Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct (gizmodo.com)

Kate Conger, reporting for Gizmodo: Google's unofficial motto has long been the simple phrase "don't be evil." But that's over, according to the code of conduct that Google distributes to its employees. The phrase was removed sometime in late April or early May, archives hosted by the Wayback Machine show.

"Don't be evil" has been part of the company's corporate code of conduct since 2000. When Google was reorganized under a new parent company, Alphabet, in 2015, Alphabet assumed a slightly adjusted version of the motto, "do the right thing." However, Google retained its original "don't be evil" language until the past several weeks. The phrase has been deeply incorporated into Google's company culture -- so much so that a version of the phrase has served as the wifi password on the shuttles that Google uses to ferry its employees to its Mountain View headquarters, sources told Gizmodo.

Comments

Re:Four legs good, two legs better!

[thomst]

ShanghaiBill observed:

Plenty of corporations start in the corrupt and greedy abyss right from the beginning. For instance, Microsoft never went through an "idealistic" phase. Oracle is another example of primordial slime.

I've never worked for Microsoft. It's certainly true, though, that Gates stole CPM from Gary Kildall, and (after modifying it to run on a then-incompatible filesystem) sold it to IBM, as PC-DOS, for mucho dinero. In spring of 1992, he screwed IBM, too, by buying up every floppy disk he could find, to delay OS/2 2.0's rollout, while Microsoft vacuumed up all the PR oxygen with Windows 3.1's much-ballyhooed release. On floppies. (Yes, OS/2 2.0 was released on 17 3/5" floppies - and you could get it in 5.25", as well. Eventually. But, from February 1992 through mid-July, you couldn't buy a box of floppies for love, money, or marbles, because Microsoft had purchased every manufacturer's entire output. And it was rare, in those days, for PC's to have CD drives, believe it or not.)

And it was interesting - in the ghoulish way passing a really bad accident on the freeway is interesing - to watch the collapse of IBM's otherwise-carefully-planned rollout of their vastly-superior OS. The panic in the IBM guys who came by our lab space at Wells steadily mounted, as the weeks since the official release date ticked by, and the continuing floppy shortage kept anyone but major potential customers (like Wells Fargo, where I was a senior technology analyst) from being able to get their hands on the darned thing anywhere but at IBM authorized dealers. And then only to kick the demo version around on the store's computers, not to buy a copy themselves. (In late March, our sales rep gave us an advance copy to evaluate, with the exhortation, "Take care of that. You probably won't see another one for quite a while." When I asked him if we could make a backup copy, he said, "Officially speaking, I should say 'No.' Unofficially, though, it's probably a good idea.")

Once upon a time, however, I did work for Orace. (As a contractor, rather than as a FTE.)

I had recently left Wells (this was at the end of 1992, before the swine who ran NationsBank ate them, jettisoned all the top execs I'd known, and assumed the Wells identity, even though it was a considerably smaller entity, because their own brand was absolute poison), and I naively believed that place had been a shark tank. I swiftly found out that Wells was full of mere guppies, instead. Oracle, by comparison, was a freakin' piranha swarm.

As just one example of the work environment at Oracle: I had set up a shared, $10,000 Tektronix Phaserjet, wax-transfer color printer for an Oracle sales department. (Cost of consumables? About two bucks a page, depending. Even the special, clay-surface paper was expensive. And the four, separate, rolls of wax-surface, color printing medium? Yikes!) One day they called me to say that it had stopped working, and one of their employees needed to be on a flight to Europe pronto, with color printouts of his Powerpoint deck in hand an absolute priority.

So I drove to Redwood Shores (which took nearly an hour), and, after visually inspecting the printer, determined that its power cable was missing. I substituted one from a nearby workstation (whose user was on a marketing trip to Asia, which meant he had no immediate need for it), and the marketing guy easily made his flight, 4-color printout in hand. Then I went looking for the missing power cable from the printer (which, with the Tektronix logo stamped on it, was pretty distinctive). I found it, too.

Some guy from another department (in a different silo on that same floor) had filched it to supply power to his personal laser printer - and then walked away, without replacing it, leaving an entire department that depended on the Phaserjet with no way to print its slides.

I confiscated the cable, of course, and took it ba

Capitalism is dead. Long live corporate cancerism

[shanen]

Good comment and deserves the insightful mod, even though you didn't address the underlying religious issue:

"There is no gawd but Profit, and the google wants to be Profit's #1 prophet."

Right now Apple holds the title (according to Fortune), but they are evil and cancerous in different ways. The noncancerous corporations have mostly been crushed out of the market or bought out and merged.

It amuses me to imagine there could be solution approaches. My current favorite would be a progressive tax on corporate profits, where the rate increases with market share. NOT a penalty to success, but rather an incentive to reproduce by fission, providing more competition, more choices, and more freedom for the human beings. The REAL human beings, not the legal fictions like corporate persons.