What continues to impress me about Google is:
1. Just how quickly this was built (really, it was quick); and
2. Google wants you to use our services because they're compelling not because we don't give you any other choice (ie "Don't be evil").
Sure there are limits to what it currently does but I think you'll see it rapidly iterate.
I don't mean any offense, but the "Don't be evil" mantra is growing a bit tired. Evil is a strong word, and "not being evil" is a pretty low bar, IMO.
(i.e. the agent 'Google' is distinct from the agents that it is composed of)
See https://plus.google.com/100010618263697835406/posts/azTW8hvw... for details.
Ultimately, some policy on some random social networking site nobody uses is not much of a big deal. If you don't like the policy, don't use Google+. Easy.
It sounds less like it was ignored and more like it isn't a priority for a resource stretched team.
If Apple suddenly came out and said "right, from today on we want 75% of your sales instead of 30%" would you have the same reaction?
Google App Engine:
* Not the dominant hosting platform. Not even close to being the dominant.
* Maybe a million dollar product. Certainly not a billion dollar product.
* In beta/preview until just now with developers knowing pricing had not been set or could be changed.
* Optimizing your application properly can negate most if not all of the pricing increase.
* Open source alternative framework available if you want to keep using the same APIs.
Apple App Store:
* Dominant market position with only the Android Market coming close.
* Billion dollar product.
* Existed as fully launched for several years.
* Set percentage. You can't change it other then making your app free.
* No open source alternative that supports the same APIs.
Beta/preview products can and will change.
If profit is the only motivation for decisions at Google, why did it pull out of China? I'm sure you're cynical and wise about that too, but here's what I can tell you. I saw Sergey up on stage saying the same things he said in this interview (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/interview-sergey-br...) and he got fiery and emotional about it. This is a guy who grew up in the Soviet Union until he was 6 and for him it is a very personal and ideological issue.
This corporations-as-profit-seeking-automata meme is old and tired. At the end of the day it's people who make decisions, and just as in every aspect of life people can have complex motivations for the decisions that they make.
I refer you to the comment above by jey
What Google "wants" as an entity is different from what the individual
component humans want.
Not necessarily. To parrot one of the other posters here: saying it doesn't make it true.
You could also argue that being a charity would be a very slow and inefficient means to achieving many of the things Google has set out to do. Being a for-profit corp gets them there faster and with fewer distractions not core to their purpose. I'd even venture to guess that it wouldn't be possible for Google to do what it does as a non-profit.
Sure, profit is a motivation, but it's certainly not the only (or even necessarily primary) motivation.
http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
"That was a surprising realization. Companies often claim to be benevolent, but it was surprising to realize there were purely benevolent projects that had to be embodied as companies to work."
In any case, the parent doesn't have to justify anything, because he's stating a relatively well-known argument: in the US, there's an obligation for corporate executives to maximize shareholder value. This point is debated (http://www.linkedin.com/answers/law-legal/corporate-law/corp...), but not to the extent that you're claiming.
Do you mean "why did they make a big rant about pulling out of China and then not actually do it until they were literally cyber-attacked by the government"? Google was never all that big in China anyway. I'm sure their whole strategy around this was to get gullible people to buy into the "Don't do evil" nonsense.
>Sergey up on stage saying the same things he said in this interview and he got fiery and emotional about it.
Yea? So do politicians. Very passionate about what they're talking about until it comes time to vote. Then they follow their wallets.
>This is a guy who grew up in the Soviet Union until he was 6 and for him it is a very personal and ideological issue.
I know plenty of people who grew up in the Soviet Union. What exactly do you think goes on there that makes the "lucky few" who escape want to change the world? Maybe it did have some profound effect on him but it sounds more likely to be simple positioning. Getting people to think he really cares will cause them to defend him every time his company betrays that trust.
>This corporations-as-profit-seeking-automata meme is old and tired. At the end of the day it's people who make decisions, and just as in every aspect of life people can have complex motivations for the decisions that they make.
It may well be old and tired but it's how the world works. The only thing a CEO can get in trouble for not doing is increasing share holder value.
You've been conned.
I think the core of Google is Larry, Sergey, Urs, Craig, and the other dozens of engineers I've read about (never met), and from their actions and words over a course of a decade, I think they've proved that a huge motivator for them all is to simple make the world better.
They've all got lots of money. I think the long term evidence shows that they care about doing good. I think their motivation for earning money is to expand their own ability to do good.
If someone disagrees, instead of responding with more argument I'd ask you to make a table and list everything Google done has done in one column and whether or not it seems "good" or "evil" in another. Then we could debate further.
This is relevant to your statement, because while it's pretty much a requirement for a publicly held company to pursue profit at any cost, it's not necessarily the case for a company run by the people that have a disproportionately large number of votes on major issues.
I'm pretty sure they still have over 50% of the votes, so together they can decide how Google will handle tough moral issues without any support from other shareholders.
I would argue that it's entirely plausible that a couple altruistic billionaires will sacrifice a few dollars in pursuit of non-evil (their opinion of non-evil mind you).
"I strongly disagree. Google wants us to use its services because at its core is a bunch of engineers that simply want to make the world better."
I don't doubt that the people working at google want to make the world better and work on cool software. I don't think that is the primary motivation of google as a company.
Are you serious or trolling? I would expect if someone had such an ignorant/naive opinion they would at least be smart enough to not let other people know.
Here's what I see from google:
Search - a product that helps them sell ads
Gmail - a product that helps them sell ads
Google App engine - A platform where they used the hype of MapReduce et al to get people to join and then ramped up pricing drastically after a lot of people had been on the service (a service for which switching away almost certainly means a big rewrite) for years
Android - phone OS to help them sell ads.
I'm not seeing a lot of "make the world better" in there. Unless you mean "for Google executives".
Making money from selling things and leaving the user's data alone is just not in the DNA of this company.
I have always been amazed that some people would consider "don't be evil" to be a motto with any power to motivate or lead people, since it ventures no strong opinion, and points in no clear direction.
"Do good" is far more costly, less likely to be politically correct, and more likely to invite ridicule. At the same time, this kind of heart-on-sleeve sincerity has more power to inspire. Sincerity, humility, innocence tend to achieve more than cynicism and jaded worldly wisdom.
Should one treat others as one would like others to treat oneself? (the positive form)
Should one not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated? (the negative form)
I consider the maxim “Don't be evil” to be more actionable, useful, and meaningful than “Be good.”
So, uh... in hindsight I guess I'm just agreeing with you :-P
I thought about that in the wrong way.
What I really meant is it's just easier to not do evil. You can look at something and say "that's evil, so I won't do it". Sure, sometimes that can cause you hardship, but you deal with it. Maybe evil is an uncountable, but you don't need to count it. You just passively avoid options that are evil.
Doing good is harder. You have to actively seek out and choose good things to do from a huge set. That means attempting to enumerate at least part of that set. You have to figure out how to actually do those things. As a public corporation, you have to figure out how to do things and spin it as being in the company's best interests.
Weak leaders who don't do evil, but who also fail to do good, or fail to actively advocate and define doing good, are as much part of the problem because they fail in their responsibility of teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in matters of service.
You would only need to "spin it as being in the company's best interests" if the employer truly believes that business on any basis other than service is the most profitable.
In a town in which I expected from experience to encounter a few cockroaches during any visit to any restaurant, I would find that a reasonable, positive, encouraging message to advertise with.
When was the last time Google abused its set of patents to screw competition? There are so many ways in which Google can be evil, but it consciously chooses not to be.
Edit: Grammar
From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/24/google-settles-phar...
"Investigators snared Google's ad system by creating seven undercover websites offering prescription drugs to be sold without a prescription or the completion of an online medical questionnaire, Martin-Weis said. An undercover investigator informed Google employees creating the advertising for the products that they were manufactured overseas and did not require customers to have a valid prescription, she said. "In each instance, despite this knowledge, Google employees created a full advertising campaign for each of the undercover websites," Martin-Weis said."
What google did here was illegal and it paid the price for it, but I don't see anybody getting directly harmed by google's decision, it was not google selling the drugs themselves or that the drugs were not upto the standards.
Besides by the same reasoning google should block all the illegal torrent sites, or wikileaks for that matter. Always remember your truth is not everybody else's truth, and it is better that the world's leading search engine does not take sides for you.
Clearly Google can do no evil, because everything they do is good in your eyes. Next thing you'll tell me that collecting advertising for child porn, hitmen, or crack is fine too. They don't make moral judgments. Except in China when they're having problems -- then they're suddenly all about morality.
I love all the jerk-wad Google apologists downvoting this. Few companies I can stand less than this self-righteous company and its blind followers.
But, no, it's Google who are the benevolent ones! Why? Well because their motto says so, duh?
Your example of child porn and crack is taking it too far and I am sure no such thing will happen. But if you want google to be enforcing all the laws for you, then maybe it should also detect your location and disallow all merchants catering to gay marriages in the search results, in states where it is prohibited.
Also I don't agree with your generalist approach to corporations that they are all equally evil. I for one would prefer a corporation which makes a bold statement about its policies being non evil and one which is ready to be called upon when it goes astray its path, than one which makes no such claims. To me this is not self righteousness but self discipline.
A centralized database of individual's profiles is a much more dangerous tool. Google's efforts to destroy the idea of online privacy are much more dangerous to society.
And stupid lawsuits are not irrelevant to the society, they hamper competition which in turn hampers technological progress. If you think Samsung Galaxy Tab and Ipad look similar, just look again at their screens side by side the difference between PLS and IPS is day and night, it is unfortunate that the court does not deem that as differentiating enough.
And they also dominate any local keywords. Instead of going to the actual business's website, the first 10 results tend to be Google places.
Google wants to control all information. By being the defacto middle man between all businesses and their customers they are able to carve a large chunk of advertising dollars.
Why is there a giant search bar at the top of the screen? I came here to look for flights, not to search the web.
Why is there a giant map at the top of the screen? I already know where I want to go. I don't need to look at a map to decide which destination I want. This part seems like more of a tech demo than anything.
The whole UI looks like it was designed by an engineer. For example when I want to book the flight, I get a tiny left/right arrow box-thing to increase the passenger count. Very poor choice of UI.
For example, I looked at a ticket from SEA -> SFO. When I zoomed in on SFO, I can easily see how much it is to San Jose or Oakland as well.
It's also just fun to enter your departure airport and see "where can I fly and for how much?"
This will be (if it isn't already) integrated with their search product. In other words, it'll be a part of search. You'll search for "flight from ny to sf" and that's what you'll see. Perfectly natural for them to have a consistent UI in their search product.
> Why is there a giant map at the top of the screen?
It's interactive. Try pulling the marker from one location to another. Very cool. I can also see the exact route that the flight will take. More intuitive.
I may have a general area of where I want to end up, but this lets you choose exactly where through a visual map. Again, very cool.
That's not the exact route the flight will take; it's the quickest (great circle) route. Airliners fly along airways.
I can also see the approximate route the flight will take, with layovers and other planned stops.
For me it just drags the map (Chrome 13.0.782.220 / OS X).
> I may have a general area of where I want to end up, but this lets you choose exactly where through a visual map. Again, very cool.
...is a map really helpful for this? How often do you want to go somewhere but not know the name? I'd rather they take all of that map space and use it for something else. I wouldn't mind something that says "hey, you could save $x on this flight if you went to $nearby_airport instead of the one you're on."
I'm on Chrome 15 (dev), which probably explains it.
> is a map really helpful for this?
I like maps. You never know what you'll notice on one.
Definitely. They could also just overlay that on the map like they do the popular destinations.
Wouldn't this have to be thanks to their relatively recent ITA acquisition? Not too surprised since QPX runs a few popular websites such as Orbitz and Kayak.
(I'm not saying it's not a feat to do it in such little time as any project does take time, but I would like to see credit where due.)
As a developer, I just HOPE that one day google takes a service like this and makes a long blog post out of it describing and bisecting every aspect of the app and how it was built. I'm tired of clicking 'view source' and finding nothing but minimized JS
In Chrome 12 you just right click the scripts pane in the developer tools and click "De-obfuscate Source".
In Chrome 13 you navigate to the scripts pane and click the "{}" icon. I honestly have no idea why they got rid of the right click functionality, but it's incredibly useful for me.
Disclaimer: I work for Google and this is how I feel every day :) it's a good feeling though!
Sorry but not impressed, unless it was done overnight. Nothing special there, just copying from already done sites.
"2. Google wants you to use our services because they're compelling not because we don't give you any other choice (ie "Don't be evil")."
Yeah, that's why they keep filling the first page with in house junk that would NEVER make it without the Google advantage. I am already seeing adsense ads for this all over the web, how much does Google pay the webmasters for them?