Posted on 01/26/2007 8:34:38 PM PST by george76
do no evil
for free
do no evil
that doesn't pay
Also, the oppressed in China longing for more freedom were no dummies. They figured out lots of ways of getting past the Great Firewall, from using elgooG to sophisticated anonymizing servers.
And Google news is terrible.
I never go there anymore.
getting past the Great Firewall...
About Google as a company - I am inclined to believe they have a hair salon and nail salon available to the employees during their workday....possibly a workout gym and sauna...
Outrageous? Of course - it is a fantasy I have yet...somehow seems appropriate for that bunch.
Kind of like the elected offical in the sewer called Washington, only at a smaller scale.
They discovered there's room on the balance sheet for bad press, which is what turned this into a negative for them.
Maybe they hope that one day the world press will be controlled like it is in China. After that, morality will not be a problem for them.
The reality is the the press will always be a factor, and therefore, morality is a factor.
Nut the press isn't always moral. The reality is there's always going to be bitchers and whiners and they're always goign to complain, you just have to figure out which bitchers and whiners you want to piss off, and suffer the consequences. And try not to give the rare correct bitchers and whiners anything legitimate to complain about, that tends tobe the stuff that's most expensive.
And you would put the people who complained of Google's support for Chinese tyranny in what catagory - "the rare correct bitchers and whiners" or the incorrect "bitchers and whiners"?
Businesses like Google that play patty-cake with tyrants for a few extra bucks show us that the first priority of business is to make money, by ANY MEANS POSSIBLE.
Just because we have free enterprise doesn’t mean that businesses VALUE freedom. They will take a subsidy just as quickly as they’ll take a voluntary transaction from customers.
Thanks goodness we still have a competitive economic system with choices, and can switch away or boycott them.
If they ever manage to find a way to Gerrymander consumer spending, we’re doomed.
I think they'd be in the general noise bitchers and whiners, people with a valid point but with an opposite number with an equally valid point. Once somebody officially mentioned China in a Google meeting room they were in a position where somebody was going to complain about their actions. They could either ignore China, which would mean leaving a lot of potention money on the table, something that really irritates investors; or they could go into China which means following Chinese rules which means irritating all the people that don't like China. Either way Google was screwed, when in doubt remember you're a profit seeking company and seek the profit.
Sometimes there isn't an answer. Once a company has taken investors the officers of the company have a duty to seek profit for those investors, that is their job. No actually Google is finding that going after China is hurting them in the short run, China is a long run move but they seem to be getting more short term pushback than they were expecting. I'm not blaming anybody, I'm simply stating it how it is, ALL corporate moves cause people to bitch and complain, sometimes they're right, sometimes they're wrong, most times they're just pointless because the counter move would cause just as much complaint from some other quarter.
And now you've gone into idiotic hyperbole land. This is a search engine, it's not the Third Reich, time to get back to the concept of scale here. Had Google not attempted to enter the Chinese market the Chinese people would be no less opressed than they are with Google having a foot in the door. Imagine what you could accomplish if you actually used the tools of logic rather than strained silly red herring comparisons.
But one choice is always better than another. I can't understand why would anyone believe that doing business with China would be a long-term benefit. Almost everyone, including the Chinese believe that the US and China will one day be at war. That can't be good for companies that have an investment there.
Setting up a business in a dictatorship is insane. You can't trust dictators to protect your business interests. Companies that did business in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union lost big-time.
The trouble with people who get in bed with mobsters or dictators is they really don't understand the concept of morality as a business value. As a result, they end up getting screwed. You have to be able to trust people you do business with.
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