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Comment by f055 | Hacker News Reader

Which is funny, because actually, their business model was never "really cool", just "evil" ;)

Google were not "evil" for a long time after this. They really were a force for good in the world for a long time. I have never admired a large company so much as I did the Google of the early 2000s. Youthful, gifted, moral, crazily ambitious, constantly doing things I thought impossible…

The "evil" only really crept in once they started to take over all of the world's advertising.

So they were “not evil” as long as they were being funded by investors and didn’t have a self sustaining business plan...

What was it, again, that we refer to as "the root of all evil"?

It’s the love of money....

This is a common pattern that companies follow; make a good product now, make money later. Many products become crappy and companies go sour when they turn this corner.

If a profit seeking company makes a product that isn’t profitable, how can it be considered “good”?

What if it provides positive value for whole society ?

I'm speaking from a user/customer's perspective.

Even from a user’s perspective, if a product is not profitable, it will either disappear or the company will have to do something user-hostile to achieve profitability.

I like simple business models. I give the company money and they give me stuff.

What exactly is evil about their deal with advertisement?

Google were not as "evil" when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were in charge. Nowadays, the moral standard is very low.

They're still in charge.

Sundar Pichai is in charge.

He serves at the discretion of Google's parent company, Alphabet, of which Page and Brin are CEO and President respectively.

If you think that's when "evil" crept in, you really should think again how "evil" works - or, how would you implement and scale such a business model. Hint: long before they even started taking over the world of ads. The goals were defined at the beginning.

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