Getting that invite made email cool again. And they promised to not be evil, and started to develop loads of cool things and phones you could do anything with… then realized being evil is more profitable.
Should have seen it coming. Of course a company who’s main source of revenue is selling ads and positions in search results is going to end up fucking the entire Internet up for money.
“don’t be evil” was a false promise. a gimmick. a marketing slogan. in practice, the policy was lost long before even the first pre-ipo options were promised to a new hire… way back around the time larry or sergey first day-dreamed of cashing-in ‘some day’.
We were also pretty naive then. An editor for Wired magazine attended a party with Larry Page, Google’s cofounder in 2002. He asked how Google was able to offer their services for free - and Page told him how their long term plan was to gather as much data as possible through their free services in order to build artificial intelligence.
So while we all thought a free GB of storage and searchable email was awesome in 2004, we were just blindly feeding what’s happening today with the AI craze.
Same! Remember how exciting gmail was in like 2004?
Getting that invite made email cool again. And they promised to not be evil, and started to develop loads of cool things and phones you could do anything with… then realized being evil is more profitable.
Should have seen it coming. Of course a company who’s main source of revenue is selling ads and positions in search results is going to end up fucking the entire Internet up for money.
“don’t be evil” was a false promise. a gimmick. a marketing slogan. in practice, the policy was lost long before even the first pre-ipo options were promised to a new hire… way back around the time larry or sergey first day-dreamed of cashing-in ‘some day’.
I think when the creators put it out it was very much not evil. It has since been turned to the dark side by its new owners.
I like the company from the Upload TV series’s motto “don’t be evil, obviously”
We were also pretty naive then. An editor for Wired magazine attended a party with Larry Page, Google’s cofounder in 2002. He asked how Google was able to offer their services for free - and Page told him how their long term plan was to gather as much data as possible through their free services in order to build artificial intelligence.
So while we all thought a free GB of storage and searchable email was awesome in 2004, we were just blindly feeding what’s happening today with the AI craze.
Remember watching your storage capacity increase like some sort of fucking witchcraft? That was the good era of the internet.
I think the early days of Google docs were peak google-love for me.