[2muchcoffeeman]

The author is not cynical enough.

Do you going around telling people how virtuous you are? No, good people just try and be good.

The slogan was a red flag right from the start.

[Cpoll]

That sounds pithy, but a person doesn't need to remind themselves of their own values; a company of 200,000 people does.

Which isn't to say cynicism for these sorts of company charters isn't warranted, just not for that reason.

[2muchcoffeeman]

I agree.

But the moto has always lacked any aspiration about how they should do good or make the world better. “Don’t be evil”. Who thinks they are being evil? No one.

[pmontra]

At the beginning of Google it meant "we will not be like Microsoft" and it was good marketing.

[eMPee584]

This is the relevant historical context to understand how this ever got into big G's mission statement, it was to distance themselves from the then well-known anti-competitive mal-practices of the Redmond giant.. which seemingly they've learned a lot from. Don't no-one worry too much, they only have less than half of the world population's messaging metadata, schedules, realtime location and private pictures.

[qpricjalcbeu]

They aren't cynical, just disingenuous.

Google was providing cloud computing to the DoD before 2017 - there's no real morale difference between providing lower level compute vs providing a higher level AI algo other than giving yourself an excuse by adding one layer of abstraction (obfuscating?).

Very convenient to suddenly decide it's enough after collecting a massive paycheck for 10 years.

[ryeats]

It was purely self interest don't piss off people so that regulators break our monopoly. Once the monopoly was challenged it became less important.