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> doing what's best for the rest of the industry obviously isn't something Google cares about. I am sad that over the last year or so this has gone from a quie

by cnlwsu 16y ago

> doing what's best for the rest of the industry obviously isn't something Google cares about. I am sad that over the last year or so this has gone from a quiet fact of it being a corporation to a in-your-face "Google: do no evil unless you can make money". I guess each generation needs a company to fantasize about being a righteous white knight.

loewenskind 16y ago
I never bought into the whole "do no evil" bit, but I sure got sick of dealing with the army of people who did.
- lsc 16y ago
  It's interesting to watch google... they are actually handling themselves /much better/ than I would expect them to... but I think there are solid business reasons for this. Google makes money because it uses data most of us consider private to serve up ads for us. If enough people stop trusting google, they will no longer be able to do this. Consumer trust is integral to their business. and there will always be tension, as to make money, they need to use at least some of that data to serve us ads, and some of us will take offense to that. I mean, really, there's no way they can run gmail profitably without doing things that I feel violates my privacy. Now, in the short term, they could earn boatloads of money by violating this trust in a more direct manner... but in the long term, it would kill them. I think that ever since they went public there has been a constant war there, short term profits, vs long-term viability. My own personal expectation was that this trust of google would not have lasted much past their IPO... it has lasted much longer than that. Personally, I find it odd that now that this trust is eroding, people seem to be complaining more about net neutrality than about google pushing the limits of what they can do with our private data. Of course, I'm a hosting provider, and thus oppose regulation of my market.
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    Good points about Google. Markets must be regulated. I know of no credible market theory that thinks there should be no regulation. As far as I can tell this is just a bizarre invention of American Libertarians.
    - lsc 16y ago
      If you could write laws to regulate the search market, what laws would you write? how would you ensure this wouldn't kill the next google competitor?

by cnlwsu 16y ago

loewenskind 16y ago

I never bought into the whole "do no evil" bit, but I sure got sick of dealing with the army of people who did.

lsc 16y ago
It's interesting to watch google... they are actually handling themselves /much better/ than I would expect them to... but I think there are solid business reasons for this. Google makes money because it uses data most of us consider private to serve up ads for us. If enough people stop trusting google, they will no longer be able to do this. Consumer trust is integral to their business. and there will always be tension, as to make money, they need to use at least some of that data to serve us ads, and some of us will take offense to that. I mean, really, there's no way they can run gmail profitably without doing things that I feel violates my privacy. Now, in the short term, they could earn boatloads of money by violating this trust in a more direct manner... but in the long term, it would kill them. I think that ever since they went public there has been a constant war there, short term profits, vs long-term viability. My own personal expectation was that this trust of google would not have lasted much past their IPO... it has lasted much longer than that. Personally, I find it odd that now that this trust is eroding, people seem to be complaining more about net neutrality than about google pushing the limits of what they can do with our private data. Of course, I'm a hosting provider, and thus oppose regulation of my market.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  Good points about Google. Markets must be regulated. I know of no credible market theory that thinks there should be no regulation. As far as I can tell this is just a bizarre invention of American Libertarians.
  - lsc 16y ago
    If you could write laws to regulate the search market, what laws would you write? how would you ensure this wouldn't kill the next google competitor?