Is this true?
Just over 15 years ago, two Stanford University students set out to commercialize PageRank, a brilliant new search engine concept they'd developed to organize the Internet's vast array of information. However, the same intellectual property rights Google now opposes in regard to Android would have prevented Larry Page and Sergey Brin from ever having got their company off the ground back then.
It's a detailed and interesting article that takes not only that headline argument but goes into specifics of when Google allegedly played with less than saintly techniques.
Personally I'm still annoyed they killed off Google Reader, though after a year or more I'm finding things have sorted themselves without Google. And I can cut through all the Android vs iPhone arguments and who created what by just glancing at the difference in all smartphones before and after the introduction of the iPhone.
Oh, and I think Google Docs is clunky. And actually Gmail is a bit ugly. But powerful.
Still, I want Google to have and to stick to this “don't be evil” mantra.