The following is a quote straight from Google's Investor Relations web page. "If an opportunity arises to take advantage of competitors' confidential information, remember: don't be evil. We compete, but we don't cheat." Unfortunately, I'm not so sure this speaks for Google's most recent actions that are, in my opinion, aimed at swiping Microsoft employees. One of them, Kai-Fu Lee, was apparently an integral part of Microsoft's search engine team. The result was an ugly law suit and a later undisclosed settlement. He is currently president of Google in China. Microsoft argued that Lee would inevitably disclose proprietary information to Google. Microsoft, in my opinion, is correct; and while I don't really agree that an employee of any particular company should be fettered to working for the company for all eternity, this is not the only time Google has summarily snatched a Microsoft employee. Recently, Vic Gundotra, a general manager for "platform evangelism" at Microsoft just moved to Google. In order to satisfy the letter of the law -- the non-compete agreement -- he will not work at Google for a full year. This seems to be a pattern. This is the letter of the law -- OK. So it's legal. But is it evil? I think so. Just because it's legal doesn't make it non-evil. Google claims to operate by a higher standard of ethics, not just satisfy the basics of the law. They "do no evil." But is this a higher standard of ethics? At best it's poor ethics, in my opinion. And at worst it's corporate sabotage. I don't claim that Microsoft hasn't done their share of ethically-questionable things. But they also don't hide behind that terribly hackneyed "do no evil" garbage, either. I still think Google is a great company, and I'm not saying they've broken the law -- at least not the letter, but their higher standards of ethics argument seems to be shakier these days.
August 13th, 2006 at 8:47 pm
[...] Oh how we love to hate ‘winners’ in this country. Small coffee company from Seattle manages to get great expansion, we all go rah-rah-rah. They become the biggest coffee chain in America, they are evil. Small search engine takes on Microsoft, Yahoo, and everyone cheers them on. Great IPO, become huge. Evil. I don’t know why this is the trend, it probably has something to do with everyone feeling all left-out and alone back in high school and hating all the ‘cool kids’ (while desperately wanting to be one). Personally, I think it’s a crappy attitude. Starbucks has dramatically improved the quality of coffee overall in this country, and Google is still the best search engine around. [...]
November 5th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
[Manual Trackback] "Disparity seems to be trailing Google like bad smell these days. I’m not sure if it’s just “tall poppy syndrome” and the recent acts by Google are mere coincidence, but I am not so sure anymore."
September 12th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Google is Evil, it's founders are thieves. Google Ad-Sense is set up to steal from publishers and Ad-Words is set up to steal from advertisers. Google employees click google ads daily to inflate their profit sharing checks. Google does not suspend accounts they know are fraudulent as long as they are preforming well for google. Google is employing overseas click gangs and ripping off advertisers daily. The people making the most money for google are spammers selling clicks on google ads. If you spend 1 cent on google ads, you are getting ripped off.I state that as fact and dare the legal goons at google to dispute it. SUE ME PLEASE ! That will give me access via the court to your ad-sense records and the ability to prove GOOGLE IS A SCAM COMPANY THAT INTENTIONALLY STEALS FROM ANYONE IT CAN !