don’t be evil

Gmail Creator Leaves Facebook for Y Combinator

Liz Gannes in Social on November 12, 2010 at 10:59 am PT

Paul Buchheit, the well-respected developer and angel investor, is moving on from Facebook, which had acquired him along with FriendFeed, the start-up he co-founded and funded.

What’s the Chinese Word for Bing? Google Threatens to Leave China.

John Paczkowski in News on January 12, 2010 at 4:48 pm PT

Evidently, Google is taking its informal “don’t be evil motto” a bit more seriously these days. The search sovereign threatened late Tuesday to pull out of its operations in China after detecting a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on [its] corporate infrastructure originating from China.” Targeted in the assault: The Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Chrome OS, Huh? Will It Be Based on a Google Analytics Kernel?

John Paczkowski in News on July 8, 2009 at 7:35 am PT

So Google has finally copped to developing an operating system–Chrome OS, a software platform “created for people who spend most of their time on the Web, and…designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.” It is an extraordinary market play. And an unsettling one. For it seeks to place Google, which already collects vast amounts of data about our Internet use, at the very center of our information experience. The privacy implications of that are, of course, horrendous.

Mozilla: In the Shadow of the “Don’t-Be-Evil Bulldozer”

John Paczkowski in D7 on May 28, 2009 at 11:20 am PT

As CEO and chairman of Mozilla, respectively, John Lilly and Mitchell Baker steward the development of Firefox, the open-source browser that challenged and then broke Microsoft’s choke hold on the browser market. As of April 2009, Firefox claimed 22.48 percent of Web browser market, according to Net Applications. That makes it the second most popular browser world-wide, after Internet Explorer, which holds 66.1 percent. An impressive feat. And an important one. Because by dislodging Internet Explorer from its dominant market position, Firefox has proven not only that open-source projects often provide better software–something to which any Linux geek will attest–but that it’s possible for a particularly well done one to become an everyday consumer application.