Re:Jwz: Google's pseudonym support "obvious bullshit"
by brc on Thursday October 20, 2011 @02:13AM
(#3133673)
You describe what I was trying to say. It's easy to be non-evil in a startup environment for a variety of reasons.
However, once sold and listed, quarterly performance numbers start to permeate the entire organisation. As you say, the needs of making these numbers start to outweigh the don't be evil mantra. And, because the original services were set up with a 'trust us, we're not evil', the gains to be made from tweaking the 'evil' dial up, even just a tiny bit, are quite large.
I'm not surprised the rank and file are committed to the lofty ideals and goals, and they probably will continue to attract new recruits for the foreseeable future. But in order to keep committed to those types of goals, necessarily some profit is going to have to be foregone. That's mighty hard to do.
My guess is that the big event that makes people trust Google less is close, or maybe has even already been but hasn't been disclosed yet. To me, they're in the same kind of space that Microsoft was post-Windows 95 and pre-Windows 98. Everyone still likes them but questions are being asked. Legal intervention is around the corner.
I see privacy kind of like any economic externality. There's no (immediate) price on loss of privacy, so people are happy to trade it away for benefits like free email and social networking. Can you price privacy? Well, objectively we already are when we forgo private services for free ones. You could say we price our privacy at the cost difference between a free service and a paid one.
However, once sold and listed, quarterly performance numbers start to permeate the entire organisation. As you say, the needs of making these numbers start to outweigh the don't be evil mantra. And, because the original services were set up with a 'trust us, we're not evil', the gains to be made from tweaking the 'evil' dial up, even just a tiny bit, are quite large.
I'm not surprised the rank and file are committed to the lofty ideals and goals, and they probably will continue to attract new recruits for the foreseeable future. But in order to keep committed to those types of goals, necessarily some profit is going to have to be foregone. That's mighty hard to do.
My guess is that the big event that makes people trust Google less is close, or maybe has even already been but hasn't been disclosed yet. To me, they're in the same kind of space that Microsoft was post-Windows 95 and pre-Windows 98. Everyone still likes them but questions are being asked. Legal intervention is around the corner.
I see privacy kind of like any economic externality. There's no (immediate) price on loss of privacy, so people are happy to trade it away for benefits like free email and social networking. Can you price privacy? Well, objectively we already are when we forgo private services for free ones. You could say we price our privacy at the cost difference between a free service and a paid one.