Not Being Evil Covers a Lot of Ground
Google’s slogan has always kind of bothered me. “Don’t Be Evil” does not necessarily imply “Be Great” or even “Be Good”, its an exclusive thing to ‘not be evil’, they can still ‘be very bad’ without being evil. I think their slogan should read “Always Be Great”. Just an opinion.
btompkins said,
Wrote on December 6, 2005 @ 2:57 pm
“Don’t Be Evil” is a brilliant marketing campaign. Think about it, with three little words, they accomplish the following:
Debase their competition - Since MS is known as the Evil Empire, they get you to think all sorts of negative ideas about microsoft.
Get you to think postive thoughts about Google - “finally, a company that’s not evil!” is the message.
Get you to think about your own behavior - “I don’t want to be evil, I need more google”
All with three words… Now, it’s totally untrue, as a company can never really be evil or good, at least publicly traded ones, but I think it’s just brilliant, nonetheless.
breichelt said,
Wrote on December 6, 2005 @ 4:04 pm
I agree with you Brendan, it kind of catches you off guard, especially the word ‘evil’. Its not something you typically see in a company slogan/mantra. “Always Be Great” is a lame marketing slogan, I’ll admin
Anonymous said,
Wrote on December 6, 2005 @ 8:52 pm
I think it’s less referring to actual code, and more to management decisions.
I can name several “evil” MS technologies/practices that you don’t hear about every day (Tabular Data Stream, ISAPI to name a couple), but Google not so much.
Are they really so great? I dunno. They’ve got the SummerOfCode thang. The Google API. I mean, you don’t (or at least didn’t) see MS giving that stuff away before Google forced their hand.
And then there’s that list of 10 Google ideals or whatever. It sounds like a nice place.
Look at http://www.eworldui.net/ for example. A very nice, inexpensive set of ASP.NET controls (free if you don’t need the source!), but MS gives him a job, and forces him to shut it down.
Now I’m not saying there aren’t 50 cases of Google doing the same thing, but I haven’t seen it.
breichelt said,
Wrote on December 6, 2005 @ 10:18 pm
Sam, I’m not saying that Google actually is great, or that microsoft or anyone else is bad or evil. All I’m saying is that they’re setting the bar rather low, to simply not be evil is pretty easy, but being great is a lot harder to do.
Anonymous said,
Wrote on December 7, 2005 @ 1:31 am
I dunno. I mean, .NET is pretty great. The sealed framework and discouraging IL manipulation though? Evil.
Linux is pretty great. The 50 million inconsistencies between everyone’s own particular brand of greatness in their apps though? Or how about (top o’ me head) 4 package management systems? I mean, they’re all great, and far superior to Installers, the Registry, blah blah. But 4 of em? So you have to keep multiples around because not everything you need is in one format? Or how about STUPID error messages about memory dumps, process end, process start, or 50 million other modal notifications only the most depraved dream-in-octal-damn-the-usability hacker could love?
Definitely EVIL.
Creating RubyOnRails and then making excuses for ActiveRecord because it is what it says when real applications often need real O/R Mappers?
Sure ActiveRecord is GREAT, beautiful code for all it’s 5,000 lines or so (wild guess; the point is it’s very compact), but is it up to the task?
Evil everywhere.
So I dunno… I mean, I see where you’re coming from, but playing the devil’s advocate, you can find great code or products everywhere. It’s the evil bits that bite ya.
c# was to wait for version 3 to fix fundamental problems they baked in _on purpose_ because they didn’t trust us as developers.
Linux still isn’t as good a Desktop OS as Win95 was the day of release because it’s apparently impossible to get thousands of developers to hold themselves back when it comes to gee-whiz features and pay more attention to usability as a whole and how their feature/application/widget fits into the puzzle.
RoR is held back by it’s own hype as soon as you realize you can’t use it for anything with a terribly complex domain model because it’s too tightly coupled to the database.
Or maybe I’m just misinterpreting Google completely. That’s what I always thought it meant; so it’s a lot more than “write good/cool stuff” to me, but I could be way off base.
breichelt said,
Wrote on December 7, 2005 @ 10:24 am
I agree that other companies to evil things, Microsoft, Linux, ActiveRecord, sure all of them can be considered evil. My point is that none of them have a slogan that says ‘dont be evil’. People think that google is so great because they have this slogan that says they wont be evil, and what I’m saying is that ‘not being evil’ shouldn’t be something that you have to declare, it should just be the way you are. Instead of announcing that they wont be evil, they should announce that they are going to do good.
Anonymous said,
Wrote on December 7, 2005 @ 6:56 pm
I see your point.
I still like the slogan though since ideally I’d see it as a way to keep management honest. There’s not much wiggle-room in “Don’t be evil”.
Of course I ran into a case where yes, Google has been evil today.
If “Don’t be evil” really applied across the board:
You can’t just say, wow, GoogleTalk is a great IM client. You have to explain why you didn’t allow non-google Jabber servers. There’s no good technical reason for it. It’s just the way it was done. When you think of all that is needed is a different URI though… well, it’s hard to believe this didn’t actually bubble-up and some middle-manager decided “we must protect our brand” or some such BS.
Should we feel entitled to Google’s hard work? Well… MS lets you do it. Why not GoogleTalk, which is just a nice UI on top of a nicer OSS library?
Maybe this will be fixed, but since it’s so trivial, it seems like it would have to be purposeful.