Hacker News Reader

Comment by enitihas | Hacker News Reader

Yup. I think Google needs to hire the PR people from Microsoft and pay them rockstar salaries. Microsoft does far worse things than Google yet they manage to hide from the public eye much better. Bing works and censors in China. Microsoft doesn't care what employees say about their clients. Whereas Google gets immense negativity for a not yet live "dragonfly" project, and even very small scale US military projects.

Windows 10 broke new ground in privacy violations in a desktop operating system, but things are much farther away from the public eye. Even for something like deprecating services, Microsoft shut down their ebook store, where users had paid for the books, and yet their brand value doesn't get impacted as much as Google's.

View on HN

It's not an PR thing, it's mostly an internal communications issue.

Google championed a culture that allowed SJW-ism to thrive in its own rank that isn't really true of other large companies. Cheerleading social progressivism and then forgoing its "do no evil" motto and then trying to act like any other big corp created massive cognitive dissonance among its own employees that isn't true of other companies.

What is SJW-iam? What is social progressivism?

Do you think this definition of SJW is correct?

“ "Social justice warrior" (SJW) is a pejorative term for an individual who promotes socially progressive views, including feminism, civil rights, and multiculturalism.[1][2][3] The accusation that somebody is an SJW carries implications that they are pursuing personal validation rather than any deep-seated conviction, and engaging in disingenuous arguments”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice_warrior

> SJW-ism

Is another word for 'we hire young, educated, mostly coastal, twenty and thirty-somethings who statistically lean left'.

There is nothing unusual about Googler political leanings, given the demographics of the tech worker pool.

Viewing it the way you are simply projects your own politics on a... Perfectly expected outcome of demographics.

SJW-ism generally connotes being radical left with a 'us-versus-them' overall worldview. Calling that a "statistical" leaning is like saying that /r/The_Donald "statistically leans right". Quite the understatement!

Nobody is surprised that, say, a fracking firm would, politically, lean more than a bit right, with a bit of an us-versus-them worldview.

But when a tech company does so, in another direction, that is, apparently, a hold the presses event...

It’s all about expectations.

Amazon and Microsoft have never codified in their value system anything that touches “never working with the military” and no one that joins either company should or does have the expectation that the company would ever back away from something so lucrative.

Google on the other hand has created a culture of “do no evil” (even if that isn’t their official motto anymore) that encouraged SJW-ism, and thus falsely gave the impressions to their workforce that they could speak up about socially progressive issues that have clashed with corporate strategy. They’ve created a workforce of snowflakes, for lack of a better term, and the cognitive dissonance created by a fake progressive culture is extremely counter productive.

And yet, Amazon and Microsoft had the exact same ethical struggles about the exact same issues as Google in the past few years. The outcome for all three firms on these issues was incidental, and could have, very much, gone either way, based on the personalities and individuals involved.

Your second paragraph does not square with the principled stance Google made wrt China a decade ago. VPs abandoning those principles (and trying to keep the entire thing secret) is the unusual behaviour, in this case - not the pushback they met.

> SJW-ism

can you use a more real, adultish, less 4channic term to describe what you mean by this? Best I can tell "SJW" means anything from "anyone I disagree with" to "anyone who's not openly an asshole".

> Microsoft does far worse things than Google

*citation needed.

Taking Microsoft's side is not something I do lightly, but the amount of fuckups from Google doesn't even come close to what Microsoft did. From the privacy violations perspective which you brought up, Google has a wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_regarding_Goo...

Not to mention what Google is currently doing to the web with the whole Chrome and AMP bullshit.

> Even for something like deprecating services, Microsoft shut down their ebook store, where users had paid for the books

Microsoft does a damn good job at deprecating services. The ebooks have been refunded. As an enterprise consumer, I would choose Microsoft over Google every day of the year. They really do bend over backwards to keep older services/OSs alive. And that's where you need a lot of trust. Trust is NOT something I think about when I think about Google. It's funny you bring this up, when Google deprecates services like there's no tomorrow. And badly for that matter.

I was freakin' blown away the first time my friggin' operating system tried to warn me not to use Firefox and use Microsoft Edge instead, and I can't believe that it wasn't a much bigger deal in the press than it was.

Are you freakin blown away every single time you visit a Google site on a browser other than Chrome and see essentially the same thing?

clear difference between your local OS and a website you're visiting.

Not when the OS is ChromeOS or Android.

Does Android warn you to use Chrome instead of Firefox?

Most people don't even know that an alternative is possible.

In fact, a large percentage doesn't even use pure Chrome, rather the OEM customized variant with an icon named Browser.

>Microsoft does far worse things than Google

Do they? Google makes me way uncomfortable at the moment with their pervasive insight into everything but trust us anyway cause don't be evil.

MS seems like the underdog almost in the data mining game

Perhaps this is extremely wrong and naive, but it feels like it's relatively "easy" to avoid Microsoft data mining. I don't use Bing, I don't use Outlook for personal stuff (only work emails), I don't use MS Office, and I don't use Windows. Whereas almost every website I visit probably has a Google tracking service on it (Google Ads, Google Analytics, etc.)

I suspect Google's real sin is to be seen as competitors by dying old media conglomerates who own much of news for fair use snippets and owning youtube.

The NSA spied on everyone and got practically a yawn. Google as a competitor and suddenly they are the panopticon and receive utter bullshit accusations of "selling your data". Meanwhile ISPs did illegal shit and got retconned protection.

The inconsistencies speak volumes even accounting for Zeitgeist of the past.

Eh, this seems like the standard corporate response.

While it’s brand may have suffered, the company still employs a lot of smart and creative people. I would hope that they tap into that pool to come up with better solutions than “hire better PR”.

perhaps because micro$oft's stock has not been benefiting a lot from creating a perception of no evil. If anything they used to be the devil incarnate for most of us

Reply on news.ycombinator.com