npwsol - 7:30 pm on Jun 12, 2008 (gmt 0)

I like your post, Ian, and yours, bakedjake. Ian's partly because his views are in line with mine (;)) and jake's because he raises an excellent point. Google does invite scrutiny by having that as a company motto.

I think it's safe to say that the people involved in meetings at Google, by their own admission (I can't cite, but do remember reading. Please correct me if I'm wrong), are not just marketers and bigwigs. They get people from all of their departments involved, and what this provides is multiple viewpoints, many of those belonging to people who are not simply looking for the almighty dollar.

Deciding if something's evil at Google involves many people with many different ideas about what is right and wrong in terms of our modern world, which fosters debate and consolidation, and a means of addressing some of the concerns you or I might have without us being in the room. It is a good mentality for a corporation to have, and I feel as though it has worked well. Clearly some disagree, and I'll concede their right to, but let's make like Google and discuss their actions before we label them as evil. How does this change affect us? How does this change affect our customers? Does this help progress the internet, or does it stunt it? If we sincerely have a problem, we're in a position to raise concerns, and I have a feeling that Google, unlike many other companies, will address our concerns; they'll respond and they'll open a discourse. I find Google to be very active in the developer community, so this is certainly a possibility!

With regards to Google creating a closed system: I feel this is necessary. If we had the source for Google's closed system, how much easier would it be to crack? Or how many google clones would pop up in a single day, ones without the same commitment to customer privacy (or at least anonymity)?

In the same degree, I don't hate M$ because of their closed operating system, I hate M$ because of their propensity of locking computer manufacturer's into long-term contracts and otherwise preying on the laziness of people. I hate M$ because of their shift away from absolute backwards compatability, and their new cover-fire methods with regards to technology (here's .NET, here's windows forms, forget MFC, wait, no we're developing a new one, forget windows forms!). M$ uses its position to lock the masses into their system, which in turn locks other corporations (who depend on the masses' familiarity with the products they use) into using their services. As society matures and becomes more technically savvy (if it happens before the end of the world), I suspect people will become much less dependent on M$ and thus greater competition will emerge. I also see this happening these days, albeit slowly.

Google, on the other hand, to establish standards we can build upon, and to use as reference. If it weren't for Google, how popular would AJAX be today? True, they offer services and tools which we can only see one side of, but thanks largely to the open structure of the internet, we are not dependent on them.