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Silicon Valley Values Shift To Customersploitation
theodp writes "Bill Davidow is the real Silicon Valley deal. Commenting on how Silicon Valley has changed over the decades, Davidow is not impressed, dishing out harsh words for Facebook, Apple, Google, and others. 'When corporate leaders pursue wealth in the winner-take-all Internet environment,' concludes Davidow, 'companies dance on the edge of acceptable behavior. If they don't take it to the limit, a competitor will. That competitor will become the dominant supplier — one monopoly will replace another. And when you engage in these activities you get a different set of Valley values: the values of customer exploitation.'"
My first reaction to this article was a wry smile" "I think I've heard this story before." I spent 30+ years working in IT on Wall Street, and saw that industry change from relationship-oriented to a almost complete focus on short-term transactions. ("What have you done for me today?") IN both industries, there is a good deal below the surface that isn't visible, easily or at all, to the customer; that the customer often ends up getting screwed shouldn't really surprise anyone.
This is in no way similar to, say, my telephone number being sold or traded by businesses to telemarketers.
This isn't new, and this isn't unique to IT.
The more I think about, the more impressed I am by the Craigslist model. There is no constant addition of features just for the sake of appearing to do something or for the sake of growing revenues. That's a service that is truly focused on its users.
Google was 1997 and Lycos was 1994. Mod parent down.
That's the company founding date. Lycos got a web search engine in 1998 when it acquired HotBot. HotBot launched in May 1996. Meanwhile, Google was in development since January 1996 and started first experiments with crawling the web in March 1996. The proof of concept system was working by August 1996. The domain google.com was registered in September 1997 and the company itself was founded a year later.
And the most important thing: The only other search engine that was using backlinks to rank search results before September 1998 was RankDex. Ever heard of it? Crawler bots were NOT the killer feature of web search engines. Backlink-based ranking was.