From what I know about Google, they are serious about least privilege type of stuff internally and employees dont get arbitrary unbound access to systems or data.
You're responsible for your data, not Google, not Microsoft.
In terms dev-related stuff, TensorFlow - literally something that's made today's ML possible, Kubernetes, BigTable, MapReduce, and yknow, that good old thing called Chrome..
I understand hating on Google. They're not that great, but none of the FAANG are "great".. They all have some terrible bits, some good bits. However, to say that Google has not provided anything except "spam stuffs" is very wrong.
Search alone has changed the entire way that humans consume information. I would say that today's internet landscape, for better or worse, would not exist without Google.
And I agree, Google does take security more seriously than most places.
They're helpful to you, not me.
MapReduce was not and isn't something that made ML possible. It made data engineering at scale possible.
IIRC there was some basic safeguards though, like a query must have had like 10 unique occurrences or something. I also have no idea if you could tie searches to people.
I was just looking at aggregate numbers. That was really cool. It was like Google Trends but with real numbers!
I don't necessarily disagree, but that's only from a technical pov. However, I think the release of it as a open-source library made it so that it's far easier to learn the tech that already existed. Vast majority of university courses use it to teach lots of different concepts that were far more "mathy" before.
> MapReduce was not and isn't something that made ML possible. It made data engineering at scale possible.
Yeah. Maybe I worded that wrong. I wasn't saying it made ML possible. Just that it's a huge contribution to the Open-Source tech overall.
Also, you don't use a Phone? or Maps? Really? Do you use Chrome? Do you use Firefox, because Google's contributed a massive amount to the web standards that are implemented in both Firefox, and Chrome.
Both MR and TF are net-negative for the outside world. I think more unis teach pytorch than TF now.
You may not use those things directly, but you're dependent on those who do.
Related question, if security is so bad, how did they win Project J.E.D.I? (honestly curious)
Just like the OP I have first hand info on how atrocious Microsoft’s internal privacy controls are.
The later versions of Windows are just ad space for Microsoft to advertise.
Azure is the worst of the 3 cloud providers. Horrible developer experience and documentation and reliability.
That said, I would still take Satya’s Microsoft over Balmers any day
Lets not use emotionally driven, ambiguous terms like 'evil' to describe these kinds of things. Google is not, for instance, conspiring to commit genocides, nor is Microsoft planning a coup in an Eastern European nation with the goal of colonizing them to use as indentured technical support.
What do you want a corporation/company/business (of any size) to be driven by?
- Ethical Metrics (could be solved by allowing corporations, directors, boards to face similar punishments to humans committing crime).
– Something that measured employee treatment.
Profit is such a shitty motive... it's effective, but still shitty.
I'd agree they are both evil in that they both seek to leverage your personal data against you for their own gain, but it sounds like Google does it while being more protective of what they've taken from you while MS also leaves you vulnerable in new ways through carelessness.
I'm not too worried about Bing though. That's nothing compared to Microsoft's access to your computer at the OS level. We know anything we do online will be seen by others, but being able to snoop on our personal files and log our keystrokes is a whole lot worse than knowing what we type into a search engine.
However improved/more popular Bing becomes, eventually Bing will end up in the same position Google is in now where they'll have to make their web search worse in order to constantly shove ads in your face instead of returning results that are useful, and slowly SEO spam will adapt to pollute Bing's results further. Google may not even mind if Bing starts gaining users. At this point Google can collect so much data from android devices that I doubt they need google search to peer into our lives like they used to anyway.
The primary driver for humans is status. Status in the military is achieved through leadership and honor. Status in academia is achieved through capability. These sectors provably show that people can be driven by things other than money.
The sad thing here is that there are tradeoffs. Nothing is as efficient or as effective of a motivator as money. But money is the driving force that is most detached from ethics.
The media likes to make a big deal out of privacy but mostly people only give a shit up to a point... so it doesn't effect googles bottom line and therefore google also doesn't give a shit.
Why?
For one, I've had a Microsoft account for over 20 years now (anyone remember Hotmail?). It's long past due for me to be complaining, and Microsoft hasn't wronged me in that time anyway. By comparison, my oldest Google account only goes back just over 10 years, and horror stories abound even if I've been fortunate so far. I keep all my truly important correspondance and login tie-ins with Microsoft (read: my Hotmail).
For another, Microsoft nurtured over 30 years' worth of good will from me with Windows and Office; even though I hate many things about Windows from 8 and up, among other things, I will ultimately be a friend to Microsoft simply because they were a significant and positive part of my childhood and now my adult life.
Really? I find Microsoft's documentation for Azure (in English) to be quite thorough and helpful. Their tools are well-designed and quite powerful.
Perhaps those of AWS and GCP are even more amazing, but I wouldn't call Azure "horrible" by any stretch of the imagination.
There’s something to it. Ideas and implementations are pressure tested through market competition, so they get refined and adapted.
The issue with advertising specifically is that it’s inherently manipulative and often condescending. On the web it has a infectious nature, making everything a bit worse.
> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
> Banksy
Power is. Look at all the powerful dictators in the past, and what they did. Do you think Stalin was motivated by money? Napoleon? Mussolini?
Microsoft is evil v1. Google and everyone post 2000 is evil v2.
They are just as evil as Microsoft but they've learned that amongst other things, you need to a) seem nicer and b) lobby politicians.
I'd argue that made them more evil.
Though it has to be said that Microsoft has learned, too, so at this point they're pretty much the same thing.
The monopolistic dominance is the issue. They have too much data and too much power, and leverage that to swallow other market categories. Today they have a deeply unhealthy dominance over the tech industry.
Google could do everything right and still be an existential problem. You say MS has data security issues, okay sure. I’d still rather have them or anyone at 25%+ of the market.
I believe this thread would have a much less dramatic headline if Google didn’t itself kill Google Search ten+ years ago.
Also, it bought most of the examples listed, not made these. It just saw an ads/dm opportunity.
I also remember using Opera on its last original engine and those “Get Chrome” banners which made a whole browser freeze and stutter on anything but Chrome. I’ve pointed that out a few times back then on forums, but not too many people noticed it, it seems. The “our ads our performance” trick fled completely under the radar.
Google isn't forcing someone to use it. It's monopoly can disappear when something better it's there.
It's the short sightedness that causes the most unethical behavior from the top down. 10-Qs... a man considered changing that timeline to help fix that problem but he was ostracized. Maybe one day la naranja will return.
I would be interested to see what an ethics motive looks like that gets people out of the bed in the morning to do a job they barely care about.
Don't forget security! Multiple serious and extremely trivial cross-tenant security exploits only in the past couple of years. AWS and GCP have had none ever, the much smaller OCI has had one.
Only* about. GCP and AWS haven't had cross-tenant security bugs, meanwhile Azure have had multiple, and trivial ones to boot. If a multitenant service can have such poor security, it's doubtful internal only stuff is any better.
So all in all, disagreements with direction, but nothing wrong/evil on the level of any of the FAAN.
They are not like the other. I wouldnt include big entertainment company among technology behemoths
You have already lost the argument. I'm sorry but nobody would care about anything you say because that almost just does not apply to anyone else.
Also the fact that those products have no effects on you has nothing to do with whether a company is important or if their products are significant or helpful to the vast majority of human population.
And to be a bit cynical, it feels the only purpose of this comment is to show that you have a unique lifestyle, not to contribute to the discussion constructively or based on consensus. (Of which there are many on HN)
Microsoft is the capitalist evil. Google is the technocratic AI evil. The first wants your money, as much of it as they can hoover, using dark patterns if useful for it. The second wants to optimize your life using _their_ metrics, without ever engaging with you (humanity is the problem - engaging with it never scales).
From memory, Microsoft used to be absolute bastards when it came to your data. They did everything they could to keep you gated in and without any control. Things like: refusing any export tools for your emails so you couldn't migrate to another provider; or, not allowing any non-web access to your email.
Then Google came along with GMail and revolutionised things: amazingly generous free data allowance, IMAP access, data download options, open standards, liberal approach to letting people set up various hacky app access, and so on. It was hugely successful for them, and forced MS to moderate their approach.
Google abandoned their Don't Be Evil strategy and sacrificed a lot of their principles (and, I would argue, a lot of their success with it), but at one point they had a positive impact and they've never been as evil as early-era Microsoft.
I used it, and also guided other juniors to implement real world products which're running in production to help others human life in a very short time, in a maintainable way.
This was impossible before with old toolings.
Is it more clear to you ? I'm also sorry for not so clearly said, but that's how conversation works ;)
There're choices for you to make. It's your choice.
But on the other hand, Gmail was an absolute bitch to get early on unless you were lucky enough to be friends with someone who had an address already. Maybe it was justified, but I don't remember that period fondly.
And ultimately, whereas Microsoft at best improved and at worst stayed as EEEvil as before, Google went from hero to zero in just the last decade burning away all the good will they nurtured. As things stand, I'll happily throw my hat in with Microsoft here.
How about "malevolent?"
I have spent a significant amount of time on each and would suggest it's the only actual cloud. The others are data centers masquerading as a cloud, notice when us-east has issues for AWS, Azure had a spof dependency on a datacenter that didn't even have AZs... GCP is architecturally on another level. The others seem to be unaware of what 'cloud native' means, so if you are attempting cloud native on non clouds, you inherit their lack of foresight.