[ Thanks to james
Maguire for this link. ]
“I still think the vast majority of people at Google
adhere to the company’s ten founding principles, which is more than
I can say for my dealings with Microsoft over the years. Certainly
both companies are hyper-competitive. But the very nature and
pervasiveness of Google’s online services makes it more pernicious,
and has a greater potential for abuse, as the recent news
indicates. But it also means that they can turn more quickly when
they make a mistake: the Etherpad issue was resolved in a day or
so. Imagine Microsoft trying to do that. Indeed, try finding
something similar to this document on Microsoft’s Web site: you
will find a lot of corporate doublespeak, rather than the plain
spoken “Ten Things” that Google professes:
http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html“While all this was going down in Italy, I was reviewing what
information Google has stored on me in Google Accounts. If you
haven’t had a look at your “dashboard” lately, it is instructive to
see exactly what Google can track on you. In my case, I use a ton
of different Google products, and recorded for posterity include
the following:”