Comment by beatle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beatle | Hacker News Reader

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A few points:

-Google is also in the hardware business (Chromebooks) and soon (Motorola).

-Google is the target of several antitrust and patent lawsuits.

Two years ago, Google offered to buy Yelp, but the talks broke down. Last year, Google introduced Places, a Yelp-like service for listing businesses and collecting consumer reviews. A Google search for a restaurant often displays the Places entry — linked to a map, user reviews and other services — ahead of Yelp. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/technology/googles-to-face...

Actually here's a more complete (& funny) list from http://brianshall.com/content/google-are-pussies

    Yelp gets popular? Copy their info, shove Yelp to the bottom of the page and put Google Places and reviews at the top.
    
    Groupon won't sell? Spend billions from other businesses to destroy them.
    
    Twitter and Facebook innovate on search? Take their content, whine when they try and stop you then spend billions to prevent their growth and hopefully destroy them.
    
    Apple working on a touchscreen smartphone? Spend billions from another business and copy everything you can, down to swipes and apps.
    
    Need a smartphone operating system with Java. Take Java and use it for your own ends. 
    
    Need a location mapping technology and Skyhook won't sell? Spend billions from your monopoly profits and strongarm your partners and drive Skyhook out of business.
    
    Buy up the big travel search sites.
    
    Claim you are open source but share nothing related to what your business claims to be about -- search, and nothing related to how you make your money -- advertising
    
    Claim you are open and standards based but control who gets access to your smartphone operating system
    
    Like all rich monopolists, they spend millions hiring high priced lobbyists and public relations teams inside the Beltway -- for their direct benefit

The list goes on...

> Two years ago, Google offered to buy Yelp, but the talks broke down. Last year, Google introduced Places, a Yelp-like service for listing businesses and collecting consumer reviews.

So... what? At least they tried to buy the technology before building it in-house, which is more than what most companies do.

Apple has run out of businesses a lot of companies by stealing their ideas outright and shipping them as part of MacOS (Konqueror widgets, Spotlight, etc...).

You conveniently forgot this.

>>> A Google search for a restaurant often displays the Places entry — linked to a map, user reviews and other services — ahead of Yelp.

You should calm down, the furiousness with which you defending Apple would only lead to people assuming that you are not taking their points seriously.

Now, Yelp case is where Google acted selfish. There is a thin line between a commercial entity being evil (not kill-people evil but steal-your-ideas-or-money-or-data evil) and it being selfish. Google definitely acted selfish, just like any other corporation should and does. The line that separates selfishness and evil is unfortunately subjective (and often biased) which means that while you see something as clearly evil, others find it just selfish - I am pretty sure that no one here is going to deem these actions selfless; we are not that naive.

Now, to your points here and at other places:

(1) Google made in Open Source Operating System. It is by definition (with some exceptions to how it was enforced), open source. If there was no Android, there would have probably been no competition to Apple and hence no leverage against them.

(2) Android is not a necessary software; which means that if arbitrary restrictions like "Only to be used on labour-friendly devices" are put, there is no way a third party OEM is going to sign it; there are replacements available and we have already seen (with R. Stallman) that overly offensive campaigns do not go well with majority.

(3) Google is not charging anything directly for the OS. This means that they cannot put forward conditions to manufacturers like "I will charge you $10 less, if the $10 goes to the labourers"; Apple should. Whether or not if that is a possibility for Apple is a different story altogether (one that I cannot comment about, I have no experience in Chinese Political system or in device manufacturing).

(4) I am from sort-of a third world country. Our evil is way different from your evil - labour exploitation and fierce competition practices that we see, are way worse. While you are focusing on First world problems (e.g. order of information when a place is searched on Google, which BTW is not affected directly - the changes were on Google Places) only these companies are fairly global in their user base and development sites. There is a rating of evil that hence we have to consider; some actions that they are involved in on some continents would be way worse than others that they do on the North American and European continents. Evil - Good is definitely not a binary object.

Hey beatle, are you a PR rep for Apple? You've become kind of conspicuous coming into every single thread on HN that mentions Apple and either defending their actions or trying to deflect attention on to some other issue. It's extremely consistent and you talk very little on any other topics, you're a one-issue sort of guy.

Google has PR people too: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=yanw

Wow, great example, thanks.

I don't think most people would class moving into new markets with existing competitors as "evil".

moving into new markets, and using their dominant position in search to dominate that market IS evil.

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