It really sucks when a company that supposedly has ethics high in their set of values does things like this.

If they would just come out and say we're just like all the other cutthroats out there it would be one thing, but to have all these lofty ideals and then to do stuff like this at the same time creates a real problem.

People will start to think that this kind of patent is ok. It's not. It's a web based user interface, a hole in a page with a couple of buttons next to it. There have been many sites before google that started out with an interface like that. The only thing special about the google page is that they kept it like that.