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by nostrademons 2417 days ago
But that's the point - where are you willing to be hurt? That's a more interesting question than what you are ostensibly willing to stick to, and much more revealing about the organization's culture. Everybody wants all the nice things, but what really reveals your values is when you want two nice things that are contradictory - which do you choose?

That's why Facebook's "Move fast and break things" is so powerful (and so revealing) as a value statement, as it showed that Facebook was willing to break any number of things to move fast. Google's "Don't be evil", as words, is utterly useless, because nobody considers themselves evil. Google shutting down their consumer-facing site so that they could honor the terms of their AOL deal, however, spoke huge volumes, as did them pulling out of China in 2010 regardless of the cost to their market. Similarly, them going back into China regardless of privacy and human rights violations also speaks volumes.
1 comments
agnokapathetic 2417 days ago
> Google shutting down their consumer-facing site so that they could honor the terms of their AOL deal

What was the story here? I'm not familiar with this and I can't seem to find anything on Google about it :)

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nostrademons 2417 days ago
When they were young (2002) Google signed a contract with AOL to become the default search provider there. When they flipped the switch, AOL gave them so much traffic that they lacked server capacity to service all the requests. Rather than renege on the contract, they shut down google.com and redirected all hardware resources toward servicing the AOL traffic until they could build more servers and make any necessary software optimizations.

The story was told to me as a Noogler (in 2009) as an example of Googliness, and also as a significant milestone in the company's development. The backdrop of this was the dot-com bust: web companies were failing left and right, and nobody knew who would be left standing. By shutting off their own consumer brand to honor the terms of the contract, Google made a name for themselves as someone who would move hell or high water for their partners, which built critical trust in what was then a promising but unproven startup.

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