I have been listening to “The Google Story” as an audio book. With this experience as a background, the decision of Google to limit which Google features and resources would be available within China was made public (Reuters). This on top of the company’s resistance to requests for information by the Justice Department. The idealism of the company in the early days, the resistance to selling out when ranking hits to return to users, the motto “Don’t be evil” seem inconsistent with the decision. To be fair, others before them have made similar accommodations (Yahoo, Microsoft). I have to stop reading these books and assuming that “garage-based technologists” are this era’s heroes.
