Stop worshiping the ground Google walks on, which seems common on HackerNews.
I've had the exact opposite observation here. There are few places on the Internet I see Google get more consistently browbeaten and held to account for its mistakes and abuses than on HN. This has been the case for at least the past six or eight years or more. Threads on Google here are very rarely laudatory; they typically make the front page because of bad things.
HN comments tilt toward overwhelmingly disliking Goliath and favoring David. You see this in most Intel v AMD threads from the past decade. You'd think Intel killed HN's favorite puppy or merged with Oracle. Intel having an inferior product now doesn't explain the visceral response, it's something deeper psychologically, it's a revulsion of big tech broadly. It's mostly just a matter of rooting for the underdog and against big tech. The same thing is common re Amazon and Facebook here (increasingly Apple as well, which has lost a lot of its favor on HN). Microsoft is slightly in favor by contrast, they took a very long big tech lashing previously and people like a comeback story (their open source olive branches help a lot).
Pretty typical, forever repeating psychology. Underdogs, comebacks, goliaths v davids. They won't like you again until after you fall.
To be fair, Intel engaged in some really evil practices to prevent AMD from gaining market share for a very long time. And, unlike Microsoft's slap on the wrist, Intel never really got punished at all for it.
Yeah, Intel isn't as bad as Oracle simply because they don't have Larry Ellison. However, Darth Vader isn't magically good simply because he's not The Emperor.
Yeah, the fact that once "the davids" of the past became today's goliaths changed their behavior from (at least pretending to) caring about being social net-positive forces to being purely business machines has nothing to do with it.
For instance, Google's code of lost this paragraph two years ago [1]:
> “Don’t be evil.” Googlers generally apply those words to how we serve our users. But “Don’t be evil” is much more than that. Yes, it’s about providing our users unbiased access to information, focusing on their needs and giving them the best products and services that we can. But it’s also about doing the right thing more generally – following the law, acting honorably, and treating co-workers with courtesy and respect.
It may not matter to you but it does for some others. I'm one of them.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
I can't risk having a corporate rollout/demo/pilot fail because some developer made the Googlebot pissy and got everything they're associated with banned.
I trust Microsoft way more than Google at this point. That says something.
But that is way different than Embrace, Extend, Extinguish from MS. I would not trade, say, Chrome for the world of IE. the tension between Google and Apple is far healthier for developers and consumers.