If you need to sloganize a reminder to yourself to not be evil, that's not a promising sign

Early in Google's history, I took that sentiment as saying that they were one of us (Internet people), and weren't going to act like Microsoft (at the time, regarded by Internet people as an underhanded and ignorant company). Even though Google had a very nice IR function and general cluefulness, and seemed destined to be big and powerful.

And if it were the altruistic Internet people they hired, the slogan/mantra could be seen as a reminder to check your ego/ambition/enthusiasm, as well as a shorthand for communicating when you were doing that, and that would be respected by everyone because it had been blessed from the top as a Prime Directive.

Today, if a tech company says they aspire not to be evil: (1) they almost certainly don't mean it, in the current culture and investment environment, or they wouldn't have gotten money from VCs (who invest in people motivated like themselves); (2) most of their hires won't believe it, except perhaps new grads who probably haven't thought much about it; and (3) nobody will follow through on it (e.g., witness how almost all OpenAI employees literally signed to enable the big-money finance-bro coup of supposedly a public interest non-profit).

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traderj0e 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I took it to mean, prioritize long-term growth over short-term income. But the slogan was silly even back then, like obviously an evil company would claim to not be evil.

	▲	neilv 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If it was silly, a lot of altruistic people nevertheless fell for it. For example, my impression at the time was that people thought that Google would be a responsible steward of Usenet archives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer#Preserving_Usene... FWIW, it absolutely was believable to me at the time that another Internet person would do a company consistent with what I saw as the dominant (pre-gold-rush) Internet culture. For example of a personality familiar to more people on HN, one might have trusted that Aaron Swartz was being genuine, if he said he wanted to do a company that wouldn't be evil. (I had actually proposed a similar corporate rule to a prospective co-founder, at a time when Google might've still been hosted at Stanford. Though the co-founder was new to Internet, and didn't have the same thinking.)

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1718627440 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In other words the company made a bet on peoples naivety and it worked.