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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

I agree that's the most worrying sign. In the past Google won by making what people needed. But it seems clear that was not their primary motivation for SPYW. Their primary motivation was clearly fear of Facebook. That hasn't made Google evil yet. It's just the first step down the road to mediocrity. Which may lead to evil in the long term, because to make lots of money despite being mediocre, you generally have to do evil things.

I don't think it's that interesting that anti-Google posts get reflexively upvoted though. The cause is one of the more common and least discriminating aspects of human nature: whenever any person or organization is successful, there are a lot of people who want to see them cut down to size.

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I think the last year has been fairly tough on Google (ever since Page took over). It's been the first real time that Google has put a concerted effort into

a)making money outside of pure search ads

b)cutting expenses

It's this sudden turn into becoming a real company that has shocked and angered lots of people and burned up most of the good will capital they accrued till then.

As painful as it is for us freeloaders, this might be a good thing for Google as a company that will help ensure long-term viability and growth.

It echoes Bezos's push into uniforming the architecture inside of Amazon http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3102800

Painful, but may ultimately be necessary. Google's far too long been the place of half-finished ideas.

It's this sudden turn into becoming a real company that has shocked and angered lots of people and burned up most of the good will capital they accrued till then.

If being a "real" company means only thinking about profits, well, then it is only fair that you lose the goodwill capital that you accrued by not only thinking about profits if you stop doing that. Is this the case with Google? For me the jury is still out, but it is undeniable that my OnyProfitsCountRank(tm) algorithm is getting a lot of signals that Google might be trailing the lots of Microsoft, Apple and Facebook.

I'm genuinely curious: Why the downvotes? Possible reasons:

A) Because I wrote that If being a "real" company means only thinking about profits, well, then it is only fair that you lose the goodwill capital that you accrued by not only thinking about profits if you stop doing that

B) Because I wrote that it is undeniable that my OnyProfitsCountRank(tm) algorithm is getting a lot of signals that Google might be trailing the lots of Microsoft, Apple and Facebook.

C) Both

SPYW certainly seems like the only real, new issue. It seems to me like a clear case of sacrificing a product's short-term quality for long-term quality. I.e. diverting as much traffic as possible to G+ will drive up usage, which will give Google more data on which to optimize search results.

It strikes me as analogous to Apple's move from OS9 to OSX. OSX performed poorly at first, but it was a necessary if painful infrastructure change for the sake of the product's future.

Another reason I'm not worried is that Google's only lock-in is search quality. If a challenger appears and really does perform better for searches, then people will eventually shift over. I think this is ultimately what will keep Google from going completely off the rails vis-a-vis search.

Conversely, I think it's what allows Facebook to get away with a lot. Its lock-in feature is ubiquity/network-effect, which is at best orthogonal to quality of product.

> whenever

Why doesn't it happen to Apple, then? Apple is much much more successful than Google, and, arguably, more "evil".

What I think people react badly to, is hypocrisy (real or perceived). Apple does what it says and doesn't apologize. Google has this whole blurry theory of "not being evil" which many of its own actions prove false, hence the backlash.

Apple is not responsible for large chunks of Internet infrastructure, such as search, advertisements, email, maps, analytics, and many other services that are automatic "go-to" solutions for hundreds of millions of users of Google services. They just want to sell you an overpriced phone/table/laptop (God I can't believe I just defended Apple!).

They do increasingly dominate the online music business with iTunes, much in the same way that Amazon does with digital books, but that is nothing compared to the global Internet reach of Google and hence a higher level of responsibility and scrutiny.

Also, at least at the moment, Apple's profit model is easy to understand - you pay money, receive something in return and they pocket the profit. Google's model is based upon understanding who you are so they can place the best adverts in front of you. When you're an upstart, that "who you are" bit doesn't seem to matter too much, when you're a behemoth, it becomes pretty scary.

"High trees catch lots of wind" (Dutch proverb)

"it" manifests itself differently for Apple. Apple, not being in the content hosting as much as Google, gets attacked on its environmental (Greenpeace) and its social (Foxconn reports) stances, not necessarily because it is behaving badly relative to its peers, but also because it is a more visible target.

I don't believe Google is intentionally being evil, but they are definitely behaving a lot like the company they coined the phrase because of.

In the 90s Microsoft was using it's huge installed user base advantage to push it's less popular and new-to-the-game browser on a group of people, while also keeping out the competition with some unfair ways.

This seems identical to how Google is using it's position as leader of search to push it's late to the game and less popular social network onto it's users, while keeping out the competition.

Changing your search engine is easy. Changing your OS is not.

How about changing your webmail provider, your mobile OS and the cloud services integrated with it?

http://www.dataliberation.org/

I'm not saying Google is perfect, but they seem to take customer choice seriously. That's the exact opposite of Microsoft 10 years ago.

That's where the android strategy Is paying

That Verizon can change the default search engine to Bing? Let's see a Windows Phone phone ship with Google as the default search engine...

Another common aspect of human nature: Interpreting people in the worst possible way.

My opinion of Google has turned from positive to negative in the last 5 years, and it has nothing to do with how big or successful they are.

Google has been very successful for years. They've only been losing their high esteem in the last year or less. At least in my social circle.

>But it seems clear that was not their primary motivation for SPYW. Their primary motivation was clearly fear of Facebook.

This is my main issue with Google. Most of their products/services were created/acquired not because they want to innovate or create something awesome. it's usually to copy or kill newer and more innovative start-ups and products or more established companies (many of Google's services are mediocre versions given away for free).

Case in point: Yelp, Groupon, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Skyhook, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc.

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