I'm always a bit taken aback by the heat that Google gets for even thinking about breaking into the Chinese market. Microsoft is in China and has active US military contracts. Apple is in China. Yet it's Google that gets the bad rap for trying to get into China and then ultimately turning down billions of dollars in revenue and data.
I think a lot of this has to do with how much self-congratulating google has engaged in over the years around ethics. They set very high expectations, boasted about it, then fell very short.
What you're seeing in people's reactions is disappointment. No one's ever seen Microsoft as an ethical company, so no one bats an eye when they enter the Chinese market and embrace the questionable ethics of the Chinese government.
That doesn't make it right, but it certainly gets less attention.
The rest of them have been open about the fact they are ruthless profit making centers focused only on money and you shut up and stay in line or else you're toast. Google's model was "don't be evil" and for years went on the image that they are fighting for the public good and that they were an example of the ability to be principle centered, do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time. Now that the pressure starts to turn up on how to be profitable it turns out that everything they said they stood for, and more importantly the ideal that they represented, turned out to be a lie.
They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up, now that they have abandoned that fall more for it.
Apple at least somewhat tries to put up an image of caring about environmental issues[1] and privacy (e.g. in the aftermath of San Bernardino attack). (Of course they still have Chinese sweatshops, and who knows how much raw materials comes from child labour in the Congo so of course it's mostly a smokescreen.)
>They were able to cash in on this image of moral superiority and principle first for years and it gave them a leg up
okay but honestly how silly is it to take a company's branding to heart? like are we all children that believe in santa claus too?
>do good for the world, and get stinking rich at the same time
i'm old enough now to understand that these two things are mutually exclusive because the latter necessarily involves exploitation (thereby doing net evil rather than net good).
Doing good for the world and getting rich are by no means mutually exclusive. People pay money for products and services that make their lives better and history has shown that economic growth is not a zero-sum game.
Where companies get into ethical trouble is when they try to maintain exponential growth long after it is possible to do so in a way that is moral. You can make a lot of money doing good for the world, but you can't sustain exponential growth indefinitely without crossing a few lines.
economic growth is an abstraction. i'm not talking about abstract notions of good and evil.
some people believe that there are systems where entropy decreases too. their mistake is the same as yours: the system you're looking at isn't big enough. someone, somewhere, pays for your growth. either it's the employees that you underpay or it's the commons that you trash or it's the competitors whose coattails you're riding on or etc and etc and etc.
you can't point to a single product that doesn't incur this kind of entropy increase somewhere along its supply chain.
edit: i'm getting downvoted. would love to know where i'm mistaken (other than that i'm assailing capitalism).
I didn't downvote, but I agree with GP that growth isn't a zero sum game. If you create the right product, then you and the people who pay for your growth all end up better off than you were before.
In hindsight, it was naive, but it wasn't just branding. It really was a strong sentiment at the time long before the Internet consolidated around a few extremely powerful companies.
It's viewed as a betrayal of whatever ethical/moral core Google claimed to have originally, at least by employees and customers who bought into the hype early on and didn't realize that Google is ultimately just another big tech company with shareholders.
As a former employee it never really surprised me that the company would want to move back into China, but it did surprise me a bit that they were doing so under heavy secrecy. I suppose in practice they were right to want to keep it secret (employees were unhappy) but on the other hand it's impossible to keep secrets in that company so they should have known it would leak eventually.
Microsoft, Apple, etc. doing business in China is unsurprising in comparison since we all know what big tech companies with 10k+ employees are about: Making money.
Because half of us are just glad Microsoft isn’t in charge anymore. The opposite of hate is apathy, and that you ask the question suggests that you are too young to remember a lot of people used to call Microsoft the Evil Empire - a reference to Star Wars. Of course they’re doing slimy shit. They’ve always been slimy to half of us. If you forget history it will repeat.
You’ve got me on Apple though. And I say this as both a member of an Apple household and a longtime investor: It’s more or less a luxury good, it has cachet, people tie their egos to them, and we have the legacy of the Reality Distortion field that you can still see in the word choices in product launch events (and the fact that they are events).
People don’t want to believe Apple is evil like they don’t want to believe Michael touched kids inappropriately at Neverland.
They do some things domestically that make it Not My Problem... if you ignore the Hong Kong situation. But I am not empowered to fix my own government (save maybe at the local level) let alone someone else’s.
Microsoft never had a good rep to begin with. They were always seen as an evil corp. I remember when most of the mentions of Microsoft on the forums used to be spelled as "Micro$hit", "Micro$haft", or something similar. Google didn't have this image problem until later in the game.
that's because google won over hearts and minds with "do no evil" so people feel betrayed because they invested themselves in the ideology of the company. it's mostly their fault for taking branding seriously.
People might vaguely dislike you for ambiguous reasons if you are an underachiever, but get them excited about things you can’t actually accomplish and they start to know exactly what they don’t like about you.
I’ve had a boss who tried to give out rewards to people and announced them without possessing them, and we had to harass him to get them. By the time they were delivered it felt like we’d earned them a second time, completely undermining whatever message he was trying to send.
The first “idiot” I worked for has the honor of my best anecdote for underestimating work and would pull this stunt where we could “go home early if we get everything done” on random Friday’s. On average we left an hour later on these days than on a typical Friday. The last time he tried this the entire team shot daggers at him and wandered back to their desks.
>> it's mostly their fault for taking branding seriously.
That's a hard lesson for a lot of people. Unfortunately it comes in different forms as well. I cant tell you how many places I've run across that seem to be paying slightly more than lip service to safety standards.
I felt slighted by their interview process and experience a little schadenfreude. From what I gather a lot of other people have the same salt.
It’s the biggest reason I tell people to be magnanimous in interviews. You may need to interview them again in three years, or their friends. You don’t want them to tell you to fuck off, or worse, talking about you behind your back to their peers.
There’s a company in Seattle who had a long history of having trouble hiring. They even hosted a bunch of meetups but still got hardly any bites. Because they had a reputation as an awful place to work and people would talk about it after the meetups or even quietly during the meetups. I have my suspicions this actually hurt their lead rate instead of helped. Getting people together to air your dirty laundry is rarely good.
It’s also why I strongly discourage 1 on 1 interviews. If I’m in a room with a coworker I know how they treated the candidate and they know how I did. There’s feedback to be given, adjustments to be made. Without that you can’t tell if one interviewer has low success rates due to beig really picky or being a dick.
The second guy I talked to at Google was such an asshole that I doubted my read on the other three people. It shakes you, and me in particular. I have a problem with saying no to all offers on the table, which shows up as self-sabotage in interviews. I don’t want to work with you, so I’m not going to try to convince you to want to work with me. It would be better for me to stick with it and get comfortable just saying no to all bad offers even if that’s all the offers I have. Least objectionable has won out a time or two and I’ve always paid for it in the end.
Microsoft does not know nearly as much about people as Google does. Microsoft does not have the insane Orwellian mission to "organize the world's information".
