'Google.cn', damn ethics, we do business!
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What happens when a firm faces a conflict between its purported 'ethics' and chance of making money? Simple, it chooses 'business' over 'ethics'. This is what the darling company of new age economy ‘Google Inc’ chose.
'Google' obsequiously acceded to all the (restrictive) requirements of Chinese government to place it servers in mainland China and get “Google.cn”. Chinese government was never comfortable with 'Google' and connections to its servers were routed through firewalls of government making the access slow for users. Chinese government in particular disliked the ‘cached’ WebPages facility which allowed users to view even those WebPages which were blocked by it. The slow access allowed the local search engine ‘Baidu.com’ to get 40% market share while Google had 30% share. How can 'Google', number 1 search engine of world see itself number 2 in the 'fastest growing economy' of world? The same Google whose 10 points ethics includes ‘interests of the user first’, ‘Democracy on the web’ and ‘The need for information crosses all borders’ conveniently chose to ignore all of this for 10% market share.
In US, 'Google' has been contesting the subpoena of Justice department which asked it to reveal random 1 million search results permanently stored in it servers. This investigation is being done to stop child pornography. Google says it is 'breach of trust' it has with its users. What a farce? Now who won’t believe that the real purpose of this is to earn few brownie points over Yahoo, MSN and AOL who complied with the subpoena? 'Hypocrisy' is the only word which does not gets stored in Google’s server.
'Google' has once again proved that when it comes to business, nothing is paramount than profits. After all when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin take $1 as their annual pay, profits are the only way to maximize the share value and hence the stock option. They can’t afford to remain at 16th on Forbes magazine's list of the 400 richest Americans when Bill Gates is on number 1.
Go ahead Google, shout your slogan “Don‘t be evil.”
What happens when a firm faces a conflict between its purported 'ethics' and chance of making money? Simple, it chooses 'business' over 'ethics'. This is what the darling company of new age economy ‘Google Inc’ chose.
'Google' obsequiously acceded to all the (restrictive) requirements of Chinese government to place it servers in mainland China and get “Google.cn”. Chinese government was never comfortable with 'Google' and connections to its servers were routed through firewalls of government making the access slow for users. Chinese government in particular disliked the ‘cached’ WebPages facility which allowed users to view even those WebPages which were blocked by it. The slow access allowed the local search engine ‘Baidu.com’ to get 40% market share while Google had 30% share. How can 'Google', number 1 search engine of world see itself number 2 in the 'fastest growing economy' of world? The same Google whose 10 points ethics includes ‘interests of the user first’, ‘Democracy on the web’ and ‘The need for information crosses all borders’ conveniently chose to ignore all of this for 10% market share.
In US, 'Google' has been contesting the subpoena of Justice department which asked it to reveal random 1 million search results permanently stored in it servers. This investigation is being done to stop child pornography. Google says it is 'breach of trust' it has with its users. What a farce? Now who won’t believe that the real purpose of this is to earn few brownie points over Yahoo, MSN and AOL who complied with the subpoena? 'Hypocrisy' is the only word which does not gets stored in Google’s server.
'Google' has once again proved that when it comes to business, nothing is paramount than profits. After all when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin take $1 as their annual pay, profits are the only way to maximize the share value and hence the stock option. They can’t afford to remain at 16th on Forbes magazine's list of the 400 richest Americans when Bill Gates is on number 1.
Go ahead Google, shout your slogan “Don‘t be evil.”
posted by greensatya @ 10:14 PM
7 Comments:
At 6:19 AM,
XVSA013 said…
even microsoft started by selling cheap software to mass market!!
i think as time goes on, ppl loose track of their original objectives ...
the question we have to ask to ourselves is - what would I do?
At 7:17 AM,
Y said…
Democracy on the web???
These American corps need to be given a hard kick on their bums. They have a president who in the name of democracy is ruling the world like an anarchy and now these corps. Just recently, I read in the newspaper that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have given in to the Chinese government to restrict providing search access for certain words which were thought by the chinese govt to be against the establishment. What more they will share with the government the info of chinese nationals who search the web for certain info's. Only last week a man was found guilty and punished for doing a search on the web, perhaps using google for phrases thought to be anti national.
Google defends this behaviour as respecting the rights of individual countries!!
At 8:35 AM,
greensatya said…
Mowgli - I didn't get the MS example ? Anyway MS never took the high road of ethics or posted its 10 point ethics on its webpage.
What would I do ???? I would have rather Google be at second position and server users in China through google.com in Chinese language (word has it that this service will continue) than have servers in mainland China.
Sher- Yeah, it was only a day back when Google accepted the terms and conditions of Chinese government and said to hell with ethics. It has made mockery of itself. It was Yahoo which revealed the user identity and got that person arrestd for 10 years .
No amount of spin can justify the Google's action of doing business in China with censors.
At 8:50 AM,
Casablanca said…
Interesting. Very interesting.
And the post makes sense too.
*wink*
At 10:17 AM,
greensatya said…
Hey Casa, glad that you liked the post !
(*wink* *wink*) :)
At 1:53 PM,
Y said…
Satya, has the post removing virus infected you now. Just curious is there something that I now know that, you dont want me to know.
At 6:26 PM,
greensatya said…
No, no I didn't remove the post. I changed the date of it from 2006 to 2005 :p
Actually for one year my blog was like personal journal writing my day to day happenings. As time passed I evolved and started writing on issues. Though still every post I write is connected to me in some way. (I will write the history of my blog one day :p)
That was the lyrics from one album which I used to listen before. Today was dusting my room and found the CD
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