I'm the one you originally replied to, and yes that's roughly what I'm saying - maybe the individual engineers and designers that built features were trying their best not to be evil, but the company as a whole always had dark motives.
They always funneled user data into ad revenue, always drove people to use their versions of things with overly pushy dark patterns, always collected way more telemetry than necessary.
They bought Android and turned it into a profit center, bought YouTube and have spent basically the whole time making user hostile actions with ad UX and weird algorithms.
Despite individuals' best efforts, I posit that Google the corporation's modus operandi has always been to co-opt good ideas and good people and twist them towards the grey, rarely crossing any defined line but always stretching every one of them to suck more private data, more telemetry, and more ad value.
Just because they invest in an open source programming thing (that gets people to use their platforms and ecosystem for more ad dollars) doesn't make them good.
Being frank, I think you have an ideological position which is both satisfyingly consistent ('google is evil and always has been') and which provides a mechanism to discount any contrary facts ('you were just boots on the ground and didn't understand the corporation as well as I, being an enlightened person, did'). But I was actually there, and while I can't tell you any of the many times I saw Google do the right thing when it hurt its bottom line I can tell you that I saw it happen a lot and in big ways. You don't have to believe me, poor little deluded cog that I am, but I think I will take my messy, complicated, first person understanding of the place over the reductive ideology any day.
They always funneled user data into ad revenue, always drove people to use their versions of things with overly pushy dark patterns, always collected way more telemetry than necessary.
They bought Android and turned it into a profit center, bought YouTube and have spent basically the whole time making user hostile actions with ad UX and weird algorithms.
Despite individuals' best efforts, I posit that Google the corporation's modus operandi has always been to co-opt good ideas and good people and twist them towards the grey, rarely crossing any defined line but always stretching every one of them to suck more private data, more telemetry, and more ad value.
Just because they invest in an open source programming thing (that gets people to use their platforms and ecosystem for more ad dollars) doesn't make them good.