Don’t Be Evil but Don’t Miss the Tech Train ⇥

Quentin Hardy, for the New York Times:

[Google] has been accused of flouting copyrights, leveraging other people’s work for its benefit and violating European protections of personal privacy, among other things. “Don’t be evil” no longer has its old ring. And Google, an underdog turned overlord, is no humble giant. It tends to approach any controversy with an air that ranges somewhere between “trust us” and “what’s good for Google is good for the world.”

But ascribing what’s going on here solely to the power or arrogance of a single company misses an important dimension of today’s high-technology business, where there are frequent assaults, real or perceived, on various business standards and practices.

I’m not sure the direction in which these tech companies are headed is a generally positive one. There has been a fair amount of backlash for these incidents, and it’s going to continue. But that’s okay because we’re in uncharted waters. Things will change.