On Google and evil | Hacker News Reader

On Google and evil

johnaugust.com

18 pointsdanilocampos15 comments

I find it disturbing that people get so caught up in the marketing spin and counter-spin of these amoral giant corporations that their personal self-image becomes tied to the companies they root for and they create these moralistic interpretations of their actions. Grow up. Corporations are just money making machines, they don't have your or anyone else's interest at heart besides their shareholder's.

Google's just reached giant status. They're no longer the plucky little underdog, and we shouldn't expect them to act like one. As far as large corporations go, they're on the "less evil" side of things. They still do some shady things, but I would call Apple and Microsoft far shadier. Google only looks bad in comparison to their stated motto, not by real-world actions.

When Microsoft has a big success — Kinect, for example, is amazing — I find myself rooting for them.

I was amazed to find myself doing the same thing, and if I had gone back in time to tell my younger self that I would be doing that, the younger me would have suspected that the older me was pulling his leg.

Everything in Xbox land has that kind of tint for me. The 360 has been a great console and the Kinect is a wildly impressive bit of technology, not to mention a great user experience. If you can remember to stand in front of your TV, it's hard to do anything wrong.

It's fun, it works well, and it beats the hell out of anything you could do with Wii nunchucks and the balance board.

What kills the warm and fuzzies I have about the 360 (a game like Assassin's Creed 2 is just...gorgeous. To see it running so incredibly on 5 year old hardware is a marvel) is Xbox Live. The operations of that service take an enjoyable platform and put a greasy, scamy salesman in front of it.

back in 2006 when i first moved into the "game changing strategies" role at Microsoft, we spent a lot of time analyzing Google's culture. one of the things we spotted was that "Don't be evil" isn't sustainable. there are a lot of situations where any option is at least somewhat evil; and business pressures have a way of forcing you to do evil things.

Of course I was very careful about saying this around Microsoft. People there are very competitive, and being evil used to be a core competency. I didn't want to get into a situation where folks were saying "hey we have an opportunity to can be more evil than Google!"

I agree. At some point, when your company gets so big and entrenched, it becomes necessary to make decisions to do what ever it takes to keep the machine running. Some may interpret this as being "evil", but I see it as a natural instinct to survive. Self preservation is not inherently evil. It's one thing to be the underdog fighting a giant, but it's another thing to become the giant yourself and having to defend against new underdogs. The Animal Farm analogy is apropos.

I don't think it has anything to do with Apple or Microsoft or competition. I think it is Google's reliance on algorithms over people that caused them a lot of problems when human interaction is needed.

I see Google's bad PR as pretty much in line with Paypal's problems. A blackbox that people depend on. Paypal is that way because of fraud detection that errors on the guilty side. Google is that way do to lack of support infrastructure and a deep belief in the supremacy of algorithms. Add to this a motto that is easily mocked and makes for great link-baited headlines and you have Google's situation today.

The only thing being a competitor to Apple has influenced this IMHO is that it places Google in the consumer arena where they are not well structured to deal with customers. More avenues for interaction is the problem not the companies they compete against.

Google Wave - under thought and over engineered? And this is coming from a screenwriter - NOT a designer. NOT an engineer.

I thought it was a great experiment. Shut down yes, but it's being open-sourced and I can see people will pick it up. Poor performance but I am sure the code and lessons can be used somewhere else.

so what should the google movie be about then?

"But it’s remarkable how much my appreciation for Google has shifted over the last year or two"

I suspect this shift in sentiment has more to do with Google evolving from being Microsoft's competitor (back when Microsoft was the boogeyman to Apple), to Google being Apple's competitor.

To many who hold Apple so dearly to their heart, this causes a serious conundrum. Suddenly every move by Google can only be seen with incredible suspicion and assumptions of worst intentions. See the recent raging about WebM as a perfect example.

The Android operating system it makes for mobile phones has become a viable challenger for Apple’s iOS. But for all the talk about it being open, they’re not giving it away out of the goodness of their hearts

The link provided to purportedly demonstrate this undermines the point, because it is, demonstrating the point above, nothing but the raging conspiracy by an Apple fanatic who abhors any perceived threat to his love Apple.

Nonetheless, as a consumer I am fully aware of Google's ambitions with Android, which is the same reason why I don't use Chrome. However Android is the best available option in the space for my rights, and the best opportunity to stop those rights from being trampled, however many ridiculous scarequotes are used to express the author's total misunderstanding of open.

Why all the hate for Apple? This article is about how opinion of Google has soured.

My theory is that "Don't be evil" isn't sustainable if society defines "evil" as making business decisions in the interest of self preservation. Society likes underdogs, and Google is now clearly the top dog fighting to survive instead of fighting to get the top. Once a company gets big enough, it becomes easy to be perceived as a bully because anything you do will have all that power and leverage behind it. And underdog entering a new market is innovative. A big corporation entering a new market is invasive. Firefox supporting WebM is practical, but Google supporting WebM is evil. Even Apple is generally perceived to be the evil Big Brother they so famously advertised against a few decades ago.

Why all the hate for Apple? This article is about how opinion of Google has soured.

There's no hate for Apple. There is, however, perspective on human behavior, one of which is a "with us or against us" mentality.

Even if you don't have a dog in the Android/iOS hunt, resenting Google is as easy as trying to use its search to locate information around anything even remotely related to commerce. Or programming questions.

I think that's a product of the same initiative, honestly. Like some sort of attempt to strike the achilles heal of Google. "Ha ha, your search stinks!"

Searching for programming questions always sucked on Google proper. The only redeeming target was the Deja News corpus Google acquired. I doubt I'm along in my sadness at seeing the beautifully categorized and well discussed Usenet groups descend to uselessness, replaced by a disparate collection of poorly organized, polluted Q&A sites.

Commerce -- like finding a review. When do people ever think that was good on Google? Seriously I'm seeing people talking about trying to buy iPhone cases -- come on. Again, it always sucked on Google. Always. It's worse now simply because there is remarkably little real content (the professional review industry has almost disappeared, as it was supported by magazines, and the consumer review space disappeared because people stopped hosting their own Geocities sites and the like).

Specialized sites were always a world above any search engine. For game reviews I go to Metacritic. For movie information I go to imdb. For restaurant reviews I go to yelp. And so on.

So no, I don't resent Google for those things, because it was never good at them.

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