Hacker News Reader

Comment by zaxomi | Hacker News Reader

When they sent out the directive to remove "Don't Be Evil" someone was too lazy and just removed "Don't", so ever since then it's been "Be Evil".

That explains a lot, doesn't it?

View on HN

"Be profitable" is enough to explain everything, no need to go further than that. Every large company does similar things, because that is where "be profitable" takes you until regulations catches up.

Every large company does similar things, but essentially no company on Earth is capable of doing it at the scale that Google does. This makes Google being evil a much larger problem than other large companies like Nike.

"Be more profitable". Remaining profitable hasn't been a problem for Google.

Nah, "be profitable" is enough, once you go down the details.

For example, if every change to the Google homepage needs to be profitable, then they can't ever make ads easier to ignore.

Scale that up to data collection etc, and you get Google today.

Remember when microsoft first created windows, you would launch it by typing:

  C:\> WIN

(I can't recall, did they have paths then? was it C> instead?)

Well they were going to remove it but like everything else at Google the project got cancelled before they could get finished deleting the phrase.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com