Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanwaggoner | Hacker News Reader

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Google gets a lot of criticism (often deserved), but it’s worth taking a moment to think of all the things they haven’t done. If Microsoft had Google’s market share in search, is there any doubt that they’d be systematically demoting or even banning their competitors in the search results? Demoting someone in Google is a virtual death sentence, and yet not only has Google ever been accused of using this vast power, the idea itself is almost unimaginable.

Oh please. This is so weak that it's laughable. First, Google hasn't always had this much market share in search and the other big search providers (to my knowledge) didn't ban their competitors. Microsoft didn't ban other office suite products from working on Windows. They didn't ban other browsers. Yeah, IE might have been more tightly integrated, but please explain how this is different from the incestuous pile of Google products that promote Google search at every turn?

Instead of glossing over how Google gets some criticism and then beating your anti-Microsoft strawman, maybe we should take a look at some of the questionable things Google has done (China).

It'd be nice if I was wrong, but in my opinion, Google isn't some special orgy of love and kindness towards humankind. It's a multi-billion dollar company with millions of shareholders and it'll do whatever it thinks is best for turning a profit. If that happens to be stuff that isn't "evil", so much the better. If not (China), so be it.

Let's revisit when Google is as old as Microsoft or Disney or News Corp. is now and see how it all turned out. I'm betting the only difference is that now articles like this will make Google out to be the big bad corporation filled with sociopaths trying to destroy the world.

EDIT: added a closing thought

O, how quickly we forget the lessons of the 90's. MS did not outright ban their competitor's software because they were always in the cross hairs of the justice department for antitrust. But they did everything they could to make life for their major competitors difficult. Every new version of windows would screw up and break the major word and excel competitors.

And as far as the other search engines go, at one point it got to the point where they effectively not only banned their competitors but banned any useful site out there. Towards the end, Altavista was so blatantly selling search results, that no matter what you searched for you would always get a bunch of porn with a couple of pages selling those stupid Ethernet cameras sprinkled in.

I do not know whether Google is truly not evil or wont become evil in the future. But they had much more integrity than their competitors and that is one of the reasons they became successful.

MS did not outright ban their competitor's software because they were always in the cross hairs of the justice department for antitrust.

Yeah, kind of like how Google is tiptoeing around that now?

Before Google went to China, there were debates within the company: not over whether there was money to be made, but whether they would be a force for good there. When that was answered positively, they went.

I don't think saying "CHINA = EVIL" is terribly helpful, either.

Sorry, I put quotes around evil because I don't think Google being in China is particularly evil, just that it's a good example of them being more interested in making money than avoiding any hint of questionable business practices.

There's a big difference between doing the right thing and being seen as never doing the wrong thing.

> Microsoft didn't ban other office suite products from working on Windows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

Interesting, for two reasons:

1. It states that it was only in a beta release of Windows 3.1 and was removed for the final product. Is this really the basis of your argument here?

2. They clearly went about it in a deceptive way, but is what they were doing at the core wrong? Was Windows 3.1 considered an upgrade from MS-DOS? If so, I don't see how requiring users to have the base package is wrong, any more than Apple is unwilling to allow you to upgrade from Windows 95 to Snow Leopard. Maybe I'm not understanding the situation?

Larry Osterman has a good post on the AARD code here http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2004/08/12/21368...

for (1) the purpose was (as rumors go) to scare off OEMs from DR DOS.

That's the exact opposite of banning competing products from working on Windows. They banned Windows from working.

other big search providers (to my knowledge) didn't ban their competitors

Yahoo had links to Altavista, lycos, google, etc, at the bottom of its search results years ago. I'm not sure where he's coming from. If the internet was a book, the text would be companies like Disney and the index would be google. It would seem strange that the author would be paid less and be held in less esteem than the guy who compiled the index.

Agreed. I don't really understand people's mindless adulation of Google, which is at heart an advertising company. I find Google tremendously useful and I admire them as a business, but the reality is that we've swapped one barrier to entry (publishing, tv, cable, etc) for another (Google). As the author pointed out, if you get yanked from Google, you're dead. Is this really a better situation than what we had before? Instead of power being consolidated in a handful of powerful companies, it's now consolidated into one very young and very unproven company whose sole motivation in life appears to be selling ads against other people's original content. Terrific.

Of course the vanguard of the media industry doesn't like Google. They've spent billions creating content and Google's entire business model is to lower the value of that content to free so they can sell more ads against it. And we cheer Google on because we want shit for free, meanwhile complaining about how Demand Media and Aol and TechCrunch are pumping out incredible quantities of shitty content to get more ad views.

The middle of media is dying, and it's partly thanks to Google. You can go niche / high quality and produce artisanal content that small groups are willing to pay for, or you can mass produce piles of shit and make pennies at scale. But I'm not sure you can produce good content for a large audience anymore.

/rant

To be clear, I'm not really blaming Google, or Demand or anyone. This is what the market wants, and I'm not sure it's evil to give it to them. If they hadn't done it, someone else would have. My point is just that Google isn't some altruistic genie.

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