How Google Discovered the Value of Surveillance
I think the surprising thing is that people are surprised.<p>It took basically until now for the bloom to come off the rose. Think about that. For 20 years Google has been supposedly hiring the smartest guys in the room and all it took was free food, some ball pits and slides, contributing some tech to open source, and working on a handful of &quot;moonshots&quot; that haven&#x27;t gone anywhere to keep the sheen of innovation going. And it worked. For 20 years.<p>People have been saying Google is the new Microsoft for a few years but it basically took until now for that to become consensus. Microsoft, who&#x27;s been on the back foot until recently, has recast themselves as the new Open Source Champion, basically using the Google playbook from 20 years ago. And it&#x27;s working!<p>If you think about it Apple is the only company that hasn&#x27;t changed. There&#x27;s never been a bait and switch. It&#x27;s always been proprietary. It&#x27;s always been confident, others would say arrogant about its products. They&#x27;ve never tried to cloak themselves with the mantle of open source. The only reason the tech industry uses their products is because of its inherent qualities. No one had to be tricked into liking them. And they&#x27;ve always been honest about this.<p>All the &quot;privacy cranks&quot; were right about Google. But from 2000 to about 2015 they were casually dismissed as fringe. People really bought the &quot;Don&#x27;t be evil&quot; slogan externally (and I&#x27;m sure internally as well). Before Facebook, they mastered the art of doing something bad then walking it back with an apology and some opt-out privacy setting that they knew no one would enable. Privacy was always an afterthought (read Steven Levy&#x27;s book about Google).<p>I&#x27;m glad everyone is seeing the light finally.