Comment by shevy-java

They de-facto created a monopoly. You can reason that its services are useful, but without also pointing out that they established a de-facto monopoly, this "analysis" is very incomplete.

> what people celebrated about Google

When exactly? Google initially was not anywhere near as problematic as it is today. I don't see many celebrate Google these days.

> what made Google such an attractive place for people like the author to work.

Was it ever? It also feels it used to be more attractive in the past. Nowadays you do not see any such yubilant posts about Google anymore. People complain a lot more about Google.

> What's fascinating is that Google gets virtually zero recognition for this (Google services are largely taken for granted), and beyond that, Google is one of the most hated corporations for it.

That's also not true. Some of Google's service are still popular such as Google Maps. You see very little criticism about it. But in other parts, Google revealed how truly evil it is. Be it the fight against ublock origin or Google locking down Android or dominating the www via abusing adChromium. Nope, sorry, the criticism against Google is totally warranted. Years ago I did not understand the de-google movement. Now I am of the opposite opinion and even more extreme. I think Google has to be removed from this planet as entity. Someone needs to chop it up. The US courts are too corrupt and bribed to change anything. I think the people need to fix Google, by no longer using it. This is difficult, I get it; I am still using Google, such as youtube. That's actually my biggest use case of Google. The browser (thorium) is the second loophole here but in theory I could use firefox.

> So if we use Google as a case study for "progressive business", having mostly succeeded at giving the poorest people one Earth an equal product to the richest people on Earth, what is the takeaway?

That's like saying Al Capone is a saint. You try to connect evil with good. There is no connection here. Google remains an evil corporation even if it makes useful services. But it also kills existing services - look at the Google graveyard. Look how they crippled its search engine. Google pisses off people - why do you not see this? You basically wrote an eulogy for Google here. No specific criticism at all.