Don't be evil
Has Google capitulated??
Was recently reading the review of a book on the Google story and the author ( God bless my memory can't remember him) had commented Google has reached the stage where it ceases to become people's answer to the behemoths and becomes a coorporation itself.
So has the company which prided itself on being different and whose motto is Don't be evil gone over the other side..sold its soul for the millions of yuans expected to roll in?
Google has agreed to the Chinese Government's demand for a censored search engine for the Chinese market. The great firewall of China would filter out contents related to Taiwan, democracy, Tiananmen Square etc.
Read a great article on the same in Time today.It had Larry Page going all defensive and explaining how Google has only made a choice of the lesser evil. We prefer one fifth of the population to have some kind of access to Google than nothing at all.
Even before google signed the memorandum,Yahoo and Msn had signed similar agreements.msn had shut down many dissenting blogs and Yahoo provide the ip address of a journalist who now faces 10 years of imprisonment.
One thing does go to the credit of Google,it has yet not agreed to Bush administration's demand for customer specific information to which both yahoo and msn have long since agreed to.
Perhaps its time for us to stop imagining Google to be 2 university students Phd project and treat it as the coorporation it has become...and as Time says coorporations are only of one type-the money making type.
Was recently reading the review of a book on the Google story and the author ( God bless my memory can't remember him) had commented Google has reached the stage where it ceases to become people's answer to the behemoths and becomes a coorporation itself.
So has the company which prided itself on being different and whose motto is Don't be evil gone over the other side..sold its soul for the millions of yuans expected to roll in?
Google has agreed to the Chinese Government's demand for a censored search engine for the Chinese market. The great firewall of China would filter out contents related to Taiwan, democracy, Tiananmen Square etc.
Read a great article on the same in Time today.It had Larry Page going all defensive and explaining how Google has only made a choice of the lesser evil. We prefer one fifth of the population to have some kind of access to Google than nothing at all.
Even before google signed the memorandum,Yahoo and Msn had signed similar agreements.msn had shut down many dissenting blogs and Yahoo provide the ip address of a journalist who now faces 10 years of imprisonment.
One thing does go to the credit of Google,it has yet not agreed to Bush administration's demand for customer specific information to which both yahoo and msn have long since agreed to.
Perhaps its time for us to stop imagining Google to be 2 university students Phd project and treat it as the coorporation it has become...and as Time says coorporations are only of one type-the money making type.
posted by d_grail at 10:32 PM
2 Comments:
Let's face reality. People love underdogs. When Google was an underdog and fast beating Microsoft in search and other web related stuff, they were hailed as the next AT&T. Now when Google has become rich, some people don't like it. Ever time anything controversial against Google comes up, people line up to point their "Don't be evil" motto (which in my opinion, shouldn't be there in the first place). Google has done a lot of good as far as developers are concerned and the recently opened Google.org is also doing charity work.
Seriously there are a million more evil doing corporations, than Google.
Google is the media darling..so was microsoft before and IBM long before..
I guess another smart kid in some part of world and a better search algorithm , is all it will take to bring the empire to it's knees
till then let's enjoy it
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