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Comment by hpoe | Hacker News Reader

The rest of them have been open about the fact they are ruthless profit making centers focused only on money and you shut up and stay in line or else you're toast. Google's model was "don't be evil" and for years went on the image that they are fighting for the public good and that they were an example of the ability to be principle centered, do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time. Now that the pressure starts to turn up on how to be profitable it turns out that everything they said they stood for, and more importantly the ideal that they represented, turned out to be a lie.

They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up, now that they have abandoned that fall more for it.

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Apple at least somewhat tries to put up an image of caring about environmental issues[1] and privacy (e.g. in the aftermath of San Bernardino attack). (Of course they still have Chinese sweatshops, and who knows how much raw materials comes from child labour in the Congo so of course it's mostly a smokescreen.)

[1] https://www.cultofmac.com/268413/tim-cook-tells-profit-obses...

Apple makes Chinese iCloud user data at rest available to the Chinese government. They've come a long ways from fighting the FBI back in 2015.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy...

>They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up

okay but honestly how silly is it to take a company's branding to heart? like are we all children that believe in santa claus too?

>do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time

i'm old enough now to understand that these two things are mutually exclusive because the latter necessarily involves exploitation (thereby doing net evil rather than net good).

does any amount of exploitation poison the well, and swing the pendulum towards net evil?

Doesn't it? Do the ends ever justify the means? Besides here we're talking about getting rich rather than averting war or curing disease or something.

That’s pretty black and white, considering the subjective nature of defining exploitation.

And sometimes when people get rich, they add value to the world. The getting rich may be the goal, but it can also help other people too.

In hindsight, it was naive, but it wasn't just branding. It really was a strong sentiment at the time long before the Internet consolidated around a few extremely powerful companies.

Doing good for the world and getting rich are by no means mutually exclusive. People pay money for products and services that make their lives better and history has shown that economic growth is not a zero-sum game.

Where companies get into ethical trouble is when they try to maintain exponential growth long after it is possible to do so in a way that is moral. You can make a lot of money doing good for the world, but you can't sustain exponential growth indefinitely without crossing a few lines.

>economic growth is not a zero-sum game.

economic growth is an abstraction. i'm not talking about abstract notions of good and evil.

some people believe that there are systems where entropy decreases too. their mistake is the same as yours: the system you're looking at isn't big enough. someone, somewhere, pays for your growth. either it's the employees that you underpay or it's the commons that you trash or it's the competitors whose coattails you're riding on or etc and etc and etc.

you can't point to a single product that doesn't incur this kind of entropy increase somewhere along its supply chain.

edit: i'm getting downvoted. would love to know where i'm mistaken (other than that i'm assailing capitalism).

I didn't downvote, but I agree with GP that growth isn't a zero sum game. If you create the right product, then you and the people who pay for your growth all end up better off than you were before.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are saying, but e.g. how did Sal Khan do net evil rather than net good with his Khan Academy project?

Khan Academy is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and sal khan consequently isn't "stinking rich".

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