4 ms·

I agree, I doubt there can be much difference between Fortune 500's company A and Fortune 500's company B, in the long run. I thought, though, that "being evil

• JohnBooty 6y ago
  I thought, though, that "being evil" (whatever that means) came from some kind of instinct of survival experienced when facing the threat of bankruptcy, or at least very strong market pressures. And and it didn't seem to me that Google had been facing these yet. It's even more difficult than fighting for survival. A publicly-traded company can't just survive, turning a tidy profit every year. It needs to grow at a rapid pace or else those stocks (and therefore the executives' stock options) are useless. Google didn't need to fight to survive, but they also didn't have the option of remaining "Google, circa 2004" or whatever we think their last year as a mostly-good company was.