Great article Charles, as always very thought provoking. Would be nice to address Apple as well and compare the two.

Posted on 5/12/10 2:29 PM.

Good point, though I suppose once you start expanding the list you can keep going and going. Focusing on these two seemed appropriate, though given so much of the column was about Microsoft rather than Google, I think the tag line on the cover and the article title should have made it clear it's not all about Google.

By the way, I absolutely love the IntelligenceSquared debates Charles mentioned, and I liked this one when I heard it. Much of the "pro evil" side focused on their stance in China, which changed subsequently. I wonder how that debate would play out now.

Posted on 5/12/10 2:44 PM in reply to Dejan Milojicic.

The IQ2 debate did focus on China and while it was good, I did not think it was principled. I tried to give a small but important-to-geeks principle by which to judge evil, as well as considering broader issues such as an essentially denial-of-service to startups, privacy, and others. I have always admired Google's struggle to balancing business and ethical interests in China. I think Google was forced finally to choose one way or the other and they did. I would hope if the debate were re-done, that they would consider principles such as real support of open standards and technologies.

Posted on 5/12/10 6:09 PM in reply to Frederick Douglis.

The article anthropomorphizes Google by attributing to it the human trait "evil." The interesting question to me is whether there is an individual at Google who is reponsible for it being evil or there is a collective evil behavior that emerges. If the latter, is it the nature of the business that Google is in that would encourage evil behavior? Moreover, are new employees susceptible to catching the behavior?

Google is an organization of people, so if it is evil, there must be one or more people at Google who are evil.

Posted on 5/22/10 3:25 PM.

Mike - thanks for the stimulating comments. Just briefly, while I noted that I thought well of a few of the managers, the issue of individuals being evil was not addressed by my deconstruction of the meaning of evil in relation to organizations and technology. In any large organization there are likely to be people with some degree of evil in some sense of the term, and history shows that other people, whether new or not, are susceptible to catching such behavior. But again, this is orthogonal to the sense of "evil" that I tried to carefully characterize in a way that is different than we use when attributing such a trait to a human (even if corporations seem now to be individuals under US law. And finally, you will note that the article does not, in the end, attribute "evil", as defined, to Google.

Posted on 5/27/10 3:52 PM in reply to Michael Huhns.