Good to know that the company that holds my email, appointments, two-factor-auth, credit card number, and search data has the reliability of a flaky college freshman.
Also good to know that there will literally ALWAYS be people willing to minimize the broken promises of corporations (when they're not insisting that no corporation would ever be so stupid as to break a highly visible promise because the outcry would be tremendous).
Reading this is a breath of fresh air from the traditional "defend Google or other corporations at all costs" type comments. Maybe now we can drop the meme that Google is some altruistic entity and realize that ~97% of their revenue is from advertising. This is why they exist.
It's now just a matter of time before paid inclusion results show up in the organic SERPs like Yahoo used to have.
The best part is in Google's original IPO filing they promised not to ever accept money for inclusion of results:
> "Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating."
> "We do not accept money for search result ranking or inclusion. We do accept fees for advertising, but it does not influence how we generate our search results. The advertising is clearly marked and separated. This is similar to a newspaper, where the articles are independent of the advertising."
> "Some of our competitors charge web sites for inclusion in their indices or for more frequent updating of pages. Inclusion and frequent updating in our index are open to all sites free of charge."
> "We apply these principles to each of our products and services. We believe it is important for users to have access to the best available information and research, not just the information that someone pays for them to see."
"A benefit corporation or B corporation is a corporate form in the United States designed for for-profit entities that want to consider society and the environment in addition to profit in their decision making process."
"Maximize profit" is not a well-defined single thing. For instance, the suggestion that companies maximize profits without regard for their customers must explain why the customers actually stay with that company; in general that may be a short-term win but a huge long-term loss, and many companies have died that way. If nothing else you've got to consider long-term profit vs. short-term profit, and there are in fact many other "something elses" to consider (what level of risks to take, etc).
Well the company I work for as one and any other company that realises the pursuit of money without regard for other ideals is an exercise in destruction and exploitation.
Often co-operatives will fit well in to this category as the workers in a co-operative are rather less likely to malevolently exploit themselves in a disdainful pursuit of profit before humanity.
Agree about freshman, just wanted to add, that this freshman has managed to do other not so nice things recently, thus increasing cumulative damage to the reputation well beyond sum of each part. I assume that at some point powerusers will start to migrate to different services, when/if competitive enough offer comes
A promise made by Marissa Mayer, who, as most of us know, works elsewhere now. Sure, the promise was arguably on behalf of the company, but "under her watch" is also arguably implied.
And... Did you leave her? or just break up as a common agreement? In legalese language, I am pretty sure that a promise is synonym of contract, and contracts might be dissolved if both sides of the contract agreed.
This being an open promise is not a contract but a reaffirmation of a goal, since people change is regrettable but OK to break promises to ourselves sometimes when the interest of the goal had changed.
From Wikipedia article: [1]
"In the law of contract, an exchange of promises is usually held to be legally enforceable, according to the Latin maxim pacta sunt servanda."
Like said, the word "exchange" is critical here, and isn't pedantic - this is a key part of the modern western understanding of contract law.
A contract must be quid pro quo to be valid.
"Bob, I'm going to come fix your fence this weekend" is a promise, but it isn't a legal contract.
"Bob, I'm going to come fix your fence this weekend for $100" is a promise, and because there is a quid pro quo exchange it can qualify as an enforceable contract. Bob can potentially come after you for damages if you renege on your end of it.
One-sided promises (like the one Google made) are generally not considered contractually obligated[1].
"A contract is a legally enforceable promise or undertaking that something will or will not occur. * The word promise can be used as a legal synonym for contract *,[2] although care is required as a promise may not have the full standing of a contract, as when it is an agreement without consideration"
That article is wrong (and the cited source for that claim, if you follow it, leads back to a thesaurus-like entry that is, unlike the other definitions on the page, itself unsourced though the source appears to be itself a tertiary source.) A promise is not a "legal synonym" for a contract. A promise is a necessary but not sufficient element of a contract.
This is exactly the problem people are having with Google. We/they have this ideal of what they thought Google was/should-be and Google isn't/haven't-been-completely living up to it.
One could argue that the advertising situation has changed. Back in 2005, the types of banner ads that they opposed were heavy, often Flash driven punch-the-monkey junk.
Now, they are putting non-animated (from the samples that I have seen) banners that are completely relevant to your search.
Does that argument hold up? I don't really think it does. But maybe that is their angle?
Also good to know that there will literally ALWAYS be people willing to minimize the broken promises of corporations (when they're not insisting that no corporation would ever be so stupid as to break a highly visible promise because the outcry would be tremendous).