For the first time I read some solid positions saying that Google is the new villain and what they are doing now makes us think at the first years of Microsoft (cool company back than, evil corporation now).
Does anyone remember 1995 and Win95? It looked like a silly patched upgrade of MS-DOS, it was even named MS-DOS 7 (following MS-DOS 6.22). The famous blue screen of death ruled the new operating system, they were blaming software piracy and the software, not the operating system. Time showed us that it really was a crappy operating system.
Does Google really looks like that? I only see clean software, clean products, user oriented and almost no failiures.
In a recent talk with Tudor (working at google now) about future Google products and where the company is going, he brought to my attention the Google philosophy, with ten things Google has found to be true.
Could it be only marketing bullshit, or do they really believe in that? From what I hear from the googlers I know, I would think that they believe those ten things.
Time will tell.
Well… Google decided at one point in time not to index images of the Abu Ghraib abuses. How goes that with “not being evil”? How is that going with “focus on the user”?
And speaking of Windows, … Windows really doesn’t suck that much anymore (and this since a long time). (It’s not really only my opinion (John Carmack and a few other guys agreed with this too).
I don’t believe that Google is evil as I don’t believe that Microsoft was when they released Win95. People want to make money, want to build good reputation and stay credible in the process in order to keep making money. PR is a big component in this game. Google’s list is not new and definitely not original, as far as PR goes. Johnson & Johnson (perceived by many as being even more evil than Microsoft) came out with a similar list they call their credo, a long time ago: http://www.jnj.com/our_company/our_credo/index.htm
Bottom line, Google came out with a lot of lessons learned from others’ experiences and mistakes, which helped them build good products. I am not trying to defend Microsoft, but they must have done something right too, since the crappy Win95 did not break their neck. Au contraire.
I agree that Microsoft has now some really really good products but they are seen as an evil big company… because there are some things more focused on money and market control than the user’s needs.
The question that keeps coming on my mind is: will Google become a huge sort of evil company like Microsoft, or will they stick with this philosophy that from my opinion is more than just PR?
Both of your comments object to some things I said, but you didn’t comment anything about the main idea of the article: is Google bad or not? Will it become bad or not?
The real question is: Why do you care? Would you actually refuse the job from Google if it turned evil? >:)
All this evil-not-evil is a discussion written by script-kiddies. Good programmers write good code regardless of the place where they write it. IMHO Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all rank pretty high among companies where it is desirable to be an employee. Amongst this, to my knowledge at least, Microsoft is known for paying pretty well (as far as wages go).
If what makes a company evil is the fact that it wants to become a monopoly, than Google is just as evil as Microsoft. A user on slashdot had a pretty insightful comment on this (can’t remember the link tho..)
I think I did answer part of the question in the first sentence of my response. “I don’t believe that Google is evil”. Will it become evil? I think they will do everything in their means to make as much money as they can. That includes trying to build monopolies where possible and then defend themselves using loopholes in the law. But I don’t think they will become “Oil Industry” evil, overthrowing governments of third world countries just for profit.
A cool article about this. 🙂
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40076/1