5 ms·

This is one of those stories I'll tell the next time someone asks me what's so special about the "hacker" community.

• dschobel 17y ago
  And what it says about Google. +5 years into their life as a big public company and they still "get it". I'm thinking of how many desks such a decision would cross at my company (publicly traded, ~1500 people) and it's amazing that Google turned it around in two days.
  • jackowayed 17y ago
    A weekend day, too. At most companies you probably wouldn't even get your no until Monday at best.
  • zitterbewegung 17y ago
    Maybe it has to do with the fact that engineers aren't second class citizens in google? I bet it has all to do with corporate culture.
  • vaksel 17y ago
    if they "got it" they wouldn't have done it in the first place. It's just damage control for them, Sure the fact that they actually try to damage control gives them lots of points, but let's not kid ourselves, without the outrage, nothing would have happened.
    • Eliezer 17y ago
      Other companies would "damage control" by re-enabling new pad creation until their preferred new version came out. Google promises to open-source the code. I call this a win for nonevil. Any sufficiently advanced damage control is indistinguishable from ethics.
      • InclinedPlane 17y ago
        Google's "don't be evil" motto is a weak one for several reasons. Negative mottos are inherently weak because they provide a lot of leeway in definition, it's always possible to fuzz the line on what's evil and define evil to be a smaller and smaller zone of behavior. In the strictest terms Google has already committed a fair number of evil acts (e.g. cooperating with Chinese persecution). Also, a double negative (essentially don't be not good) is fundamentally weaker than a positive statement (e.g. "do only good"). More so, over time a statement such as "don't be evil" quickly morphs into "be much less evil than the competition" which then slowly morphs over time into "be just a little bit less evil than the competition". Reading the comments here defending google's actions re: etherpad it's hard to argue that google is at any stage other than the last "be a little less evil than the competition" stage. And at that point your precious "don't be evil" guidance is worthless because at best you are so inconsequentially less evil than the run of the mill heartless corporation that you really haven't decreased the amount of evil being done in the world.
        • mquander 17y ago
          You know, shutting down creating new documents for two whole days (for free users, not paying ones) has to be pretty low on the evil scale, when the next announcement is that they're going to open-source it. C'mon.
        • nl 17y ago
          "cooperating with Chinese persecution" References? Google censors it's Chinese version - is that all you are referring to?
        • nl 17y ago
          You've got an odd definition of evil. Exactly which part is evil? 1) Buying AppJet 2) Publicly announcing their intentions for the service 3) Listing to feedback 4) Changing their intentions for the service (on a weekend) This is a serious question, btw. Obviously shutting down a service isn't evil on it's own - it's a net good for the world if no one care about it (saving electricity, giving people more fulfilling work etc). Perhaps your argument is that they should have responded quicker. If that's the case then would it be possible for you to lay out your proposal for quicker responses?
    • mariorz 17y ago
      i always marvel at how your comments continue to get upvoted.