the funny thing is that Google itself played a huge role into making all of us raise the bar of what can be expected as a good behavior for a company. To get so

the funny thing is that Google itself played a huge role into making all of us raise the bar of what can be expected as a good behavior for a company. To get some open standards, get some open source stuff, get some free APIs, get some free services, get some interesting tools without costly subscriptions etc All the things we didn't get from microsoft. If you were a student from a poor country you were cut off all the good things because you didn't have msdn subscription (and then blame pirating...). I remember when I though "microsoft has to be stupid, they are walling off potential developers for their platform, if they only made stuff more developer friendly they would benefit greatly". I didn't mind that they were making money, I was concerned that they they got in the way, the didn't let you. Google is certainly repeating some of these mistakes, but generally feels more friendly to users and developers for its platforms. Other issues with Google about privacy etc, you cannot really compare it with a company that didn't recognize the value of "the internet" until too late. These are novel issues, and mixing profit with such sensible topics will certainly cause problems, whatever your business model is. The interesting things is that we demand that from Google, because we know it's possible to do better, and the irony is that Google itself (among others) made us raise the bar of that acceptance.