In this case, I'm asking you to consider EE from a different perspective, and whether what they did was worthy of scorn. My hope is that you'll soften your hatred of EE, but I don't expect everyone to come to that conclusion. Not every argument is a total negation of the counter position, I suppose.
Now, I realize that may sound like snark, but I actually mean it on a deeper level than that. Why should I care about their internal motivations? EE chose how they would interact with me. It was their choice. They get to live with the consequences. If they had wanted to be perceived differently, it's incumbent upon EE to decide to treat me differently. It's not my responsibility to try to "understand" them, any more than it is my responsibility to interact with any other company in exactly the way they want. That's freedom, for the both me and EE.
You're equally free to defend them, and I was free to read the defense out of curiosity, which is why I'm posting at all. But the end result is the same; I know EE by their actions, and the result is what it is.
To me, EE is not deserving of the campaign against them. They're not patent trolls - they built a business that added value, and then they applied some spammy marketing to it. Patent trolls deserve to be taken down with a passion. EE, not so much. Thanks again for your comments.
>It’s a little known fact that top contributors to EE got VIP treatment. They were flown to different locations around the world, wined & dined, and got lots of cool swag (computers, tablets, etc). When the experts came to visit us in San Luis Obispo, it was all-out fun for them. Experts on Experts Exchange have the potential to get some sweet perks.
Some of that money could've easily gone into improving the UX and adding features to the site which seemed to be stuck in 1999, or failing which, reducing the price of subscriptions. Throwing expensive swag around when there are better places to put it is a bad idea.
The thing about EE is that it is not gossip. People hate EE and they don't hate it because someone told them to hate it--they already had come to that conclusion on their own. I always hated EE and when I talked to other people about it, I found out they also held the same opinion, many times a fierce hatred of it. There was no campaign to build the hate; the hate was already there, all discovered independently by frustrated coders looking for an answer.
Maybe the evil intentions of EE were not real. But there are moments when I am coding when I want to tear all of my hair out. That emotion is real and won't be forgotten.
Speak for yourself. I think free software is pretty much a net good. It's a shame we're not at a point yet where it's the status quo; I'm glad it is for content.
They didn't, and apparently still don't - so they deserve whatever people think about them. Instead of making excuses, you need to apologize - it's that simple.
If your business model really, really, needs cheating your users - then the ONLY moral way out is to quit, no matter what other good things are there.
The serious point is, it does matter what you as a company do and employees are responsible for that. You made Google searches work worse, you made our lives difficult when we looked for information. You polluted the web.
There's the letter of the law and there's the spirit of the law. EE may have been compliant with the letter of Google's law at the time, but if you'd asked Google and Google users specifically they would've told you it was sleazy/not ok.
Google eventually understood the sleaziness and changed their policy to address this specifically. End users also understood the sleaziness and went elsewhere.
So, yes, what they did is worthy of scorn.
Okay, as a favor to you, I will hate EE 10% less for 24 hours. But I'll still filter their links out of my Web searches, and warn people away from them at every opportunity. The reason? They're unapologetic parasites.
Happy now?