7 ms·
I was excited by “Don’t be evil” back in the early days. But maybe they should’ve chosen “Don’t be stupid or evil” because their amnesia, arrogance and careles
by stephenhuey 8y ago
I was excited by “Don’t be evil” back in the early days. But maybe they should’ve chosen “Don’t be stupid or evil” because their amnesia, arrogance and carelessness remind me of so many hilarious sad stories from the early days in the tech industry as recounted in this book which I own:
In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters
- randomsearch 8y ago“Don’t forget not to be evil” I don’t believe the founders have had personality transplant, so why has google become evil?
- zdkl 8y agoIt's not evil it's shareholder... value... optimisation ! I blame corporate on that one.
- gldalmaso 8y agoSeems like given enough time, any company will lose whatever value it tried to uphold in the past in favor of shareholders. Once it reaches that point, every business optimization is in detriment of either the final user or society, quite often both.
- MrEfficiency 8y agoShareholders= You and your parents and your grandparents retirement. This need to have 7-13% yearly returns force companies to grind their employees and customers. I like capitalism, but I can easily see capitalism doing evil things to create short term profit.
- smolder 8y ago"I can easily see" sounds like it's a hypothetical, but destruction of real value for short term monetary gain is plainly visible all around. I've probably ran into 1000s of real world examples.
- waterhouse 8y agoDon't the founders have a majority of the voting stock? Do they have a legal obligation to "maximize shareholder value" for the other shareholders?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- taneq 8y agoPartly they're stepping back a bit and partly they've drunk their own koolaid?
- zimbatm 8y agoMost of the evil on this world is caused by too many levels of abstraction.
- hipjiveguy 8y agoAbsolute power corrupts absolutely