Leaked Transcript Contradicts Google’s Official Story on China
Wow, reading this article and some of the other linked Intercept articles, in my mind the culture at Google has finally hit a tipping point, having gone full-bore over to the &quot;evil&quot; side.<p>I know most folks on HN will think &quot;Google has been this way for years&quot;, but I think the way The Intercept articles describe the erosion of the culture at Google is a perfect template for how virtually all large profit driven companies eventually turn &quot;evil&quot;. It&#x27;s the added secrecy that can be rationalized at first, the stretched gray areas (e.g. &quot;we&#x27;re just in an exploratory phase&quot;) that eventually cross over to full-fledged lies, but you&#x27;re still able to convince yourself it&#x27;s just a little &quot;spin&quot; for the greater good.<p>The really hard thing about &quot;not being evil&quot; is that in requires conscious, continuous effort to forgo profit (sometime huge profits) to adhere to that value. The lure of the Chinese market is simply too great, so people convince themselves it&#x27;s possible to get at that potential market without compromising their values, and they do lots of mental gymnastics trying to get those opposing ideals into congruence.<p>I&#x27;ve seen this pattern many times before, honestly with much lower stakes than what Google is contending with, so I applaud Google for holding out as long as they did. This is one reason I hate talking about &quot;company values&quot;: it&#x27;s easy to adhere to those values when they&#x27;re not in conflict with the company making money, but the second there is a quarter to hit or a metric at risk, those values always seem to go out the window (or at least get vastly watered down) in the pursuit of profit. I think it&#x27;s pretty inevitable, and I wish companies would just admit to it.