I strongly disagree. Google wants us to use its services because at its core is a bunch of engineers that simply want to make the world better.
(i.e. the agent 'Google' is distinct from the agents that it is composed of)
See https://plus.google.com/100010618263697835406/posts/azTW8hvw... for details.
Ultimately, some policy on some random social networking site nobody uses is not much of a big deal. If you don't like the policy, don't use Google+. Easy.
It sounds less like it was ignored and more like it isn't a priority for a resource stretched team.
If Apple suddenly came out and said "right, from today on we want 75% of your sales instead of 30%" would you have the same reaction?
Google App Engine:
* Not the dominant hosting platform. Not even close to being the dominant.
* Maybe a million dollar product. Certainly not a billion dollar product.
* In beta/preview until just now with developers knowing pricing had not been set or could be changed.
* Optimizing your application properly can negate most if not all of the pricing increase.
* Open source alternative framework available if you want to keep using the same APIs.
Apple App Store:
* Dominant market position with only the Android Market coming close.
* Billion dollar product.
* Existed as fully launched for several years.
* Set percentage. You can't change it other then making your app free.
* No open source alternative that supports the same APIs.
Beta/preview products can and will change.
If profit is the only motivation for decisions at Google, why did it pull out of China? I'm sure you're cynical and wise about that too, but here's what I can tell you. I saw Sergey up on stage saying the same things he said in this interview (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/22/interview-sergey-br...) and he got fiery and emotional about it. This is a guy who grew up in the Soviet Union until he was 6 and for him it is a very personal and ideological issue.
This corporations-as-profit-seeking-automata meme is old and tired. At the end of the day it's people who make decisions, and just as in every aspect of life people can have complex motivations for the decisions that they make.
I refer you to the comment above by jey
What Google "wants" as an entity is different from what the individual
component humans want.
Not necessarily. To parrot one of the other posters here: saying it doesn't make it true.
You could also argue that being a charity would be a very slow and inefficient means to achieving many of the things Google has set out to do. Being a for-profit corp gets them there faster and with fewer distractions not core to their purpose. I'd even venture to guess that it wouldn't be possible for Google to do what it does as a non-profit.
Sure, profit is a motivation, but it's certainly not the only (or even necessarily primary) motivation.
http://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
"That was a surprising realization. Companies often claim to be benevolent, but it was surprising to realize there were purely benevolent projects that had to be embodied as companies to work."
In any case, the parent doesn't have to justify anything, because he's stating a relatively well-known argument: in the US, there's an obligation for corporate executives to maximize shareholder value. This point is debated (http://www.linkedin.com/answers/law-legal/corporate-law/corp...), but not to the extent that you're claiming.
Do you mean "why did they make a big rant about pulling out of China and then not actually do it until they were literally cyber-attacked by the government"? Google was never all that big in China anyway. I'm sure their whole strategy around this was to get gullible people to buy into the "Don't do evil" nonsense.
>Sergey up on stage saying the same things he said in this interview and he got fiery and emotional about it.
Yea? So do politicians. Very passionate about what they're talking about until it comes time to vote. Then they follow their wallets.
>This is a guy who grew up in the Soviet Union until he was 6 and for him it is a very personal and ideological issue.
I know plenty of people who grew up in the Soviet Union. What exactly do you think goes on there that makes the "lucky few" who escape want to change the world? Maybe it did have some profound effect on him but it sounds more likely to be simple positioning. Getting people to think he really cares will cause them to defend him every time his company betrays that trust.
>This corporations-as-profit-seeking-automata meme is old and tired. At the end of the day it's people who make decisions, and just as in every aspect of life people can have complex motivations for the decisions that they make.
It may well be old and tired but it's how the world works. The only thing a CEO can get in trouble for not doing is increasing share holder value.
You've been conned.
I think the core of Google is Larry, Sergey, Urs, Craig, and the other dozens of engineers I've read about (never met), and from their actions and words over a course of a decade, I think they've proved that a huge motivator for them all is to simple make the world better.
They've all got lots of money. I think the long term evidence shows that they care about doing good. I think their motivation for earning money is to expand their own ability to do good.
If someone disagrees, instead of responding with more argument I'd ask you to make a table and list everything Google done has done in one column and whether or not it seems "good" or "evil" in another. Then we could debate further.
This is relevant to your statement, because while it's pretty much a requirement for a publicly held company to pursue profit at any cost, it's not necessarily the case for a company run by the people that have a disproportionately large number of votes on major issues.
I'm pretty sure they still have over 50% of the votes, so together they can decide how Google will handle tough moral issues without any support from other shareholders.
I would argue that it's entirely plausible that a couple altruistic billionaires will sacrifice a few dollars in pursuit of non-evil (their opinion of non-evil mind you).
"I strongly disagree. Google wants us to use its services because at its core is a bunch of engineers that simply want to make the world better."
I don't doubt that the people working at google want to make the world better and work on cool software. I don't think that is the primary motivation of google as a company.
Are you serious or trolling? I would expect if someone had such an ignorant/naive opinion they would at least be smart enough to not let other people know.
Here's what I see from google:
Search - a product that helps them sell ads
Gmail - a product that helps them sell ads
Google App engine - A platform where they used the hype of MapReduce et al to get people to join and then ramped up pricing drastically after a lot of people had been on the service (a service for which switching away almost certainly means a big rewrite) for years
Android - phone OS to help them sell ads.
I'm not seeing a lot of "make the world better" in there. Unless you mean "for Google executives".