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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Transparency? Integrity? You know ... just the things everyone is all so ready to pounce on Google and Apple for not having.
I don't get it. I really don't. You (and seemingly others) are OK with B&N doing things that you admittedly say only benefit B&N, but want to call Apple and/or Google greedy for doing the same things.
Is this really a "businesses I like are good and business I don't like are greedy" sort of thing? Even when both businesses are only out for themselves? Because that's the vibe I'm getting from many here.
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From my point of view, it's often fairly clear when a company is Evil, in the rather tongue-in-cheek way that Page and Brin meant it, as opposed to achieving their wealth and success by serving their customers.
Google became the Goliath it is by giving away a bunch services to users (and monetizing the resultant data*) and later by creating a free and open operating system for phones that gave users a lot more freedom and choice than competing systems.
Then, instead of continuing that model (which is still hugely profitable, I wager) they started taking away free features, removing much of that freedom, and locking down that OS, undoing many of the things that made them better than the competition and got them where they were. That threw their turn to Evil in to sharp relief. Bill Gates' and Steve Jobs' brand of evil was visible from day one.
There's more than one way to succeed in business. I recently read an economics article describing the difference between "shareholder capitalism" and "stakeholder capitalism." I had never heard the terms before.
If I understood the idea correctly, shareholder capitalism is what we see when companies seem to put their their short-term profits and their stock value ahead of everything else. Screw other stakeholders: the customers, the employees, the community.
Stakeholder capitalism is when a company looks for success by considering all those stakeholders, and increases profits by increasing value to all of them. Provide great products, retain the best talent, foster the future customer base by building goodwill in the community, etc, and all that will line the shareholder's pockets as well.
If I have it right, I see the former as "Evil" and the latter as good business.
My perception is that Google shifted from the latter towards the former.
ApK
*Yes, some find the idea of making you and your data the product to be Evil, but I say you knew what you were signing up for. Complaining about that is as dumb as positing a bunch of personal data to share publicly on Facebook then complaining that Facebook shared your data.