that issue...

edit: also google "why html5 video is not ready"

Interesting. That is hypocritical, you’re right.† Being a Mac user I never have this problem in any browser, except, come to think of it, for the live keynote streams they started doing a few months ago.

Apple even uses JS for use cases where one would traditionally use Flash, such as 3D product views, whereas Google still only uses Flash for Street View.

†Do you have an MPEG-4 decoder? I know a lot of Linux distros, and Firefox, only support e.g. Theora out of the box, for patent reasons.

Edit in response to edit: I know all about the various formats, etc. But <video> absolutely is ready, if you’re willing to support exactly 2 formats (MP4 and Ogg Theora) with a Flash-based fallback — something companies offer as an upload-and-paste-simple service.

> I know all about the various formats, etc. But <video> absolutely is ready

No it's not. Format is just the tip of the iceberg. It still has many issues such as fullscreen not working/implemented differently, many devices have buggy implementations, it still lacks streaming features that flash does and more. The spec is still lacking.

http://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs...

or if you're lazy: * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Igz5gdB4uY * http://mashable.com/2010/10/07/w3c-stalls-html5/

To be fair, <video> is hardly ready for mainstream use yet.

There's a real need for it, though, as I demonstrated. I don't care who you are, you're going to have to explain why you say <video> isn't ready to be used yet! Isn’t <video> + fallback better than <video> or Flash by themselves?

<video> isn't ready yet because the implementations are very young, and they still have pretty basic bugs. We don't yet have a good comprehensive test suite for the API, and the API in fact is still in active flux (I'm literally changing parts of the API as we speak -- I have an incomplete edit that changes how the timed track API works that I'm still working on). And of course there's the issue of the codec, which is still unresolved.

Deploying a site with <video> and Flash is twice as much testing, implementation, and encoding cost as just <video> or just Flash.

Using <video> today (late 2010) is fine for experimental purposes, demos, or for people who are on the bleeding edge. But for mainstream sites who need to reach even people who use IE6, or who don't have much in the way of resources to spend on this kind of stuff, or who simply aren't interested in being the pioneers of new Web technology, then I wouldn't recommend using it yet.

This kind of stuff moves really quite fast, though. Six, twelve months from now? Who knows. Maybe it'll be deployed widely enough and with good enough quality of implementations that using a proprietary plug-in for video will seem positively anachronistic.

Thank you, and good luck with those edits.

Youtube does support HTML5, but it's optional. From your account settings enable it and on any supported videos it'll be used.

For me I'm glad it's optional, the versatility of the Flash video player is preferable for me, HTML5 might be fancy schmancy but it sucks right now for features.

Google uses iPhones to demo their latest mobile apps when they launch new features (most notably, voice search), and they talk about HTML5, but never use YouTube's HTML5 embeds with a fallback in ANY of their announcements.

Hard to sell people if you're not taking your own stance to heart.

20 million.

That's less than 0.1% of what Gates donates. That's about 0.01% of Google's market cap. That's about 4.6 work-hours of Google revenues.

Google is counting on people not having a feeling for what "million" and "billion" mean, aside from both being big numbers.

And part of what was advertised was charities using Google Apps.

I like Google, but this feels pretty cynical.

according to http://www.google.org/ they gave "over $100 million in 2009." I'm not sure what this 20 million refers to, but it's not their total giving.

also, with Bill Gates you appear to be comparing total donations vs some yearly amount.

The URL to the YouTube video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R06EAUAi4MU

HTML 5 enabled: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R06EAUAi4MU&html5=1

This money is obviously doing a lot of good, but I have to ask why are they making a big song and dance about it? It's the equivalent of me donating 20 bucks to charity and then going around telling everyone. If they were doing it purely for altruistic reasons then they wouldn't even mention it. It definitely has a commercial purpose behind it. It's better than them not doing it, but don't fall into the trap of believing it's purely altruistic. Google employees don't have a higher set of morals than other companies.

The thing is, it doesn't matter. Money donated for ego purpose buys just as many polio vaccines as money donated for strictly self-less purposes. For some reason, we are taught that donating money should be strictly altruistic action and we get upset when someone is doing it for publicity or whatever. But in the end, it doesn't matter; money is money, and if people can feed their egos (or make their company look good), and charities get money, that's fine. Everyone benefits.

I'm as cynical as the next man, but at the end of the day a charity donation is a good thing.

All companies who do it should be congratulated, not winged at.

Encourage other companies to do the same.

As one of Adwords' biggest advertisers, I'd like to thank Google for giving themselves a tax write off instead of giving me a holiday gift this year and last year.

It means a lot.

Also, http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/p/cause/#tnc

To be honest, I want Chrome for a cause to stay. It is one of the most fun dick measuring contests a bunch of web fiends can have.

I wonder what this did to Chrome usage ratings?

More on topic: how many of these charitable donations have a hidden agenda? Paying for schools in India, carefully nudging them to train engineers, having cheaper employees? etc ...

And to be honest it's a great way to showcase tabs.

Not when you hit the 250 tab max halfway through your browsing day.

i don't think greedy is ever a word that will be used to describe google. ambitious, yes. greedy, no.

you're welcome :)

I wish youtube videos streamed just as nicely as this one.

Are there really still people left, who are naive enough to think that charity really is for a good cause? It is basically just another business for rich people/comapanies to move money around. If it would work the way you think it does, why is Africa and South Asia still looking the same it looked 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago?

This is really something for a separate discussion, but a major cause for the poverty of the regions you mentioned have more to do with social and political troubles than economic issues. All of the money in the world donated to a region where warlords take it all will not make the intended recipients any better off.

Also, there is another argument that claims direct aid actually creates dependency, and development stalls because there is no motive to progress.

None of those arguments alone should be a reason to restrict your charitable giving, but keep in mind that there are situations in where even the most noble organizations will be helpless to improve a region.

I seriously think the idea of charity is flawed. There are so many things wrong with it, that it's really hard for me to put that into a comment.

Another point, quite important and often forgotten, is that people actually think, if they put some money in charity they did a great thing today. With a bright smile they walk on the street of their own city, letting drugs, raping, bad school education, homeless people and so on just happen. But that's okay. They come in heaven now, because they did charity...

But hey, when it is a company it must be better. Because they at least themself should know that it actually is a marketing campaign they are doing and not helping people.

South Asia? Doesn't that mean, like, India?

Does India still look the way it did 30 years ago?

As for Africa and South Asia, check out this presentationL http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y.... They don't look nearly the same as thirty years ago!

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