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> My view is that the people on the inside often can't see the forest for the trees.

Agreed. But it's also a problem of partial information - on both sides. People on the outside also have partial information about things coming from tech. We sometimes believe something done was definitely intended to be "evil", but usually isn't the case. We just have partial information about the actual reasons, and fill the rest in with our bias.

What I've usually noticed on HN is, if Apple does something "bad", people find mindbending justifications for it. But if Google/Microsoft does it, it was definitely "intended to be evil". Not that I agree with everything Google or Microsoft does.

As a Cynic that also works at a FAANG, I sometimes see instances of the "outside" reading too much into an action that the company takes.

However. From the inside you have to keep an eye on how your actions might look to the outside with little to no context.

The research my team does could be pulled in one of two ways: "wow thats really useful" and "wow that's fucking intrusive." Its down to us to demonstrate to the normal person in the street that we have done effective work to mitigate the downsides so that its a net benefit to society.

This means we have to actually think about how adversaries might use our stuff and put in meaningful blocks, rather than handwavey "oh but no one would be that evil/stupid/malevolent/power hungry"

large tech companies should get lots of continuous scrutiny, the current tech press are extremely shit at doing that. For example facebook kinda gets enough, but its just default hate, rather than "why are they doing that seemingly stupid thing?" Google is still gets a mostly free pass, and Apple are apparently the saints of privacy. They are all as bad as each other, tiktok, Google and Facebook for mostly the same reasons(pumping industrial amount of shite into young people's eyes), Apple for enabling child porn at industrial levels and undermining encryption in the process.

> Apple for enabling child porn at industrial levels and undermining encryption in the process.

I'm late in cleaning up old browser tabs, so I understand if there's no reply to this in a week-old discussion. How would you support the first half of this statement? Surely, there's far more CSAM on social networks than on iMessage (assuming that's where you were alluding).

> and of course management knows that when you're bootstrapping a new project/product, you need to get users fast, and the best way to get users is to do what's best for the user... at least for now

This is pretty explicitly said at a lot of companies, and I think that it's funny that many engineers care so little about business that they stop listening after the "do what's best for user" part and then get surprised when the "at least for now" part kicks in.

But then again, everyone says Google is evil to have made their own browser, but most of the world is using it - one would guess they must have done some good things with it (so taking humanity forward in some capacity etc.). Some are even criticizing Google from its own browser - I hate the fact that it made Firefox lose their market share, but I also understand it can't all be because the big corp brainwashed everyone (sure it would be a significant part though).

Maybe they’ve achieved this position for Chrome leveraging Google’s strength, not because Chrome’s quality? I can name a few reasons, like an aggressive marketing campaign for Chrome circa 2012 (promotion on Google search, bundling Chrome with popular apps) and sabotaging Google web apps in rivals, specially Firefox, that makes Chrome look better for Google’s users (basically everyone online).

I'm not sure anyone is calling them evil simply for making a browser. Tactics like forcing it to be pre-installed and unable to be removed on Android are somewhat evil, especially if they're part of an anti-competitive strategy.

IE6 was the browser "most of the world used" too. But really, surely, there was absolutely nothing done well in it. The only reason it was the most used browser was monopoly abuse. And while we can discuss the exact terminology of "a monopoly" and whether the Ie6 hegemony fit in there theoretically, that it came with the most used OS, really was the only reason it was popular.

With Chrome it is different. But at least a large part of its popularity comes from abused monopolies enforcing this software on people. Less than IE6 i'd say, but still a large part.

That’s not true. When IE6 launched it was definitely the fastest of its contemporary competitors. The problem with IE6 was not that it was bad at launch, but that it wasn’t touched for five years after launch, and didn’t properly disappear until 2016 or so.

Yes. And in that sense it's also similar to Chrome.

IE6 might have been the best competitor at first. But it certainly did not grow into the 9x% usage and staid there by being the best competitor. It only grew popular once MSFT started using its monopoly to push it.

It really sucked by then, compared to its competition.

While I understand your argument about IE6 which was shipped with Windows, Chrome didn't have that advantage for a long time - it's only now that Android phones and Chromebooks are shipped with it, but I don't know of a single person who does not download Chrome on their Windows Desktop too - even now when Edge is based on Chromium! Firefox has always been my primary browser (it still is, I'm typing this in Firefox), but say what you may, Chrome has taken the internet forward in many aspects. I work on an in-browser CAD tool, and I can see how vastly better Graphics performance is in Chrome when compared to Firefox for example (and it's just one example).

In the end it's still a management problem. I do not think it is rank-and-file employees' duty to think about long term strategies or outside perspectives on the company or anything like that. It should be the management's responsibility to clarify this to the outside world. Again Google's management completely fails at that.