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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 Go
by bradleyland 15y ago
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.
- yanw 15y agoThey specify what they mean by "evil": http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/googevil http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/googevil
- vtail 15y agoHere is the direct link: http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/tenthings.html http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/tenthings.html
- breck 15y agoI 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.
- jey 15y agoWhat Google "wants" as an entity is different from what the individual component humans want. (i.e. the agent 'Google' is distinct from the agents that it is composed of)
- abraham 15y agoGoogle is strongly guided by the agents that shepherd it.
- blub 15y agoYou mean agents like Eric Schmidt, that declare online privacy as dead?
- abraham 15y agoOnline privacy never existed. If it is online it can be leaked, stolen, or shared.
- vladd 15y agoAre you aware that several Googlers resigned after a petition signed by 10% of the entire engineering workforce was ignored by management? See https://plus.google.com/100010618263697835406/posts/azTW8hvw7fx#100010618263697835406/posts/azTW8hvw7fx https://plus.google.com/100010618263697835406/posts/azTW8hvw... for details.
- jrockway 15y agoWould 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.
- abraham 15y ago"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.
- danssig 15y agoPeople 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?
- throwaway32 15y agothe 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.
- joelhaus 15y agoThere 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.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jorangreef 15y agoMany people try to earn profit, but the best way to earn profit is to seek to serve. Profit is a result, not a goal. Service is a goal, the result of which is profit. Get your motivation right and the methods will follow.
- haberman 15y agoPeople 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-brin-on-googles-china-gambit/ 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.
- nutjob123 15y agoI can't tell if this is sarcastic or not.
- sbochins 15y agoI 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.
- icandoitbetter 15y agoYes, 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?
- nazar 15y agoExactly! 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.
- sbochins 15y agoI was responding to this: "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.
- danssig 15y agoWow, 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".
- teej 15y agoOr, 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.
- fleitz 15y agoNo 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.
- blub 15y agoOh, but Google is very serious about ads. They will make this product as good as it needs to be to sell ads, and no better. Making money from selling things and leaving the user's data alone is just not in the DNA of this company.
- LearnYouALisp 15y ago"Blub"--The nerve!
- angryasian 15y agothe 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.
- jorangreef 15y agoIf 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.
- rudiger 15y agoThink of the Golden Rule: Should one treat others as one would like others to treat oneself? (the positive form) Should one not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated? (the negative form) I consider the maxim “Don't be evil” to be more actionable, useful, and meaningful than “Be good.”
- kelnos 15y agoI 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
- rudiger 15y agoSadly, the set of "evil" things is also uncountably infinite.
- kelnos 15y agoTrue. I thought about that in the wrong way. 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.
- purplefruit 15y agoNope, 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.
- sharmajai 15y agoI 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. Edit: Grammar
- crenshaw 15y agoPatents 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. From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/24/google-settles-pharmacy-ad-probe_n_935183.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/24/google-settles-phar... "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."
- sharmajai 15y agoGoogle 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.
- crenshaw 15y ago
- orblivion 15y agoI 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".
- itswindy 15y agoWhaaaat? 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.