Delete comment from: Captain Capitalism
Regarding some earlier comments about comparisons of Yahoo!'s and Google's stock prices and P/E ratios -- Yahoo's share of search engine traffic is down, as is ad revenue across internet companies as a whole, and those are some of the factors affecting its stock price. Stock price is based on an expectation the company will be profitable in the future, or that the stock will go up and can be sold for a profit, and a whole bunch of herd-mentality factors, as much as whether people "trust" or "like" the company.
That said, I do agree with the Captain about Americans in general not liking elitist pricks. And Google has been acting like elitist pricks lately.
A while back it was a big deal in the techie press that their company motto is (or was) "don't be evil", but they seem bent on accumulating a lot of user data and market dominance that could easily be used for evil (or at least highly unprincipled) ends.
For example, the first publicized instance of alerting a government agency about search terms by region was for a good cause -- they told the CDC which parts of the country had an increased number of searches for terms like "flu" and "flu symptoms" -- but the overall concept is still pretty creepy.
With regards to Blogger, I had an account on Blogger years ago prior to the Google acquisition. Google just added on more and more layers of b.s. -- you had to change your Blogger ID to a Google ID. And to have a Google ID you had to have a Gmail account. Any updates about your blog went to your Gmail account, instead of any non-Gmail account you used to use. And on and on.
I was not then and still am not now a devoted or even semi-regular blogger. Even so, the difference between Blogger and Wordpress was night and day. I am much happier with Wordpress. I would not be surprised if the Captain likes it better too if he ever decides to switch over.
Jan 18, 2009, 7:51:00 AM
Posted to I Hate Google