This flies counter with Google's "do no evil" statement and certainly doesn't paint a positive posthumous picture of Jobs.
Sad to see. I'm not surprised by the behaviour of Apple and others, but I thought better of Google than this.
Can we all agree that the word Evil has a more sinister use - ie knowing endangering lives, environmental damage, maybe closing press freedoms? And, therefore, we should be more selective in its application?
This is turning into another version of the Godwin's law - whereby it only takes so long before Google is accused of being evil (by breaking the not-be-evil pledge).
Google is now like Microsoft.
So if someone wants to say that Google is becoming like MSFT - say that (incidentally regarding MST being evil I recently read this: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/01/antitrust_kills....)
But I think that we should not dilute the definition of Evil.
Tell that to the employee who was "terminated within the hour."
But in all fairness, non-poaching agreements are not right. What if every tech company did this? You better hope you never have to leave that company after they hire you... Cause otherwise you'll have to consider a career change.
That is not the case here as Google and the others embroiled in this scandal were evil in that they willfully broke antitrust laws.
The problem with a word like evil is that it is so subjective. For some, obeying repressive laws in China would be the ultimate evil Google has committed. Using Google's own definition of evil, using the entire right side of the search results for self-advertising could be seen as evil.
However, ultimately I agree. Since evil is so subjective, very little information is provided by calling out Google in particular for being evil and thus hypocritical.
Condemning all the involved companies equally would make more sense.
(But I can't help feeling more disappointed Google was part of this).
Using that version of "evil", makes it a completely empty marketing statement. Surely no company does "real" evil on purpose.
Actually, you'd be hard pressed to find a legit company that does "real" evil even by accident.
> Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, said he "wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out," adding that the slogan was "also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent."
"Exploiting the users" doesn't fit your definition of "evil", but it appears to have fit Google's.
Occurs when individuals or groups embrace codes of conduct or standards of behavior for their own personal well being and social approval, yet violate those very same codes or standards to undermine the personal well being and social approval of others.
There's degrees of evil, but no shades. Evil was being done to people in this case.
The point of "Don't be evil" is to hold ourselves to a higher standard, and not less us take the easy way out. That, IMHO, is what made Google great in the first place.
I'm not going to comment on the specific case here - I don't know the facts - but the reason for "Don't be evil" is as much motivational as moral.