I can't believe this was upvoted to the first comment. It's baseless speculation and slander. Whatever your reasons for disliking Google, none of your suppositions here are reasonable.
>"Google's strategy is to profit from advertising. It fundamentally benefits from knowing as much about its users as possible. Every tactic it has will always support that strategy or it will risk failure."
Yes, Google's strategy is to profit from advertising. But this is a gross oversimplification of Google's business model. It also constantly innovates and improves its own technology and domain through research and development. It would be more apt to say, "Google has many strategies, of which advertising is one." Advertising profit is just one relevant strategic position. This is important because if you try to pigeonhole Google like this it makes it easier to build a strawman argument.
>"You can tell its strategy motivates it toward evil because its slogan is "Don't be evil." It chose that slogan because it risks being evil, in its own terms. It doesn't need a slogan like "Don't be unprofitable" or "Don't break the law" because its strategy doesn't point it in those directions. It points to being evil, in its terms."
No, no no no. This is clearly your term. If you read Paul Buchheit's telling of how the slogan was chosen (he was the one who came up with it, before Google was an ad company, before it was "Google" by modern standards, and while he was still fresh at the company)[1].
Furthermore, you're not making any sense with the last sentence. How in the world can you reasonably say a company would try to prevent itself from being "evil" by preemptively referring to that possibility in a slogan?
What? What kind of logic is that? It doesn't even hold up to Occam's Razor, since I just directly refuted it with a primary source and you have submitted no evidence except your clear bias against the company. For such a complex story that requires suspending disbelief, you have no proof.
>""Don't be evil" exists to make the place palatable to humans who understand the company's direction. Who made the slogan? The people who know the company's direction best. They know it better than you and they realize its direction."
Now you're just raving. Paul Buchheit made it. Do you hear yourself? A slogan exists to make an advertising company palatable to humans? What is your problem with Google? This goes beyond any fulfilling debate, you're actually just pulling nonsense out of the air with this. It would be different if you could submit anything that makes sense to support your loathing, but you have nothing but slander and words here.
>"Google has a technically superior product to its competitors. When you realize its most knowledgeable and powerful employees know its strategy points it to "be evil", you realize why people use alternatives whose strategies don't point them to "evil," especially when current events highlight the consequences of its strategic choice of knowing so much about you, its users."
Maybe this makes sense, if you had actually set up a reasonable probability that Google has a nefarious plot to be evil and subjugate the public to its whims while distracting them from that plot. What you're saying is inane and false. It amounts to a tinfoil conspiracy theory with groundless, biased assumptions that have no basis in observable reality.
Google isn't faultless. But you're actually being unreasonable. This comment is polarizing and devoid of any substantial quality. You didn't give a real critique of the company or its ethical standards. You just raved and made it clear you dislike the company.
Finally, just for the sake of argument, assuming everything you said is true (despite the fact that it's a complex web of conspiracy with no evidence) - why would making a slogan have any impact on whether or not a company is ethical? You neither defined "evil", nor submitted any evidence. The entire comment of yours is farcical.
[1]: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-07-16-n55.html