Google "does evil", MSN nods knowingly

I never really bought the whole "Do no evil" thing from Google. It just sounds like the kind of thing you come up with when you're 13 years old and you think big companies are evil and bad and you don't want to be like them. You don't want to pay what is effectively minimum wage to the majority of your employees while hyping up how cool it is to work there. So when Microsoft gets slammed for censoring (really just refusing to host - there are plenty of other hosting options available) a Chinese blogger according to state rules there and claims that this is just "the cost of doing business in China", it comes as a great surprise to anyone that Google is under the same pressure when they are trying to do business in China as well? Liberals will say that Google (and MSN) shouldn't do business in China if those are the rules, but as public companies they have a duty to pursue relevent revenue opportunities and although there is a limit to what a responsible company should get involved in, providing web services in China, with all that entails, isn't crossing over that line in my opinion.

Maybe applying state censorship laws on your web services is evil, maybe it isn't, but if you thought to write something like "do no evil" into your company's mission statement, you probably believe it is. In that case I strongly suggest Google quietly removes it, because as a multi-national, they are going to have to do plenty of similarly 'evil' things to compete.

technorati tags (experimental): Google, MSN, Evil