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Google's Turn To Be The Villain
caesar79 writes "The New York Times has an article titled "Relax, Bill Gates; It's Google's Turn as the Villain" (also evil but at least free registration required) According to the article, the "go-getting" attitude of Google is coming across as arrogance to many people in the Valley. More importantly, it draws attention to the fact that Google has drained the market of talent, caused a 25% to 50% hike in salaries and made it difficult for startups to get funding."
Google don't make better offers. They pay less than the average. They raised the salary for new hires because they hired a whole ton of the available talent, and the other companies who need someone with those skills need to offer salaries high enough to tempt those who have moved on to other things to come back. Like around 2000 when COBOL programmers were making a ton of cash, that was all about motivating retired COBOL coders and those who had moved on to management to come back to coding for a bit.
And google are evil because they compile vast databases of personal information about everyone they can with the express purpose of using that information to manipulate them for pay. If you don't think there's anything wrong with that, then I guess you'd consider them pretty good guys. Personally, I consider it a fundamentally evil thing, and would happily douse everyone who chose a career in advertising with gasoline and light them on fire.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
And to make matters worse: Have you tried using Google Desktop 2 on a Windows computer where Opera is the default browser? The indexing starts but when you try to open a search window, you get a message that your browser is not supported and that Google Desktop probably won't work as expected for you.
I'm not dissing Googles products here, I merely want to point out that Google are not as platform agnostic and idealistic that people here seem to think they are. And why should they? Idealism seldom makes anyone rich.