Google is the one company that did walk away from a billion person market - and a strong, established position in it - when asked to censor, and you want to boycott then too?
It's no wonder companies don't bother doing the right thing. People just ignore that massive sacrifice and pull out some other reason to not like Google.
I wrote this earlier, but the thread has become massive and hard to navigate so I figured I would respond to you here.
Google's history isn't so clean either.
They spun backing out of China as something they did in the interest of free speech, but it was more a response to them getting hacked by the CCP (it's still not clear what was stolen, but something big happened).
It's unclear what caused that to get shut down, but its leak and subsequent public pressure was probably a factor.
That said, I still think people within these companies should try to do the right thing (specifically that includes developers like us that make up these companies).
They spun it as leaving due to both. I've never seen an analysis that said it was a big hack, but both are points of principle.
Of course, they've re-examined it. It was the biggest sacrifice for principle in corporate history and they got almost no credit for it.
They must regret it every day, because people who simply dislike Google can take an example of Google doing exactly what they want, and still find a way to call them out for boycott on that exact issue. And even support that issue with quibbles that are tiny in comparison.
And leave Microsoft out of the boycott request in spite of their incredibly craven and spineless behavior on same point (jumping in to try to take Google's spot).
It would appear that, if you dislike Google, it doesn't matter what they do, so why should any company make any sacrifice on principle? They should just spend the money on marketing.
If I pretend they left entirely for principled reasons then it shouldn’t matter that the public is too stupid to understand that.
I guess I take the position that doing the ethical thing is done because it’s the right thing to do and not necessarily because you’ll be rewarded for it with virtue from the public.
I agree that the public’s position on technology companies is often uninformed and contradictory, but I don’t really care about that.
If I worked at google I wouldn’t want to enable CCP censorship - not because I expect the public to like me for it it, but because I don’t want to be complicit in the oppression of Chinese citizens.
If they regret it and are willing to re-enter and comply then it wasn’t really based on ethics in the first place.
That said, I’m pretty sure the hack was the main motivation and the speech issue was just a nice story to tell about it.
It really is silly to claim you want companies to behave in a certain way (not cooperate with China) and then paint them all with the same brush including those that are doing what you want.
It's no wonder companies don't bother doing the right thing. People just ignore that massive sacrifice and pull out some other reason to not like Google.