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Google's Insular Nature
stockpicker_dude_78 writes "Robert Cringley has written a thought-provoking article on Google's insular nature, and compares them to the similar environment at Microsoft." From the article: "Google is secretive. This started as a deliberate marketing mystique, but endures today more as a really annoying company habit. Google folks don't understand why the rest of us have a problem with this, but then Google folks aren't like you and me. The result of this secrecy and Google's 'almighty algorithm' mentality is that the company makes changes -- and mistakes -- without informing its customers or even doing all that much to correct the problems."
Contrast to amazon.com which is priced much closer to earth because all their cards are on the table.
Google knows that at this point the switching cost to move to the next best thing when it arrives is low, so they have to sell the future and keep it secret and holy as long as possible.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
You are violating line #247 of our contract. Namely:
"The signer agrees to publish only stories that praise Google as supreme ruler of the universe."
You may yet be spared if you delete this article.
Love,
Google
Google are doing nothing religious, paranormal, involving ghosts, bigfoots, chupacabras, astral projection, UFO sightings, loch ness monster, etc. They are not involved in WTC coverups or chemtrails. They make no claims towards the validity of alternative medicines such as herbal remedies, homeopathy, or magnetic bracelets. They do not have mysterious power technology that casts our current physic understanding into doubt. Ask them about monuments on the moon, Mars, or Saturn's Iapetus, and they will truthfully tell you they are not covering up any knowledge of such.
That is all.
Motley Fool staffers are just now realizing that Google is slowly running out of gas. Perhaps all this clickfraud exposure is leaving people wondering how could they get away with this Internet ponzi scam for so long... Luckily Google got a little smarter and quieted the naysayers a bit by doing the MS thing and buying all the competition around them. Smart move. MS bought all threats and consumed them into the heap of junk calls Windows. Google is doing the same slowly via different angles (Skype, Writely ... which competes with MS' Word, Andriod, etc). Anyhow, since its all opinionated, I wonder when will Google's true adclick fraud will truly come to fruition... Experts estimate the true value of what Google would owe would be a couple of BILLION in clickfraud.
Infiltrated dot Net
By the way, this guy was a former fan of the Cringley fanclub until he started attacking IBM a couple weeks ago.
;)
(I know you hurt there at the moment Gab
From the article:
Google attracts advertisers like Luis with the idea that their ads will be cheaper because, frankly, they are selling something that is only thinly traded. The dream is that the system scales and scales fairly, only it isn't fair at all because if Amazon wants to advertise an equation editor USING EXACTLY THE SAME AD TEXT AND FORMATTING AS LUIS -- their words will cost 100 times less than the same words bought by Luis. It's not that Amazon (or any other big Google advertiser) has better copy writers, it is just that they sell a broader range of things.
"A large percentage of impressions & clicks do have £0.01 minimum bids," said Jeff from Google, "but these are our very highest quality ads/advertisers."
In other words, the minimum word price is 1p, BUT NOT FOR YOU.
Um, yeah. The same words should be more effective coming from Amazon than from Cringely's friend Luis, because people are simply more likely to click.
You could run all this through an algorithm that maximizes expected revenue (AI people would call this "utility") for Google based on click probability, and you'd come up with pretty much what Google does.
I'm sorry. I'm not a Google fanboi, but this is ridiculous.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
I know it sucks for the small guy, but the way AdSense works is logical and good for the consumer. Previously it was not enough clicks = irrelevant ad = no more ad impressions. Now it's not enough clicks = irrelevant ad = higher price. Both solutions make, er, (ad)sense.
I have never had a problem with Microsoft or Google. Are they perfect? Of cousre not. And yes, I have worked with a LOT of operating systems over the many years I have dealt with computers. I think that success always attracts the detractors.
Pardon any mispellings. I have been hitting the Newcastle Brown Ale a bit much.
This article is not an in-depth analysis of Google's business practices so much as it is one man complaining about two or three bad expereinces he has had with Google.
This doesn't mean that Google is secretive or paranoid, just that Google is a large corporation. Corporatoins are not perfect, just like their legal equivalent.
Why is this news?
I was thinking of converting to paganism, but where the hell can you find sacrificial virgins these days?
Hiring young talent then working them like dogs becuase of how excited they are to work at google/microsoft isn't a bad strategy, for the company. For all their evils both google and microsoft are among the greatest business stories of our age. Maybe they were onto something?
Not totally, if you were in early (IPO) you made money, but not now.
Look, I use Google all the time... but I fail to see how they make one dime from me.
By contrast, take eBay. I use them too -- at least I can see how they have directly made a few hundred bucks from me over the last few years, for services rendered.
ebay is 2/3 the price of goog (P/E ratios), so, right off the bat, goog stock ought to drop $100 USD just to be priced similar to eBay... then, maybe both of the aforementioned stocks could drop in value by half again, just to be priced more in line with other stocks... (P/E 20-ish).
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The thing that's always bugged me about Google is the generalized sense of smug superiority the company seems to emanate. "Look at our amusing job position titles!" "No, don't ask us about what we do with all the data we collect!" "Here, look at the quirky benefits we provide for our employees!" "Please, stop pointing out that while we brag about how much we love open source software, most of our exciting free applications are only available for Windows!"
Google is the kid in high school who is smart (but not exceptionally so), works *very* hard to maintain 4.0 GPA and also sucks up to his teachers all the time. However, he gets very secretive and passive-aggressive when you point out his imperfections.
I really believe they are a secret affiliate to Microsoft. They still refuse to index application/xml+xhtml pages, and what browser is it that can't display such pages?
Also, their UI is as inferior as Microsoft's.
To me, they ARE Micrsoft, and therefore evil.
Shame on all of you who bought their slogan... and congrats on Google for such smooth sales operations, fooling even the tech savvy whiz kids.
Of course they are secretive.
;)
They know as well as the rest of us that it will take about 3 days for everyone on the planet to dump Google as soon as a search engine without pages of fake sites filled with ads or just irrelivant sites is all you get no matter what you search for.
Remember AltaVista?
No reason for Google to give us 3 days notice
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Google has already peaked. It used to be that the quality of links in Google's search results were very good, and reflected pages with good content. No more. The spammers have figured out how to put their pages on top of Google's searches. The trick, basically, is to have a lot of pages with links to each other, which fools Google's link ranking algorithm.
For example, Here is a bogus blog site which is trying to Googlebomb. It looks like a blog site, but the site in question just grabs text from RSS feeds and makes a bogus blog, which also has ads which this spammer hopes to get high Google ratings with.
In my case, I had a bad transcription of the Lyrics to an early 1980s song have a high Google rank score at one point. It was a clearly personal web page. Well, back in 2002, it was one of the first ten links Googling for this particular song. These days, a Google search for this song gives you those sites which have made an ad-filled page with no content for every name in their database, those lyrics sites with too many popups, ads, and spyware (and who have copied my poorly-transcribed lyrics instead of the real lyrics), the Amazon page for this product--but my lyrics page is no where to be found.
Google's goden age has come and gone. Their searches are becoming less relevant and informitive, and big players like Microsoft are butting in to their territory (for people who don't think Microsoft can make an effective search engine: People said Microsoft couldn't make a decent browser in 1996).
These days, Myspace is the place to be (In the USA, that hot chick will have a MySpace page and will give you their MySpace ID); You Tube is a great place to easily get pirated TV content (cool rare 1980s music videos and Dr. Who TV shows, in my case); and DIGG is more relevant than Slashdot (but shares Slashdot's problem of having too many fanboys and flamers).
It all comes down to the AdWords algorithm and its intent, which isn't to help Luis OR Amazon, but to simply maximize profit for Google.
Darn those publicly traded companies! How dare they!
"Do No Evil" only really applies when you don't count making a profit as "Evil", folks.
Don't like Google? Then DON'T USE THEM. There are other search engines. Just like people who bitch about Microsoft - there are a number of viable alternatives today. Really, I'm tired of people complaining about xyz company, just use what you want and move on!
Google was every geeks darling and there was very much a see no evil attitude until Google did the blatantly evil thing of censoring Chinese search results. That was fortunately a wake up call and now I think people are questioning whether Google's "do no evil" ethos is true, which obviously it isn't being a
a company funded by stock investment it's ONLY priority (and one enforced by law) is returning profit to it's investors. The fly in the ointment though is now since Google is perceived to be hypocritical it's no longer a good investment. The bottom line is that for a lot of people who consider themselves to be rationalists geeks are effected by fundamentally irrational trends i.e. feelings towards a company as much as anyone else. Google good, google bad, depends on which week we are on. Would this article have been written before Google sold out to the Chinese? Probably not since the geeks hadn't turned on Google yet even though they were doing the EXACT things this article talks about before the Chinese debacle.
So yes I think in many ways the criticism of Google is a good thing, it's just too bad we had our irrational blinders on about OTHER Google blunders before the big Chinese sell out.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
One handidcap is that their competition sniffs it out and takes away their advantage in getting enough lead time to come up front.
Do a search on Yahoo - the result page is identical to Google. Is that original Yahoo - no, copied from Google afaikt.
I enjoy Google - they are refreshing.
I find this reprehensible. None of the criticisms levelled at Google are serious, none are fatal, all are minor criticisms, mere carping and possibly the indignation of a person or persons jilted by Google.
While the original submission appeared to raise an interesting if unimportant topic, the early posts here indicate that SlashDot is being manipulated in a rash attempt to harm Google.
its quite interesting that people think a corporation is exempt, or somehow free of greed. Sam Wall was a good guy, but when he died, the corp. made things evil. Google can be, or maybe already is, evil. Internet users, as a whole, should be asking 'what have you done for me lately' not what is evil or not evil. The whole business of the Internet is about what have you done for me lately. Any Internet business model not based on that is a business that really doesn't understand the Internet.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
There's a reason Cringley has remained a mediocre journalist, while google is a multi-billion software firm founded on being really, really smart.
This reason is exemplified by Cringley misunderstanding that google (and microsoft, and coke, and countless other hugely successful firms) are successful *solely* because they own trade secrets, leveraged into strategy -- and not because of some stupid "mystique" concept invented by mediocre journalists because they don't know what the company is actually doing, but still get paid by the word.
Duh.
Because it looks to me here more like what's happening here is just the "geek community" (by which, of course, I just mean "people who read slashdot") increasingly losing all touch with reality.
You can see this happening in a number of ways, but the increasing process of demonizing Google more and more (to the exclusion of having much energy left over to care about corporate interests which are legitimately harming the public good) is just the funniest.
You wanna know when Google got "evil"? It had nothing to do with China. Google got "evil" when they got successful. Self-proclaimed "geeks" got so used to rooting for the underdog that, pavlov style, as soon as Google became the overdog they started reflexively rooting against them.
I was reading Slashdot on the day that Google went IPO; people were already predicting, before the IPO, that Google would no longer be able to keep up a perception of being "good" while a for-profit, publicly traded company. And then the next day, when Google went IPO, they went ahead and started perceiving Google as "evil", without going to the bother of waiting for Google to actually do anything evil. Once Google finally went and got around to starting up a search site hosted in China*, these people started using this retroactively as the justification for their loose anger against Google. People who weren't looking for a reason to demonize Google barely even noticed the whole China thing.
* What, you think what Google did was "censoring search results"? The Chinese google search sites hosted in America and Taiwan aren't censored and still work just the same as they always did. It's just that now Google also has a local site hosted in China and adhering to China's censorship laws that people in China can use if they want unfettered access to Google without having to circumvent China's web filters every time they need to search for something. Is this an ethical thing for Google to do? Maybe, maybe not, with the balance probably being on "not". But by doing this, Google has hurt nobody; if Google hadn't done this, nobody would have been helped and all that would have happened is MSN would have become the default search engine in China. The only reason we view Google's presence in China as a problem is that we for whatever reason hold Google to the special standard that they shouldn't do business in China, a standard we do not hold Cisco, Yahoo, Microsoft, Fox News, CNN, McDonalds, or the U.S. Government to.
How can you tell when the Slashdot userbase has lost all sense, logic, or integrity? When they start agreeing with Cringely.
Just stop viewing the world with a high school mentality, and the problem will magically disappear. Once you're moved on and, like the rest of us, view things like companies based on their real-world actions and products-- rather than whether they make you feel inferior in front of an imaginary teacher that no longer exists-- you'll feel so much better. I promise.
Robert Cringley has written a thought-provoking article...
segmentation fault, core dumped
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
How dare you talk about google like that.. that too here on slashdot..
Google folks don't understand why the rest of us have a problem with this
Who? Wha..? Who are these "the rest of us" that this guy speaks of? A similar phenomenon happens with Apple fandom sites. Basically, when a news site or reporter decides to focus only on one or two companies, s/he ends up not having enough news, and this causes a lot of frustration. And they usually end up going down the path of speculative reporting (which is usually really boring, long, and incorrect).
Google is probably too secretive, but I appreciate their attitude. They have VERY LITTLE respect for the stock analysts, and Wall Street in general.
The fact of the matter is that the stock market is built on false (or at least dubious) perceptions. Google refuses to play that game. They don't tell ANYBODY what they're doing, which evens the playing field. The "big players" don't have any insider information, and so don't have a significant advantage over the "little players". I think it's great. Google basically says "We're not going to help the rich get richer."
That said, they are playing a dangerous game. Wall Street (and their ilk) essentially controls the U.S. economy. A given business pisses them off at their own peril. But at least Google is making the effort. And so far it has worked.
"child porn" may be the root password, but "terrorism" is the password to the builtin backdoor administrator access account.
I took a look into getting a gig over at Google recently. What a pain in the rear. It looks like I'd have to go in through an agency, which adds about 10-20% to the rate. That's IF you can find a contracting position. All the openings I saw were labeled as "temps". Screw that.
Yes, I know that some of the big companies prefer to treat contractors through agencies as temps, and not real contractors. But not all; it's quite possible at some to come in as a real contractor (although there's some paperwork). Dunno about Google; it's certainly not apparent from their website. So screw it; I ain't a Kelly Girl. I was quite happy with a different direct gig elsewhere.
So, this is just a "heads up" to Google. If you want to really attract good talent, you might consider making it more appealing to get that talent to apply. Especially when it's hard to find good talent in the Valley.
that it is secretive, it seems to me that company is pretty saintly.
Now I myself can say worse things about Google, namely that I read through their defense of their collusion with China on censorship, and the more they defend it the clearer it is that their motivation is greed. I myself never got as aggressive as I would have in pursuing Chinese business opportunities because of being ill at ease about their government, and Google could have survived losing that market.
However, on the whole they are a good and generous company, possessed of the same amount of greed and other flaws as most generally good corporations or people have.
This could, of course, change.;-)
Really, most of us have a lot more flaws than being secretive.... I do (but I keep them secret;-) ).
Did you actually sit there and type all that out just to troll? And I thought I was brored out of my mind a lot of the time. Go watch porn or play tetris or something. Nobody should ever have to be that bored.
So, now that this story has a tag with "cringley", a misspelling of the author's name, do have to wait for someone to notice that and change it in both the tags and the text, or do we just search for the wrong tags in the future?
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
It matters to many of their employees. Valuable stock options are a great way to motivate people. Worthless stock options are pretty demoralizing.
Also, if the price of their stock did drop too much, they would run the risk of an unfriendly takeover, unless of course the insiders still have most of the shares -- I'm not sure if they do or not. Either way, the stock would really have to tank for that to be likely.
Anyway, it's all fine for Google to pretend to be above the Wall Street games when the times are good. Somewhere down the road though, revenues will level off, competition will catch up, and they're going to wish they didn't piss off all the financial folks.
It seems like a trivial thing, but it makes a difference and it highlights Google's attitude. Google has a toolbar thingie that you can install in various browsers. It decides that certain fields -- "Name", "E-mail address", etc. -- should be a pale yellow colour. When I've gone to some trouble to coordinate my work with what the design team wants and what various browsers are capable of, I really, really object to having Google randomly decide to break everything and screw everything up and make me use a confusing and inappropriate { !important } CSS declaration to make the page render as it should. I complained. It is, apparently, a feature.
you're slower than an alexa update
?giS
So stop reading those threads - go read something else, it's your choice.
http://www.tudumo.com - todo list with tags
I think I like the mentality of "We're not going to tell you what we're working on until it's done". Compare that to something like Duke Nukem Forever, or damn near any Microsoft product. Hype kills technology for me. I'd much rather just have products appear in a usable state than listen to people talk about something that doesn't exist for two years only to find out the producer is killing the project.
SPARE ME.
Oh, looks like Google is trying to. Good for them.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Is it possible that if Google didnt cooperate with China, that China could simply denounce the Internet for 'most' of it's citizens? Allow only 'accepted' citizens to use the WWW and then create a CWW (china wide web) that possible would extend to other countries who wanted in on it?
If the above is possible and was done (not even sure if China has ever threatened this), which would be worse for the world? Google's actions which kept China a part of the WWW or China deciding what is best for itself and making its own sandbox?
This is going a bit too far in my opinion. There are many companies that do excell in not doing evil (and even the opposite). In many cases it becomes a central part in what they stand for, and people would not forgive such a company for going the other route. Take for instance XS4ALL, a very successfull internet provider here in the Netherlands. Currently it is part of KPN. KPN is not a company that has "doing good" in its mission statements (using pretty unfair business practices to keep its head above the surface). On the other hand, XS4ALL maintaines it's status as defender of privacy, fight against spam and providing very robust and extensive internet services - they are owned but are mostly independent from the KPN headquarters. Currently they are fighting the law that requires them to keep internet access logs.
If the company goes IPO that doesn't mean that the entire staff is replaced suddenly. Maybe in the long stance when shareholders demand a staff that only looks at profit. People make the company. I am reasonably hopefull that the ones that are currently working at Google are not evil. Maybe if others start flowing in.
They're not. They're a bunch of guys with a great PR machine, who like to make money, and who are surrounded by a bunch of technonerds. Behind the hype, Google is the Walmart of the internet.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
People with skills can turn free or valueless things into things that can be sold and have tangible value, and they'll do it for a lot less than those things are worth, creating wealth for others. I think some guy wrote something about that once.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Good one! Parent was just trying to be a smart-ass
There's nothing wrong with making a profit.
There can however, be something wrong with how you make that profit and how much profit you make.
If you're a private company, you can decide to do business the honest and moral way, sacrificing part of your profit by being a good and responsible citizen.
As a public company however, in the US you are bound by law to maximize shareholder value (profits) by whatever means possible as long as it is legal, or winnable in a court of law. Failure to comply will get you sued by the shareholders.
Since a public company has the same rights as a person, but none of the moral restraints, it can easily become evil. The law forces them to be so.
Ergo, since going public, Google has become, or is becoming, evil.
"we'd much rather show nothing (white space) than a poorly targeted or non-relevant ad"
"It does not mean, however, that Mr. Dias or any other advertiser will be able to economically show ads that are not relevant and not consistent with user intent. If Mr. Dias or other advertisers want a large quantity of untargeted impressions, there are a variety of media that offer these relatively cost effectively (e.g., web banner ads, TV, newspapers, magazines)."
eBay ads? *cough* *cough*
From the toolbar, go to "Options", and either just turn off AutoFill, or go to "AutoFill settings", and unclick "Highlight fields that AutoFill can fill in in yellow"
Not to be a pedant, but isn't that "application/xhtml+xml"?
What Google doesn't want people to know about is that there are amazing number of so called MFA (made for adsense) sites that essentially leech on advertiser's money. MFA sites are basically pages plastered with adsense ads and contentless link filled sites generated by scripts specifically designed to boost page ranks. Of course Google gets a cut of this money whenever it moves from advertiser to MFA makers so they have no incentive to prevent these leechers from doing what they do. In fact Google secretly encourages creations of these sites. They also encourage adsense publisher to blend the ads into the page as much as possible. This also tends to generate more clicks and thus more profit for Google. It's not certain if this blending technique is favorable to advertisers but it most certainly favorable to both publishers and Google.
Also a new phenomenon is sudden growth of something called splogs. Splog is a play on words of Spam and Blogs. There are literally millions of splogs out there and tens of thousands are being generated daily using software. These splogs are nothing but spam with varous cross linking techniques used by blackhat SEO (search engine optimizers) to once again to jack up Google page ranks. The kicker is the vast majority of splogs are hosted by Blogger (blogspot.com) which is owned by Google. Google provides various RSS feeds and also provides free bandwidth and hosting for these splogs on their own servers. It's not hard to find bunch of these MFA site creators or sploggers in various forums sharing their money leeching schemes and just about all the techniques they use are endored by Google. There is a real "looking the other way" attitude Google has about these activities. The advertisers are obviously kept in the dark during the whole process.
I still don't understand the idea that obeying Chinese law is evil (yes, it's mentioned again in this article). Does this mean that every law abiding Chinese citizen is evil? Does this mean that every news/media source legally available to Chinese people is evil?
That's what's suggested every time you call Google evil for providing a special censored (and it says so) Chinese service.
Few people work 'just for the money'. Money is considered a 'hygene factor' of employment and not a key factor in whether you enjoy your job/ keep working there.
The other thing is if the stock price collapsed, it's cheap, so although the options are worthless, you are purchasing the stock at cheaper than the option price anyway. Then it comes down to belief about what you are doing.
If you didn't believe in what you were doing, you shouldn't be working there anyway. Why burn yourself out on a 60 hour week when you don't enjoy what you're doing? That just means you don't really get to enjoy any of your life, as all you do is work and sleep.
If you believe in what you've doing, then the stock is undervalued, and worth buying anyway (by definition).
People on the fence are probably the most damaging to the company, as they still hang around, but tend to drag the 'believers' down. Getting rid of them is important for the morale of the company, as self-deception is important in maintaining an optimistic outlook for both individuals and companies.
Why not just split adwords into daily/weekly/monthly ad campaigns and for each have "auctions" or where each company says I want to put X dollars on word Y. Then their ad would be displayed X/(total amount placed on Y) of the time. This model is impervious to click fraud, yet both Google and the business still get fair market pricing.
Google could help push the price up buy releasing the total amount in each pot and still report the number of clicks (although due to fraud this number is less and less important).
To re-imburse websites that host adwords they would have to come up with a new ranking system based on sales of companies who get hits off their sight. Google would have to give each company hosting an adword their own "click quality ranking system" where each company could divy out as many karma points as they paid for each adword.
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
Sort of like the Bush Administration?
Cringely is, as usual, talking out of his ass.
Google has a blog that tells you what's going on.
Google puts its in-house development projects online as "beta" tools.
Google's ultra-simple front-page portal isn't about secrecy, it's about giving you exactly what you want when you go to Google's front-page.
Cringley needs to start thinking faster than he can type instead of the other way around.
It's a chilling return to the Microsoft and Netscape arrogance in terms of randomly extending and changing the behaviour of HTML rendering whenever they felt like it.
So yes I think in many ways the criticism of Google is a good thing, it's just too bad we had our irrational blinders on about OTHER Google blunders before the big Chinese sell out.
I completely agree with that.
people are questioning whether Google's "do no evil" ethos is true, which obviously it isn't being a
a company funded by stock investment it's ONLY priority (and one enforced by law) is returning profit to it's investors.
Could you cite me the relevant section of the law on that?
Even if that were true, I'm not sure it matters much. In a practical sense, courts give corporate managers wide latitude to do what they think best as long as they aren't obviously stealing. Any first-year MBA student could give give you a plausible argument: Google's do-no-evil strategy is vital to maximizing profit because consumer trust is vital to search, selling ads, getting people to click on ads, and their ever-more-endoscopic products like GMail and Desktop Search.
So the real question is who the stockholders choose to run the company. And who are the biggest stockholders? Larry and Sergei, the VCs, and a bunch of Google's early employees. Who naturally agree with the do-no-evil approach or they would have bailed long ago.
Google did the blatantly evil thing of censoring Chinese search results.
I think it was a mistake, but I honestly believe they thought it went with the do-no-evil thing. Their options were to go to China censored or not at all. The first way guarantees that they will never make a difference. By going and playing by the rules, it gives them a chance at influence both obvious and subtle, a chance to make things better. Were I a geek at Google, I would delight in making the filtering just tight enough to pass government inspection, while being leaky for anybody with half a brain.
Parent post sed: "Could you cite me the relevant section of the law on that?"
C ompany
r eclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/personhood_timeline .pdf+corporation+14th+amendment+rights&hl=en&gl=us &ct=clnk&cd=3&client=firefox-a
Sure can it's Dodge v.s. Ford a 1916 Supreme Court decision:
"Dodge v. Ford Motor Company
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dodge v. Ford Motor Company, 204 Mich. 459, 170 N.W. 668. (Mich. 1919), was a famous case in which the Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford owed a duty to the shareholders of the Ford Motor Company to operate his business for profitable purposes as opposed to charitable purposes.
Facts
In 1916, the Ford Motor Company earned surpluses in excess of $100,000,000.00. The company's president and majority stockholder, Henry Ford, sought to stop declaring dividends for investors, and instead cut prices below the price for which they could actually sell cars, while at the same time increasing the number of persons employed by his company. Ford said that he wanted to increase the number of people who could afford to buy his cars. He stated:
"My ambition is to employ still more men, to spread the benefits of this industrial system to the greatest possible number, to help them build up their lives and their homes. To do this we are putting the greatest share of our profits back in the business."
Minority shareholders objected, demanding that Ford continue to charge higher prices in order to pay them larger dividends.
Issue
The Court was called upon to decide whether the minority shareholders could prevent Ford from operating the company for the charitable ends that he had declared.
Opinion of the Court
The Court held that a business corporation is organized primarily for the profit of the stockholders. The discretion of the directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to the reduction of profits or the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to benefit the public, making the profits of the stockholders incidental thereto.
Because this company was in business for profit, Ford could not turn it into a charity. This was compared to a spoliation of the company's assets. The court therefore upheld the order of the trial court requiring that directors declare an extra dividend of $19 million."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_
Ever since this TERRIBLE decision (with perhaps good original intent) combined with limited liability, and ruling that the corporation has the same 14th amendment rights as a person in the 19th century it's utterly foolish to think a corporation can even legally "do no evil."
See also" http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:OUxdJmMReQ8J:
For more on corporate personhood.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
With Matt Cutts' blog and GoogleGuy on that webmaster forum and the many interviews some of Google's higher ups give there is a lot of information going out to the public.
What are the things people think Google should publish which they are not at the moment?
Hmm.. that sounds familiar; Google, "selling the future" to drive up the stock price... where did I hear/read about that concept before???
???
Oh yah... ENRON!
- No Sig for you!
Being secretive and not acknowledging mistakes!? Sounds just like Apple these days.
The last month on the Apple Discussion board was filled with thermal paste and whine problems on the MacBook Pro. But Apple does not acknowledge 90degree celsius+ CPU temp as a problem.
So I guess Google is just growing up...
Considering that they are a *Stanford* project that became a company, they seem to have inherited a few practices. One of them is to have a certain personality that seems to attract only exclusionists- their services reflect it. That is why they think they have been anointed by $DEITY and act without regards to consequence. They would have to remove the parts (and certain parts of the services, *cough*Orkut,Gmail*cough*) that make themselves appear like theyre still stuck-up Stanfordites.
Even if someone didnt come from that university, Google's culture seems to instill this. Add a hollow but easily deceptive bit of openness and that is why you see them act in such strange manners.
DiBona, this includes you too.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
There is a very good reason for Google's secrecy- Microsoft etc. would copy them. Also, they're nowhere near as secretive as MS.
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