My view on the Google motto "Don't be evil"

I see the (former) Google motto "Don't be evil" mentioned now and then in the forum and I've been meaning to make a post about it for quite some time.

It seems to me to be some misunderstanding regarding it. On first glance it does sound cool, and given the context of the time that Google started in, they felt like a fresh counter-point to (for instance) Microsoft. The problem is that is very easy to think like this:



But the problem is that reality isn't black and white; things aren't either good or evil. (Not for most people anyway. )

It's a pretty big grayscale between those two extremes, which contains all kinds of nice and also awful things.

So when they say "Don't be evil", they still allow themselves to be all the way from good to pretty damn awful.



I didn't think this when they first appeared, I also thought the motto was very cool. It took me a couple of years to realize that it didn't actually mean anything good for the people interacting with them.

Just felt like sharing my view on this. Now I've procrastinated enough and must force myself to actually work for a while.

Somehow, it has reminded me of the Media Markt slogan in Spanish: ¡Yo no soy tonto! (I am not a fool!) , which has been similarly translated to several languages.
Identifying oneself as "not a fool" doesn't immediately convert you into the smartest person, but it works!

Sandman said:

procastrinated

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This is one of those fantastic words that I've regularly put into practice since long before I knew its meaning. If you take the time to spell it, it's long, spreads like butter, just as the time we spend to focus on totally irrelevant things.
Just procrastinated a bit, and saw that "procrastinate" has more Google search entries than "procastrinate", which also has some. Are both allowed?

Also time to get back to work after my pr*** time today.

Next one, please? ?

JordiCP said:

Somehow, it has reminded me of the Media Markt slogan in Spanish: ¡Yo no soy tonto! (I am not a fool!) , which has been similarly translated to several languages.
Identifying oneself as "not a fool" doesn't immediately convert you into the smartest person, but it works!

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Yep, same mental mechanism - good catch!

JordiCP said:

Just procrastinated a bit, and saw that "procrastinate" has more Google search entries than "procastrinate", which also has some. Are both allowed?

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They are not. I corrected my misspelling before I finished reading your text, sorry about that. I know my english isn't perfect, but I actually do know how to spell that word. It irritates me slightly that I didn't catch the error before posting.

Sandman said:

I know my english isn't perfect, but I actually do know how to spell that word. It irritates me slightly that I didn't catch the error before posting.

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Blâme it on the "smart T9" keyboard

Sandman said:

I see the (former) Google motto "Don't be evil"

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saw the other post : Yup I guess one has to go back to the days before Google became Corporatised, venture capitaled and went all Global (suggests a change of name to Gloobal rather than Google - doesn't it). So while Larry and Sergei are sailing around the Mediterranean on boats crewed by my wife's cousins - I wonder what, if anything, they think of what its turned out to be?

There's and interesting book called, yup, The Google Story -

[Hell I hope there aren't any typos up there ]