Blogoscoped

"First off, the authors are confusing causation and correlation. Schmidt points out a series of characteristics of Google as a company and presents them as the reasons for Google’s success, but in my opinion, they are all consequences of Google’s success.

For example the authors write: “Their plan for creating that great search engine, and all the other great services was equally simple: Hire as many talented software engineers as possible, and give them freedom.” Well, this worked because the search was already successful enough to fund that freedom.

[...]

The key is market dominance. If you have a de facto position of a monopoly in your market, money pours in, and you can afford to give your employees even more than 20 percent of their time free."

This is itself backwards, yes? ISTR that http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-03-n78.html AdWords — and thus the profitability of Google's search business, if (arguably) not the search monopoly itself — was the product of early Google's 20% time and employee freedom, rather than the other way round. (Oh, and they got GMail into the bargain.) Similarly for:

"I would love to see one single company that isn’t dominating a market with no cash cow in-flow that can succeed without strict discipline, sharp focus, hard work, and hands-on management."

I thought that Google's 20% time was modelled after practises at 3M and Hewlett-Packard? I have no doubt that in their day these were companies that enjoyed comfortably high margins…

> censoring of content

The supreme irony of this is that Aaron's role as a co-founder has long been censored from Reddit's founders page [0], despite agreements to the contrary [1].

More generally, Aaron had strong views on censorship [2]:

> I think all censorship should be deplored. My position is that bits are not a bug – that we should create communications technologies that allow people to send whatever they like to each other. And when people put their thumbs on the scale and try to say what can and can’t be sent, we should fight back – both politically through protest and technologically through software like Tor...

> How is compromising [by a technology company on censorship] supposed to bring greater freedom in the long run? That’s like saying “I’m going to beat you up now so that you don’t have to be hit as much in the long run.” The right answer is to stop beating people up.

But I do think that physical violence resulting in part from the amplification of voices by algorithm would have been hard to foresee. I too would be curious if his thinking would have evolved. Sadly, we'll never know.

[0] https://reclaimthenet.org/aaron-swartz-reddit-founder/

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_cofounder_aaron_swartz_discusses_how_he/c1oewi/

[2] http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-05-07-n78.html

Thanks for the link. That certainly shows that Google was sponsoring an aggressive and fairly ugly ad campaign.

> UI was comparable.

They were not at all comparable. Here is an image of what Firefox looked like when Chrome was released [1]. Here is an image of what Chrome looked like at release [2]. Barring some design tweaks Chrome looks roughly like any modern browser whereas Firefox looks ancient by modern standards. It has the app menu, no integration with window decoration, a separate search box, tabs below the address bar, etc. Lots of things that Firefox would copy over the coming years. There's a reason Chrome was named after its Chrome–the UI was a huge selling point.

1: https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/25581533/141687681-41c5f4b6-c67e-4b98-8164-7ce5ce2d1563.png 2: https://blogoscoped.com/files/google-chrome-browsing/search-large.png

> Who made the slogan?

Paul Buchheit, the creator and original developer of GMail.

He participated in a meeting to establish the company's values and because he found things like “strive for excellence" to be bullshit, he wanted something unusual that would actually mean something. He chose "Don't be evil", because it was funny, it was a jab at Google's competitors and it was something that would be difficult to pull out.

Reference, straight from the horse's mouth: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-16-n55.html

> It chose that slogan because it risks being evil, in its own terms

No, it was mostly a half-serious joke.

Actually, the Google Videos version that originally launched was nothing like YouTube. Google Videos was originally made to search closed captioned TV, not to service user uploaded content. Also the original Google Video did not actually let you watch any videos.

Google changed to copy YouTube's style of video hosting after YouTube already gained traction. The version of Google Videos that people are familiar with came out after YouTube. The version of Google Videos that you're talking about died.

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-01-25-n90.html

Whatever you feel about Google's actions, there's no need to concoct elaborate stories around and speculative theories about the origin of Google's 'don't be evil' slogan. You can look it up.

According to http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-16-n55.html, the 'don't be evil' slogan came from Paul Buchheit, who was brand-new to the company when he proposed it at a corporate-values brainstorming meeting. This meeting was before Google became an advertising company, and Paul intended the slogan to be funny, and a jab at other companies.