Google ramps up the Evil
Image by jurvetson
Sergey Brin and Queen Noor in happier times.
But this week, it seems that each day brings new tidings of killjoy….
The demotion of Firefox in the Google Pack, in light of the Chrome competition, is the just the latest in a litany from today’s CNET article: “Google: A little more like Microsoft every day”
With their mantra of “Don’t be evil”, Google has inherited the challenge of defining evil, which begs for an operational constitution.
In The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson proposes one meta rule:
In a climate of moral relativism, the only sin is hypocrisy.
And it reminds me of my 2004 blog post on platform power analogies:
"Consider the future; the search interface to web services has similarities to the Windows interface to applications… In a web services world, Google could be the directory and gateway and more over time. And developers would hope for equal access and a level playing field…. as they perennially hope for with Windows…"
