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Google's CEO Clears the Air
prostoalex writes "Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat down with PC Magazine to discuss some of the current issues swirling around Google, such as China and censorship, growth of the video content on the Internet, Microsoft's planned move into online ads, working with AOL and Internet neutrality." From the article: "Schmidt was quick to say that the acquisition of Writely was not meant to create a competitor to Microsoft Office, which he said solves a complicated and important problem of work productivity. Writely is a server-based editing system where you can move your files around, he said, and there are places where a rich text editor is useful in Google."
"The technology we have is incredibly empowering to citizens," he said. For all the countries we don't like, he suggested we might their change behavior more by giving their citizens PCs, fast connections, and access.
It doesn't empower citizens of countries that do everything they can to proxy out that information. While I 99% agree with what Google did in China, I don't agree that giving citizens PCs, connections, and access will stop their governments from doing what they do.
Fuck, the USA is supposedly "free" and "open" and we have quite a bit of the population with access and yet we just let our leaders take FAT SHITS in front of our faces and then smile when they waft the stentch towards us.
Also from the article: Schmidt said he saw Writely and other server-based tools as another way to collect and organize the world's data. "All the world's information includes personal information," he noted.
I was a little surprised to not see anything else in there really about privacy concerns, except that users "need to trust that the information won't be abused by Google or by governments".