Shock – Companies give themselves preferential treatment
I’ve read two posts today that have made me giggle like a girl. Both of them focused on the insane notion that companies giving themselves preferential treatment is some sort of evilness or conflict of interest!
Neither post supported the concept and thought it was unfair or unethical or hypocritical for a company to elevate their own products higher than say, their competitors.
The first one I saw when I was googling some bizarre crap and ended up over at an old digg story. Google was accused of “going evil” because they promoted their Picasa software on their search engine. Note the use of “their” – “their software” on “their search engine”.
Don MacAskill thought it was against Google’s code of conduct to leverage their hugely successful search engine to promote their less successful software.
That’s a story from last year, and I read it briefly this morning before moving on with my life. Until I flicked over to TechCrunch a few minutes ago and saw much the same story, but about Wikipedia providing good links to their own products and nofollow’d links to everyone else. I could swear I’ve seen TechCrunch authors write about sites they have financial or other interests in.
Duncan Riley says, “how is it that Wikipedia continues to be held on a dais as the pinnacle of all things good with Web 2.0 and citizen generated media when we all know that it’s nothing more than a conduit for Jimbo Wales’ commercial ambitions with Wikia”.
The Wikipedia story hasn’t picked up much momentum – maybe people aren’t as stupid as I’m inclined to believe, maybe they’re asleep? Maybe people are just tired of the constant flow of non-news that revolves around Wikipedia? Yes, there’s a chance info might be inaccurate. Yes, there’s favouritism, bigotry, censorship and rivalry and whatnot between the “educated people” and the “retards who googled an opinion”.
Anyway. Allow me to be the first to say – Wikipedia, Google and anyone else, can do whatever they want with their websites. It’s not evil, mean, nasty or whatever else. It’s business. It’s quite a ridiculous notion that a succesful business should promote their competitors works instead of, or in addition to their own. Or put less emphasis on their own offerings because it might offend their competitors.
Honestly it is.
