The world is all that much worse for their poor character.

Nothing personal, just business. Yes it sucks, but advertising is the business, not search. If it’s free, you’re the product.

The "it's just business" people will double dip and still inject advertising and sell your data while also directly taking your money for a product. Cable TV is a paid product that does both. Cellular carriers sell your data about your location and the usage behaviors of the services you pay for. Car manufacturers sell your movement data for a car you paid for. Sellers of any financial services are all in cahoots about your debt, incomes, holdings, credit worthiness, etc. Even brick and morter stores pull shit with rewards programs to track your buying behaviors to optimize advertising to you.

And when those same companies make public some front end framework, or sponsor a major open source product, or create some novel distributed acid compliant database we (the HN community) rally behind them and say huzzah.

Yes. When.

over the really long term, it's poor business practices.

> Nothing personal, just business

To be candid, this might be the problem.

If we treated people with humanity and respect, we might not be so keen to throw them under the bus for a buck.

> If it’s free, you’re the product.

For Google (and others) you are the product even if you paid for it (Android).

I disagree, their character does not matter, business incentives matter. Nothing would change, if other personalities were in charge, since profit maximization is still there.