I'm always a bit taken aback by the heat that Google gets for even thinking about breaking into the Chinese market. Microsoft is in China and has active US military contracts. Apple is in China. Yet it's Google that gets the bad rap for trying to get into China and then ultimately turning down billions of dollars in revenue and data.

I think a lot of this has to do with how much self-congratulating google has engaged in over the years around ethics. They set very high expectations, boasted about it, then fell very short.

What you're seeing in people's reactions is disappointment. No one's ever seen Microsoft as an ethical company, so no one bats an eye when they enter the Chinese market and embrace the questionable ethics of the Chinese government.

That doesn't make it right, but it certainly gets less attention.

But is that really deserving of a grilling in Congress? Just for be hypocritical?

The rest of them have been open about the fact they are ruthless profit making centers focused only on money and you shut up and stay in line or else you're toast. Google's model was "don't be evil" and for years went on the image that they are fighting for the public good and that they were an example of the ability to be principle centered, do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time. Now that the pressure starts to turn up on how to be profitable it turns out that everything they said they stood for, and more importantly the ideal that they represented, turned out to be a lie.

They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up, now that they have abandoned that fall more for it.

Apple at least somewhat tries to put up an image of caring about environmental issues[1] and privacy (e.g. in the aftermath of San Bernardino attack). (Of course they still have Chinese sweatshops, and who knows how much raw materials comes from child labour in the Congo so of course it's mostly a smokescreen.)

[1] https://www.cultofmac.com/268413/tim-cook-tells-profit-obses...

Apple makes Chinese iCloud user data at rest available to the Chinese government. They've come a long ways from fighting the FBI back in 2015.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy...

>They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up

okay but honestly how silly is it to take a company's branding to heart? like are we all children that believe in santa claus too?

>do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time

i'm old enough now to understand that these two things are mutually exclusive because the latter necessarily involves exploitation (thereby doing net evil rather than net good).

Doing good for the world and getting rich are by no means mutually exclusive. People pay money for products and services that make their lives better and history has shown that economic growth is not a zero-sum game.

Where companies get into ethical trouble is when they try to maintain exponential growth long after it is possible to do so in a way that is moral. You can make a lot of money doing good for the world, but you can't sustain exponential growth indefinitely without crossing a few lines.

>economic growth is not a zero-sum game.

economic growth is an abstraction. i'm not talking about abstract notions of good and evil.

some people believe that there are systems where entropy decreases too. their mistake is the same as yours: the system you're looking at isn't big enough. someone, somewhere, pays for your growth. either it's the employees that you underpay or it's the commons that you trash or it's the competitors whose coattails you're riding on or etc and etc and etc.

you can't point to a single product that doesn't incur this kind of entropy increase somewhere along its supply chain.

edit: i'm getting downvoted. would love to know where i'm mistaken (other than that i'm assailing capitalism).

I didn't downvote, but I agree with GP that growth isn't a zero sum game. If you create the right product, then you and the people who pay for your growth all end up better off than you were before.

In hindsight, it was naive, but it wasn't just branding. It really was a strong sentiment at the time long before the Internet consolidated around a few extremely powerful companies.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are saying, but e.g. how did Sal Khan do net evil rather than net good with his Khan Academy project?

Khan Academy is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and sal khan consequently isn't "stinking rich".

does any amount of exploitation poison the well, and swing the pendulum towards net evil?

Doesn't it? Do the ends ever justify the means? Besides here we're talking about getting rich rather than averting war or curing disease or something.

That’s pretty black and white, considering the subjective nature of defining exploitation.

And sometimes when people get rich, they add value to the world. The getting rich may be the goal, but it can also help other people too.

It's viewed as a betrayal of whatever ethical/moral core Google claimed to have originally, at least by employees and customers who bought into the hype early on and didn't realize that Google is ultimately just another big tech company with shareholders.

As a former employee it never really surprised me that the company would want to move back into China, but it did surprise me a bit that they were doing so under heavy secrecy. I suppose in practice they were right to want to keep it secret (employees were unhappy) but on the other hand it's impossible to keep secrets in that company so they should have known it would leak eventually.

Microsoft, Apple, etc. doing business in China is unsurprising in comparison since we all know what big tech companies with 10k+ employees are about: Making money.

Fair point. I used to see Google as the good guy.

Working there seemed to be Good.

Where as it was obvious with Apple's anti competitive policies, they'd be evil/corrupt. When they ban Apps, I don't bat an eye anymore.

Because half of us are just glad Microsoft isn’t in charge anymore. The opposite of hate is apathy, and that you ask the question suggests that you are too young to remember a lot of people used to call Microsoft the Evil Empire - a reference to Star Wars. Of course they’re doing slimy shit. They’ve always been slimy to half of us. If you forget history it will repeat.

You’ve got me on Apple though. And I say this as both a member of an Apple household and a longtime investor: It’s more or less a luxury good, it has cachet, people tie their egos to them, and we have the legacy of the Reality Distortion field that you can still see in the word choices in product launch events (and the fact that they are events).

People don’t want to believe Apple is evil like they don’t want to believe Michael touched kids inappropriately at Neverland.

They do some things domestically that make it Not My Problem... if you ignore the Hong Kong situation. But I am not empowered to fix my own government (save maybe at the local level) let alone someone else’s.

Microsoft never had a good rep to begin with. They were always seen as an evil corp. I remember when most of the mentions of Microsoft on the forums used to be spelled as "Micro$hit", "Micro$haft", or something similar. Google didn't have this image problem until later in the game.

if Google or apple had an S in their name you would have seen more of it

that's because google won over hearts and minds with "do no evil" so people feel betrayed because they invested themselves in the ideology of the company. it's mostly their fault for taking branding seriously.

People might vaguely dislike you for ambiguous reasons if you are an underachiever, but get them excited about things you can’t actually accomplish and they start to know exactly what they don’t like about you.

I’ve had a boss who tried to give out rewards to people and announced them without possessing them, and we had to harass him to get them. By the time they were delivered it felt like we’d earned them a second time, completely undermining whatever message he was trying to send.

The first “idiot” I worked for has the honor of my best anecdote for underestimating work and would pull this stunt where we could “go home early if we get everything done” on random Friday’s. On average we left an hour later on these days than on a typical Friday. The last time he tried this the entire team shot daggers at him and wandered back to their desks.

>> it's mostly their fault for taking branding seriously.

That's a hard lesson for a lot of people. Unfortunately it comes in different forms as well. I cant tell you how many places I've run across that seem to be paying slightly more than lip service to safety standards.

My theory is that one of the FAAN +M companies is using social media to make Google's reputation go down.

I felt slighted by their interview process and experience a little schadenfreude. From what I gather a lot of other people have the same salt.

It’s the biggest reason I tell people to be magnanimous in interviews. You may need to interview them again in three years, or their friends. You don’t want them to tell you to fuck off, or worse, talking about you behind your back to their peers.

There’s a company in Seattle who had a long history of having trouble hiring. They even hosted a bunch of meetups but still got hardly any bites. Because they had a reputation as an awful place to work and people would talk about it after the meetups or even quietly during the meetups. I have my suspicions this actually hurt their lead rate instead of helped. Getting people together to air your dirty laundry is rarely good.

It’s also why I strongly discourage 1 on 1 interviews. If I’m in a room with a coworker I know how they treated the candidate and they know how I did. There’s feedback to be given, adjustments to be made. Without that you can’t tell if one interviewer has low success rates due to beig really picky or being a dick.

The second guy I talked to at Google was such an asshole that I doubted my read on the other three people. It shakes you, and me in particular. I have a problem with saying no to all offers on the table, which shows up as self-sabotage in interviews. I don’t want to work with you, so I’m not going to try to convince you to want to work with me. It would be better for me to stick with it and get comfortable just saying no to all bad offers even if that’s all the offers I have. Least objectionable has won out a time or two and I’ve always paid for it in the end.

Microsoft does not know nearly as much about people as Google does. Microsoft does not have the insane Orwellian mission to "organize the world's information".

Stay private. I don't think publicly traded companies can be values-driven, but if you maintain control over the ownership of the company, you can. Here I'm thinking of something like Wegman's grocery stores.

If Wegman's went public and had to meet the demands of Wall Street investors, I think they would lose what makes them special.

I can't think of an example of a large, closely held firm in tech.

Costco has done a really good job of maintaining their values in the face of pressure from shareholders, so I'd argue it is definitely possible.

New Belgium Brewery is supposed to be amazing as well (they also have/had some cool cogeneration tech to reduce carbon footprint, and employee ownership).

They incorporated as a B-Corp which was an attempt to create private and public companies that were beholden to society as much as the shareholders. But the last time I looked I wasn’t sure if those were still a thing or it fizzled out.

It’s much easier to stay true to your values if you don’t take in as much investor money. Google shares are priced with an exception of rapid growth so management has to chase any profit possible. There are a lot privately held companies where the owners don’t demand continuous growth.

I wanted to point to Etsy, since they were a b-corp, meaning they were held to higher "social and environmental standards" than a typical company, but I just Google'd them to see how their stock is doing and it looks like they gave up their b-corp status sometime in 2017 and their stock price is up 400% since then (price was flat and declining previously).

>> are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth and profit taking) with the way our society is structured?

Purism is trying to do exactly this by being Social Purpose Corporation: https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/. However, I would not call them a "major company" yet.

Also called social benefit corporations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

If the company doesn’t have their values and goals listed in the articles of incorporation, then they have no legal obligation to follow them.

>> Also called social benefit corporations

Wikipedia says it's not the same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_purpose_corporation

>> If the company doesn’t have their values and goals listed in the articles of incorporation, then they have no legal obligation to follow them.

But Purism afaik does have them listed.

I didn’t know there was a difference, thanks. And I’m not disputing purism’s (I looked at their website), just noting that if a corporation doesn’t list their values in their articles of incorporation, then they aren’t really anything more than lip service when push comes to shove.

One common criticism I've heard of benefit corporations is that a hostile takeover or series of leadership changes can result in a situation where the values/goals are just stripped out intentionally, rendering it a normal corporation. Alternately, strip the assets and rights to leave the benefit corporation a husk and transfer everything to a non-benefit corp. It definitely makes me wonder how robust a setup like a B corporation can actually be once unrestrained capitalism gets to act on it for 5-10 years.

Those are definitely realistic scenarios. But in the case of a company that relies heavily on attracting and maintaining talented employees, those actions would probably engender significant blowback as well. At the very least the abandoning of values is a discrete step that is taken, as opposed to an vague degradation of some executives feelings. I do agree that it isn’t a total solution, but I do think there are some other interesting developments in the area, like the Long Term Stock Exchange and Generation Investment Management.

It's not robust, B Corp is mildly a defense against activist minority shareholders, and largely PR sham.

I know I'm biased because I worked there, but I think Netflix is still true to its values.

It's always been about sharing stories with as many people as possible.

They green light stuff that no one else will, some bad, some good, but they give a lot of storytellers a voice when no one else will.

I remember that the legal department was surprisingly small, mainly because they don't go around suing everyone all the time.

Overall I'd say they have managed to stay true, but to their advantage, their values have always been the most profitable path, so they never had to really choose between profit and ethics.

I thought Netflix was about super annoying auto-play video ads, and funneling users into cheaper IP regardless of their expressed desires.

The only way I've thought of so far is to create a not-for-profit. Your not-for-profit can still make money. But since no one owns equity, no one has incentive to optimize for profit over values.

The managers paying themselves salary have an incentive. This is how most "charities" work. But that is naturally a lower ceiling than a for-profit corp.

There is an interesting book called Maverick by Ricardo Selemar I think is his name, who took over Brazil's largest steel company in the 80's. One of the points he makes in the book is that we have this obsession with growing business, if the company does $200 million in revenue this year, it has to do $250 million in revenue next year, etc.

That kind of thing, I think this is a big part of the problem is this mindset of competition and continuous growth for no other sake than growing. Part of this is a healthy desire to improve and for a while a company can make legitimate improvements for a while, years, decades, if you keep forcing people to improve a metric, revenue or share price in this case, there comes a point where there can be no more legitimate improvement, then people start to play to the numbers and as pressure increases start to turn towards means that are unethical and illegal. We can see this in every facet of life, cheating in sports because we are reaching the peak of human capabilities, banks and "financial engineers" that spend all of their time trying to invent instruments and methods for funneling money from one group of people to another, or a more concrete example software engineers that start producing shoddy code because they have to meet a deadline.

I don't blame the investor's for this and I don't think the problem is capitalism itself either, I think we'd have a different but no less destructive set of problems if we had the government running or intervening, e.g. New lifesaving drugs take 10 years a $1,000,000,000.00 to get to market because of FDA regulations that primarily benefit incumbents. I don't know a way to fix this or solve this without changing the way people decide and prioritize things, because at the end of the day what we like to call "systems" usually just end up being a reflection of an aggregate of human desires, and bad people will ruin any system, good people can make any system work.

To tie it all back, if I were to do it the only way I could see not becoming the villain is to content yourself with not being the absolute best and not comparing, or in other words, "Thou shalt not covet." either as a CEO deciding the fate of a company or as an individual in your life. If someone has a better option I'd love to hear it, but right now it seems that the incessant desire to have more and be bigger in every material thing is at the root of the problem.

> The question I have is are there ways to stay true to values (which in some cases might be in direct opposition to growth and profit taking) with the way our society is structured?

If we assume that a company's[0] values are determined in part by whom it decides to hire, I'm not sure this could be done legally in the U.S...

In the U.S., in most cases it's illegal to consider a candidate's religious beliefs when making a hiring decision. In my experience, a person's values are closely related to their religious beliefs, so hiring based on "values" would invite lawsuits regarding religious discrimination.

[0] I'm only guessing what's meant by a company's values, in this context. I know "values" means for an individual person, but not for a collection of persons.

Google has been an advertising company since when, 2000? I think it was naive for any of us to expect an advertising company to be an ethical company. Live and learn..

Or that "Don't Be Evil" was all PR nonsense from the beginning that we naively gobbled up.

The article does say Google risked all their China money at one point to stay true to their "don't be evil" mantra. They turned heel only recently. I'd say they genuinely believed and practiced it for a while, but once the upper management started to get infected with business types instead of technologists, that was the beginning of the end.

There's a question to be asked, though: Is it not PR nonsense just because employees believe it enough to act on it?

Or put another way: If it's really something the company believed in, why didn't the early moves out of China come from the top down ('do no evil' is a company philosophy so obviously the company heads like larry and sergey would be on board, right?) and why didn't the modern moves back in get rejected by the company heads?

In practice it seems like it was aspirational ('let's be nice!') instead of a true mantra or rule or even a guideline. If it was really core from the beginning would they really have dropped it wholesale?

Call me naive, but I genuinely believe Sergey and Larry believed in it (especially Sergey)

One way Google, a software company in the broad sense of the term, could have avoided a blog post with such a title is to never hire a “Head of International Relations” in the first place.

Which leads to my attempt at answering the question, of how one could stay true to ones values - know the things you’ll never do. Then don’t. Ever.