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Part of the answer is that people now are forgetting just how much goodwill Google had with the tech folks around the time Google came out with Chrome. It was o

Part of the answer is that people now are forgetting just how much goodwill Google had with the tech folks around the time Google came out with Chrome. It was open source! You could easily run it without Google! It was a titan squaring up against Internet Explorer, that did horrible things like not follow web standards or invent its own. And it was really really good. It took a handful of years for tech folks to see Google (and Chrome) the way they do now. Here is the most voted HN post from the time of Chrome's release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=291946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=291946

eieio 3y ago
Linking to that thread is super helpful, thanks! This feels largely correct to me and I was in the same camp at the time re: Google sentiment. “Google kills products” has been a meme for so long that I had kinda forgotten.
libraryatnight 3y ago
It's one of my great regrets that I believed for any second that Google was different and the "Don't be evil." was a real promise. It felt like the internet coming from the status quo, but the status quo was just absorbing the internet.