Readings

Paul Graham on some of the reasons why Google might have adopted the 'Don't be evil' mantra (the article is a little bit on the wonkish side, but if one persists then there are lessons for a larger world)...

Should Apple care what people like me think? What difference does it make if they alienate a small minority of their users? There are a couple reasons they should care. One is that these users are the people they want as employees. If your company seems evil, the best programmers won't work for you. That hurt Microsoft a lot starting in the 90s. Programmers started to feel sheepish about working there. It seemed like selling out.
When people from Microsoft were talking to other programmers and they mentioned where they worked, there were a lot of self-deprecating jokes about having gone over to the dark side. But the real problem for Microsoft wasn't the embarrassment of the people they hired. It was the people they never got. And you know who got them? Google and Apple. If Microsoft was the Empire, they were the Rebel Alliance. And it's largely because they got more of the best people that Google and Apple are doing so much better than Microsoft today. Why are programmers so fussy about their employers' morals? Partly because they can afford to be. The best programmers can work wherever they want. They don't have to work for a company they have qualms about. But the other reason programmers are fussy, I think, is that evil begets stupidity. An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. And it's not fun for a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas aren't the ones that win. I think the reason Google embraced "Don't be evil" so eagerly was not so much to impress the outside world as to inoculate themselves against arrogance. That has worked for Google so far. They've become more bureaucratic, but otherwise they seem to have held true to their original principles.