> In general I think people ought to look at Google much more skeptically than they used to and all of the technologies that they push for. They all in some way push their agenda forward.
I've been skeptical of Google for a long time, and quit using them as much as possible since they rolled out "Don't be evil." Talk about telegraphing the punch.
It's funny how corporate marketing works. For a long time I used to really love their products and their processes. Maybe it was when they got rid of "don't be evil" but at some point they started turning into just another corporation.
A corporation with a ton of resources and a ton of people's information. Anyway I don't want to go into a rant but lately everything they do even the open source stuff is just to further their agenda and seldom to help the community.
As far as I remember, it was around when Google+ came out.
Google started as a technology company for nerds. Remember when Google broke all "rules" when their website was a simple image, input, and two buttons?
Then they were into open standards, tech innovation, and where the company was run by engineers, and not media people (see Yahoo).
The result was a focus on UX and not design.
Unfortunately, around when Google+ came out, they decided they're done with that, and became a "company for the masses".
XMPP integration - dead
Open Source apps - dead
They're back to bloat (just JS instead of animated GIFs and Flash), "beauty" over "UX", closed source apps (remember when most apps put out by Google were open source? Remember the shock that Picasso wasn't?)
The only thing they really don't open source are web services (Gmail, search) - probably both for competitive reasons but also because it ties in too deeply with their infrastructure.
Chromium and Android being their two largest projects are OS though, and thousands of tools and libraries that they've built. Also TensorFlow, their newest machine learning library.
Maybe I'm stretching a bit, but Snowden was the nail in the coffin. Even if you are American, it is very hard to define evil in a such a way to defend their participation in PRISM.
That code of conduct just make it worse they were caught red handed, and I can very much understand people who completely lost their trust in the company.
I was not aware of any voluntary cooperation with the NSA on the part of Google - indeed, the NSA rather famously hacked Google's internal fiber links. If Google was handing them data, why would they need to do that?
I've been skeptical of Google for a long time, and quit using them as much as possible since they rolled out "Don't be evil." Talk about telegraphing the punch.