Let's be honest. Google wants us to use their services because the better they understand us, the better they can advertise to us. That's the profit model at Google. I don't begrudge them for it either. You've got to turn a profit if you want to keep the lights on.
I don't mean any offense, but the "Don't be evil" mantra is growing a bit tired. Evil is a strong word, and "not being evil" is a pretty low bar, IMO.
If you drove past a restaurant that had a big sign outside that said "no cockroaches here", what would you associate with it?
I have always been amazed that some people would consider "don't be evil" to be a motto with any power to motivate or lead people, since it ventures no strong opinion, and points in no clear direction.
"Do good" is far more costly, less likely to be politically correct, and more likely to invite ridicule. At the same time, this kind of heart-on-sleeve sincerity has more power to inspire. Sincerity, humility, innocence tend to achieve more than cynicism and jaded worldly wisdom.
> If you drove past a restaurant that had a big sign outside that said "no cockroaches here", what would you associate with it?
In a town in which I expected from experience to encounter a few cockroaches during any visit to any restaurant, I would find that a reasonable, positive, encouraging message to advertise with.
I think Don't be Evil is just easier, since you could make the argument that you could theoretically actually enumerate a list of things that most people would consider truly "evil". Do Good... well, good luck making that list.
So, uh... in hindsight I guess I'm just agreeing with you :-P
What I really meant is it's just easier to not do evil. You can look at something and say "that's evil, so I won't do it". Sure, sometimes that can cause you hardship, but you deal with it. Maybe evil is an uncountable, but you don't need to count it. You just passively avoid options that are evil.
Doing good is harder. You have to actively seek out and choose good things to do from a huge set. That means attempting to enumerate at least part of that set. You have to figure out how to actually do those things. As a public corporation, you have to figure out how to do things and spin it as being in the company's best interests.
Yes, it's also harder because it requires leaders with strength of character, willing to be misunderstood, willing to go against the grain, willing to stand alone at times, even in the face of opposition.
Weak leaders who don't do evil, but who also fail to do good, or fail to actively advocate and define doing good, are as much part of the problem because they fail in their responsibility of teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in matters of service.
You would only need to "spin it as being in the company's best interests" if the employer truly believes that business on any basis other than service is the most profitable.
Or, you know, they could just be taking a cut for connecting users with flights better and faster than their competitors. But please, keep thinking that google is hoping to populate some evil database with precious, precious data to make their advertising 0.000001% better. There's no way they are considering the obvious and profitable notion of getting serious about travel search.
No probably not 0.000001% better, but if they make it 0.1% better that's $28 million per year. That 0.1% is probably doable optimizing ad placements after long haul flights.
Would your complaint sound strange if it was worded, "Are you aware that several Googlers resigned after a petition ignored by 90% of the workforce was ignored by management?"
Ultimately, some policy on some random social networking site nobody uses is not much of a big deal. If you don't like the policy, don't use Google+. Easy.
"It seems that the G+ team is currently overwhelmed with technical issues of the current system -- that, combined with Vic's attitude, means that nymwars is not going to be addressed anytime soon. If engineers can scrape together 20% time to implement possible solutions and manage to convince decision-makers to let them roll out changes, we might see something."
It sounds less like it was ignored and more like it isn't a priority for a resource stretched team.
People still believe in a benevolent google after the App Engine scandal? Let me ask you something; what would Google have to do before you finally believe they're just a publicly traded company?
Really? Getting a bunch of developers locked into a platform and then raising prices sometimes 100 times more than it was? What would they have to do for it to be a scandal for you?
If Apple suddenly came out and said "right, from today on we want 75% of your sales instead of 30%" would you have the same reaction?
the first motivation of any for profit corporation, especially one as large and successful as Google, is profit. That is their entire reason for existence, don't fool yourself into believing otherwise.
People like to say this, maybe believing it fulfills some deep-seated need for cynicism, or makes the speaker feel wise and worldly. But what is your actual argument in support of this? Just saying it does not make it true.
If profit is the only motivation for decisions at Google, why did it pull out of China? I'm sure you're cynical and wise about that too, but here's what I can tell you. I saw Sergey up on stage saying the same things he said in this interview (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/interview-sergey-br...) and he got fiery and emotional about it. This is a guy who grew up in the Soviet Union until he was 6 and for him it is a very personal and ideological issue.
This corporations-as-profit-seeking-automata meme is old and tired. At the end of the day it's people who make decisions, and just as in every aspect of life people can have complex motivations for the decisions that they make.
You said profit was the "first" motivation. You haven't even justified that. Saying that a corporation has to at least break even to avoid being a charity is a far cry from your previous grandstanding. Just because a corporation has to make money doesn't mean that money is the "first" motivation for every decision. It doesn't explain why Google (not Sergey, Google) pulled out of China.
Um...they chose to go into China in the first place, and they didn't do it for charity work. A lot of people thought that was pretty evil.
In any case, the parent doesn't have to justify anything, because he's stating a relatively well-known argument: in the US, there's an obligation for corporate executives to maximize shareholder value. This point is debated (http://www.linkedin.com/answers/law-legal/corporate-law/corp...), but not to the extent that you're claiming.
I never said profit was their only motivation, but it is the reason they are a corporation, and not a charity.
Not necessarily. To parrot one of the other posters here: saying it doesn't make it true.
You could also argue that being a charity would be a very slow and inefficient means to achieving many of the things Google has set out to do. Being a for-profit corp gets them there faster and with fewer distractions not core to their purpose. I'd even venture to guess that it wouldn't be possible for Google to do what it does as a non-profit.
Sure, profit is a motivation, but it's certainly not the only (or even necessarily primary) motivation.
"That was a surprising realization. Companies often claim to be benevolent, but it was surprising to realize there were purely benevolent projects that had to be embodied as companies to work."
Do you mean "why did they make a big rant about pulling out of China and then not actually do it until they were literally cyber-attacked by the government"? Google was never all that big in China anyway. I'm sure their whole strategy around this was to get gullible people to buy into the "Don't do evil" nonsense.
>Sergey up on stage saying the same things he said in this interview and he got fiery and emotional about it.
Yea? So do politicians. Very passionate about what they're talking about until it comes time to vote. Then they follow their wallets.
>This is a guy who grew up in the Soviet Union until he was 6 and for him it is a very personal and ideological issue.
I know plenty of people who grew up in the Soviet Union. What exactly do you think goes on there that makes the "lucky few" who escape want to change the world? Maybe it did have some profound effect on him but it sounds more likely to be simple positioning. Getting people to think he really cares will cause them to defend him every time his company betrays that trust.
>This corporations-as-profit-seeking-automata meme is old and tired. At the end of the day it's people who make decisions, and just as in every aspect of life people can have complex motivations for the decisions that they make.
It may well be old and tired but it's how the world works. The only thing a CEO can get in trouble for not doing is increasing share holder value.
There is a lot of truth in this, but what impresses me most about Google is the way they have aligned their business model with their users interests and how that has enabled them to sacrifice short-term gains for long-term profits... it's a very Buffett-esque strategy that is difficult to pull-off.
Profit is a large motivation, for sure. There are some folks at Google (I'm guessing particularly on the business side), who probably have that as their primary motivation.
I think the core of Google is Larry, Sergey, Urs, Craig, and the other dozens of engineers I've read about (never met), and from their actions and words over a course of a decade, I think they've proved that a huge motivator for them all is to simple make the world better.
They've all got lots of money. I think the long term evidence shows that they care about doing good. I think their motivation for earning money is to expand their own ability to do good.
If someone disagrees, instead of responding with more argument I'd ask you to make a table and list everything Google done has done in one column and whether or not it seems "good" or "evil" in another. Then we could debate further.
Haha, if you want to disagree with my rose-colored review of why Google are so benevolent then please do a bunch of work so I can just sit here nitpick with nearly no effort on my part.
Google has a dual-class stock structure which gives class B holders (Schmidt, Page, Brin) 10 votes per share v.s. 1 vote per share for the rest.
This is relevant to your statement, because while it's pretty much a requirement for a publicly held company to pursue profit at any cost, it's not necessarily the case for a company run by the people that have a disproportionately large number of votes on major issues.
I'm pretty sure they still have over 50% of the votes, so together they can decide how Google will handle tough moral issues without any support from other shareholders.
I would argue that it's entirely plausible that a couple altruistic billionaires will sacrifice a few dollars in pursuit of non-evil (their opinion of non-evil mind you).
I saw a documentary about advertising agencies. They interviewed someone working at the marketing division of nike. She said her job was to get people to play sports. That of course is not true. Her job is to get people to buy shoes. I think your comment is misguided as well. Google really just wants people to click on ads.
Yes, Google wants to make more money. No question about it. But why are you so eager to reject any other possible motivation just because profit-making is involved? There is satisfaction in making the world a better place; why wouldn't Sergey & Larry want to get that satisfaction?
Exactly! I can't agree more on that. I can get a job which will give me trise as much as I make now with my startup+freelance jobs. But that wouldnt give me satisfaction. I suppose even seeing how people react on what you're up to on scale that Google operates has to be cool.
"I strongly disagree. Google wants us to use its services because at its core is a bunch of engineers that simply want to make the world better."
I don't doubt that the people working at google want to make the world better and work on cool software. I don't think that is the primary motivation of google as a company.
Wow, wtff? I don't understand how people can get so up in arms about Apple fanboys so long as google has fanboys like this.
Are you serious or trolling? I would expect if someone had such an ignorant/naive opinion they would at least be smart enough to not let other people know.
Here's what I see from google:
Search - a product that helps them sell ads
Gmail - a product that helps them sell ads
Google App engine - A platform where they used the hype of MapReduce et al to get people to join and then ramped up pricing drastically after a lot of people had been on the service (a service for which switching away almost certainly means a big rewrite) for years
Android - phone OS to help them sell ads.
I'm not seeing a lot of "make the world better" in there. Unless you mean "for Google executives".
Nope, I don't think this one is about advertising. My guess is they want to move into the hotel referral sales game (it's not secret they've been trying to move into this space for a while). Before you can move into hotels though, you have to have a good flight search engine.
I am reminded time and time again how much "Don't be evil" mantra still holds for Google whenever other evil corporations do things like suing companies for looks of a product, primarily to hamper competition, and when they take cut out of sale made on their platform without adding any value whatsoever to the payment platform.
When was the last time Google abused its set of patents to screw competition? There are so many ways in which Google can be evil, but it consciously chooses not to be.
Stupid lawsuits about product looks are almost irrelevant to the society and individual.
A centralized database of individual's profiles is a much more dangerous tool. Google's efforts to destroy the idea of online privacy are much more dangerous to society.
I think, google is the one protecting the idea of online privacy by not having stupid restrictions on exporting your own social data and by allowing the users to decide what gets shared with whom (circles).
And stupid lawsuits are not irrelevant to the society, they hamper competition which in turn hampers technological progress. If you think Samsung Galaxy Tab and Ipad look similar, just look again at their screens side by side the difference between PLS and IPS is day and night, it is unfortunate that the court does not deem that as differentiating enough.
Patents are just one way to be evil. Another way to be evil might be to let Canadian companies advertise illegally to sell prescription drugs in the US.
"Investigators snared Google's ad system by creating seven undercover websites offering prescription drugs to be sold without a prescription or the completion of an online medical questionnaire, Martin-Weis said. An undercover investigator informed Google employees creating the advertising for the products that they were manufactured overseas and did not require customers to have a valid prescription, she said.
"In each instance, despite this knowledge, Google employees created a full advertising campaign for each of the undercover websites," Martin-Weis said."
Google is not law enforcement and thank god for that. Unlike apple which strives to be the moral leader of the world that nobody needs.
What google did here was illegal and it paid the price for it, but I don't see anybody getting directly harmed by google's decision, it was not google selling the drugs themselves or that the drugs were not upto the standards.
Besides by the same reasoning google should block all the illegal torrent sites, or wikileaks for that matter. Always remember your truth is not everybody else's truth, and it is better that the world's leading search engine does not take sides for you.
So let me get this straight. Protecting your IP with legal patents is evil. Willfully and knowingly getting paid to advertise illegally distributed prescription drugs is fine and dandy.
Clearly Google can do no evil, because everything they do is good in your eyes. Next thing you'll tell me that collecting advertising for child porn, hitmen, or crack is fine too. They don't make moral judgments. Except in China when they're having problems -- then they're suddenly all about morality.
I love all the jerk-wad Google apologists downvoting this. Few companies I can stand less than this self-righteous company and its blind followers.
Laws, being constructed by humans are not infalliable, or otherwise new laws won't replace existing ones. I don't know how willing the google's decision to permit advertising of prescription drugs was, but I am assuming they went with it because there was no precedent for such a thing in the past (the article mentions this as this is the first time a search engine being held responsible). But I hope and am almost certain that google won't do such a thing again. We will see.
Your example of child porn and crack is taking it too far and I am sure no such thing will happen. But if you want google to be enforcing all the laws for you, then maybe it should also detect your location and disallow all merchants catering to gay marriages in the search results, in states where it is prohibited.
Also I don't agree with your generalist approach to corporations that they are all equally evil. I for one would prefer a corporation which makes a bold statement about its policies being non evil and one which is ready to be called upon when it goes astray its path, than one which makes no such claims. To me this is not self righteousness but self discipline.
What you might be seeing is the response of intelligent people who make up their own minds, and who consider Google overall to be much less evil than, oh, I dunno, MicrosoftOracleAppleFacebooketc? At least they have a bold statement that people like us, the media and their own employees will measure them up against, every hour of every day. Whether they always unfailingly measure up to it isn't as important as having it there. Especially for a profit-driven company that has unending opportunities to get just a bit more evil.
Even worse is the Orwellian Google love that's shitting all over this thread. Bill Gates started a charity because charities suck so bad and he wanted his billions to accomplish something. Steve Jobs doesn't even take money for his work (he gets stock options that he often doesn't even bother to extercise), hell, even Larry Ellison signed a thing to donate most of his fortune to charity when he dies.
But, no, it's Google who are the benevolent ones! Why? Well because their motto says so, duh?
Then maybe Steve Jobs should use his salary to make his products affordable to third world countries to do some real good than serving the riches of the world, and maybe Larry Ellison should have honored Sun Microsystem's policies of not suing anybody who uses Java APIs.
The point wasn't that Jobs/Ellison/Gates are great role models. I was showing that everyone that many would consider evil has also shown benevolence. There is nothing that makes the google founders stand out. In fact, I can't really think of anything they've done to make the world a better place besides say they want to. At least these other guys have done something.
I think you're taking the "evil" part a little to seriously. Is Microsoft really "evil" by pressuring you into a tie-in to their products? They're not killing anybody. They're not defrauding anybody. They're creating an annoyance for their customers. That's a far cry from evil, but in half-serious Internet jargon it's "evil".
Whaaaat? Don't you know thew world is a better place if Google gets that $30 per credit card instead of organic search? Or now travel money, G offers, local etc.
the naievety is amusing. what site isn't using some sort of tracker to better serve you ads or market to you better using your information to sell you something.
I don't mean any offense, but the "Don't be evil" mantra is growing a bit tired. Evil is a strong word, and "not being evil" is a pretty low bar, IMO.