EtherPad Back Online Until Open Sourced
etherpad.com
etherpad.com
I'm thinking of how many desks such a decision would cross at my company (publicly traded, ~1500 people) and it's amazing that Google turned it around in two days.
Sure the fact that they actually try to damage control gives them lots of points, but let's not kid ourselves, without the outrage, nothing would have happened.
Google promises to open-source the code.
I call this a win for nonevil. Any sufficiently advanced damage control is indistinguishable from ethics.
And at that point your precious "don't be evil" guidance is worthless because at best you are so inconsequentially less evil than the run of the mill heartless corporation that you really haven't decreased the amount of evil being done in the world.
References? Google censors it's Chinese version - is that all you are referring to?
Exactly which part is evil? 1) Buying AppJet 2) Publicly announcing their intentions for the service 3) Listing to feedback 4) Changing their intentions for the service (on a weekend)
This is a serious question, btw. Obviously shutting down a service isn't evil on it's own - it's a net good for the world if no one care about it (saving electricity, giving people more fulfilling work etc).
Perhaps your argument is that they should have responded quicker. If that's the case then would it be possible for you to lay out your proposal for quicker responses?
We call it 'evil' (to some degree) when a big supermarket starts up on the edge of town, shuts down the small independent shops and offers you the choice of supermarket-butcher and supermarket-baker or nothing, don't we?
We call it 'evil' (to some degree) when governments or industry forcibly buy up houses and turf people out to build a railway or reservoir, and offer people the choice of whatever-the-government-wants-to-pay or nothing, yes?
Yes Google have turned it around very quickly, but in the context of the parent post "we like EtherPad let's use our massive amounts of cash to hire their developers and incidentally ruin their product but who cares" is not on the same level of goodness as "we like EtherPad let's use our massive amounts of cash to train our developers and make our product so good that people move over by choice".
Google has managed to stay significantly less evil than the standard for large companies. They're big enough now that, no matter what they do, people will accuse them of insidious things, but it's hard to argue that they don't represent an incremental step in the right direction. It's not obvious how much of this is self-determined and how much is the zeitgeist of the internet, but I'm not sure that's too important.
You could start with the fact that they bought Etherpad in the first place. In its heyday, a certain leviathan that comes to mind would have simply killed it by any means necessary. (And then stood gloating over its remains, cackling and pumping its fists in the air. And saying "it's just business" to anyone who had a problem. But I digress.)
Comparing how Google uses their power to how Apple uses theirs, or what Microsoft would do with the power they wish they still had, I'm glad Google have managed to preserve the evil-to-non-evil ratio that they have, even if it is far from zero. As Sarah Vowell once said, don't diss the lesser of two evils; less evil is a big deal!
Buying the competition in order to shut them down seems, well, evil.
Make no mistake, I'm glad that google is less evil than other corporations its size, but I don't delude myself into imagining that they fully, or even remotely, live up to their "don't be evil" mission.
Everyone else seems to have concluded that they purchased EtherPad to get their people, not (specifically, at least) to shut them down.
Do you disagree with that?
Why is Google is significantly less evil? Because they pursue their interests in a way that is far more aligned with the public interest than any other corporation of their size ever (that I've observed). Making the internet faster. Digitizing all the world's books. Sure, it's all self-interested, but it's self-interested in a more enlightened way than we've ever seen in a large corporation. How can that not matter?
Do they still do evil things? Duh. This isn't binary.
I also disagree with you that their "Don't be evil" slogan is a weak one. It's just a slogan, but based on numerous things I've read, it does put some pressure on their decision makers to consider these things. Who else does that?
Actually, I disagree with pretty much everything you said. I don't accept your cynical slippery-slope argument at all, and you haven't provided any evidence for it.
Already quoted: http://simonwillison.net/2009/Dec/6/ethics/
A similar sentence could be constructed about altruism, though it might be hard to keep it as short.
i suspect this is more a (cynical) definition of "advanced damage control" than a definition of "ethics" (in which case it's not a win for nonevil; it's evil being smart enough that you can no longer tell the difference).
As much as some of us love to hate Google, you have to agree they deserve some kudos too.
Assuming Google acquired all of the IP in etherpad, they deserve quite a few kudos :-P
In this case, the initial end product may not be needed by google, as it will most likely require a significant restructure to fit in with Wave, but this shows that they appreciate the original idea to the point where they are prepared to let it stand on it's own merit.
The greatest gain to google (as with most of their acquisitions) is the talent. Its a new form of hiring - you get to see the quality and end results of the team, taking much of the guesswork out of the hiring process.
So I wish the guys from AppJet all the best, thanks for your work so far, may you go on to do great things from your new positions! And thanks for etherpad too!
This sort of thing is one reason why desktop software is still superior - our helpdesk software company sold out and closed down years ago and it didn't affect us, for instance.
I would hate it to start a precedent where every takeover goes:
Takeover with intent to open source site, but announce site closure. Lots of fuss and free marketing profile raising. Pretend reversal of intentions and announce site can stay, appear benevolent and wonderful.
From what I've seen in companies large and small: Outrage works against the outraged, most of the time.
This is great news.
And yet, I learned something.
Also, if support becomes too much of a burden, I could see google having them train 1 or 2 google employees to do a lot of it.
These guys are some of the best real-time web programmers in the world. Google just spend "low eight figures" and tried to kill their product immediately. They clearly want them to spend as much time on wave as possible, so they'll find a way to make that happen.
WHAT? Come on. Do you not think other programmers do real-time web things, and have been for years? sigh
Saying that real-time/comet/AJAX/[technology name] isn't hard is meaningless. I can easily say, for example, that "programming in C" isn't hard. I just don't see what your point is.
I hate this trend of coming up with fantastic buzz words and making people believe they're something new/hard/fantastic.
2. because people have been doing it for a long time means it isnt hard? there isnt any way to read that that makes any sense, brain surgeons have been around a while, its still pretty hard.
like most people who complain about buzzwords you are actually putting more emphasis on the 'buzzwords' than the actual point.
I find the recent trends in the industry to be extremely depressing.
In particular, they probably are the best people to join the Wave team because not only have they been doing real-time, they've been doing a real-time app that is very similar to wave, since they're both essentially documents (though wave is a little more like a series of sometimes-nested documents, but it's all the basically the same).
1. "Real-time" is nothing new
2. There are people who have been working in 'real time' web apps for yearsGoogle is Big, but apparently does not suffer from this problem, so I can only conclude is NOT "stupid".