Really, HP? You're Going to Fire Your CEO Now? [Hp]

Bloomberg reports that the HP board is going to meet soon to decide whether or not to fire CEO Léo Apotheker. And I don't see how that makes matters anything but worse.

Look, we've been as critical as anyone about HP's recent maneuvers, from the TouchPad fire sale fiasco to keeping PCs at arm's length to the Autonomy acquisition. And yes, it would be negligent of the board not to at least talk about how the company ended up in such a bind. But if Apotheker goes down, he'll be the most transparent scapegoat since Bill Buckner.

As surprising and seemingly erratic as HP's actions have been over the last few months, it's important to remember who Apotheker is, and where he came from. That is to say: the guy the HP board hired in the first place. And if you know that guy, a lot of what's gone down lately makes perfect sense.

Apotheker joined HP from SAP AG, where he'd helmed one of the world's foremost enterprise software companies since 2008. He's not a hardware guy. He's not a consumer guy. He's a solid enterprise salesman who, if you're a company coming off of the shaky and occasionally sordid leaderships of Carly Fiorina and Mark Hurd, represents stability. More importantly, in a post-PC world, he gives you the chance to remake yourself in the vision of an IBM. Or an SAP.

The HP board knew that's what they were getting. And that's essentially what they got: the TouchPad debacle killed off a platform Apotheker had inherited and a market he wasn't comfortable with. Ditto the move away from PCs. And the Autonomy purchase (even though HP likely overpaid) is the company's chance to leverage Apotheker's expertise and rebuild itself into an enterprise software powerhouse. Whether any part of that strategy is right is highly debatable. And the execution has been inarguably sloppy. But I find it hard to imagine that HP's board feels blindsided.

What did they think was going to happen? They brought in a guy whose skill set made him uniquely qualified to turn HP into a company that's barely recognizable from the one we all grew up with. And if they're chalking Apotheker up to an unfortunate choice, well, just add him to the ever-longer list of bad hires. And maybe start looking at the people who keep handing contracts to disappointing CEOs. You know, themselves.

And then there's this: while Apotheker's dramatic transformation of HP may have been for the worse, he's also (ironically?) the most qualified person to run what's left. Why not give the guy a chance to prove he knew what he was doing? Who's more capable of milking every last synergy out of Autonomy? Meg Whitman's name has been floated as a possible successor, but she's every bit as detached from HP's core business now as Apotheker was when he signed on.

Give the guy a chance, HP board. No one's going to put HP-Dumpty back together again, not like it was. So you might as well stick with the guy who can make the best omelet. [Bloomberg]

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LED Lenser X21 Flashlight Lightning Review: Really, Really, Really Bright [Flashlights]

Maglite's 4 D-cell flashlight spits out around 120 lumens of brightness. The mammoth LED Lenser X21 shoots out 1,200. It's blindingly bright. It lights up entire rooms on its own. It will hurt your eyes. A lot.

Why do you buy a flashlight? To light things up. The X21 is almost too bright. It's extremely visible even in a well-lit room, or outside—photos do it no justice. And because it uses electricity-friendly LEDs, it can beam brilliantly for a long, long time—at its max power mode, we've far surpassed LED Lenser's advertised 2.5 hours. We'll take their word on the 25 hours of 225-lumen low power mode. The thing's also brutally substantial; if you want a flashlight you can drop repeatedly and also bludgeon someone to death with, this is tops.

The X21's very heavy: 3.25 pounds. This might wear on your wrist if you had to use it for extended periods. But the X21's only real design flaw is the stubborn push motion required to switch the light's lens and mirror mechanism between a focused and diffuse beam. A twisting control would have been much better, or something that didn't require jerky motions.

This is the ultimate emergency flashlight. For reading, it's overkill. But for power outages, wilderness wanderings, or anything dark that needs to be bright as a trillion dollar casino, the X21 is a stellar pick.

LED Lenser X21
Price: $450
Brightness: 1200 Lumens
Weight: 52.49 oz
Battery: 4 x D cells
Length: 15.55-inches
LED Lenser
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I Really Want This Shape-Shifting Sofa [Video]

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The CIA Really Wants to Make Hollywood's Next Blockbuster [Military]

Are you an aspiring filmmaker who wants to produce a spy thriller? Well, you're in luck because the CIA has a pile of script ideas lying around.

Ironic, you say, that an organization known for secrecy is doling out helpful hints to Hollywood? The CIA doesn't think so. For them it's all about image control. And they're just the start of it. The Department of Defense and just about every branch of the military has an entertainment industry liaison similar to the CIA's.

If you want to make a war film and need a fleet of F-22s, a crowd of Marines, or a Navy aircraft carrier, just call up the Department of Defense's entertainment media office and they'll tell you if the Army can spare that M1A1 Abrams tank you've always wanted for a day or two of filming.

"The scripts we get are only the writer's idea of how the Department of Defense operates," Vince Ogilvie, deputy director of the Defense Department's entertainment liaison office, told Danger Room. "We make sure the Department and facilities and people are portrayed in the most accurate and positive light possible."

Hollywood has been working with government organizations to make more credible films for years (for instance, Jerry Bruckheimer and Paramount Pictures worked closely with the Pentagon when filming the 1986 blockbuster "Top Gun"). But the phenomenon is under newfound scrutiny. There was a bit of a kerfuffle recently when some in the press and in Congress speculated about whether the government will give Sony Pictures any pointers while they make a film about the killing of Osama bin Laden.

In a letter to the Defense Department and CIA last month, Rep. Peter King expressed outrage at the Pentagon's relationship with the film's director, Kathyrn Bigelow. King claimed that she had already been made privy to sensitive information that could put American lives at risk. (King may have also have been thinking about the fact that the movie is scheduled to hit theaters one month before America decides whether or not to reelect President Obama.)

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney assured the media that the Pentagon does not discuss classified information and suggested that King could work on "more important things to discuss than a movie."

Ogilvie told Danger Room that until the Pentagon sees a completed script, they won't make a decision on whether they'll assist Bigelow. Standard procedure is to review the script, make notes on what the Defense Department would like changed, and kick it back to the producer. If the changes are made, the military will provide whatever help they can - declassified information, equipment, personnel, etc. - for a price. If an agreement can't be reached, the project is either scrapped or made without Pentagon help.

"We try to find a middle ground," said Ogilvie. "We want the portrayal of the military to show professionalism, cohesiveness, jointness, and dedication." He cited NCIS and NCIS: Los Angeles, two shows the Pentagon has collaborated on, as examples of entertainment in which bad behavior in the military is often depicted, but at the end of each storyline, someone always takes action to correct it. In other words, the U.S. government wants us to know that the military is not made up of selfish rogues and the CIA doesn't exclusively employ people who look like Brian Cox.

"We want these movies to help us in terms of recruitment and retention," said Ogilvie.

OK, fair enough I guess, but why has the Defense Department recently partnered with 20th Century Fox to make an X-Men/U.S. Army ad or with explosion-enthusiast Michael Bay to make all three Transformers movies? In The Washington Post, David Sirota suggests entertainment like this is "government-subsidized propaganda."

Ogilvie assures Danger Room that the Pentagon's Hollywood ventures are much more innocent than that. Sure, they'd like to see a boost in military support, but it really all comes back to accuracy in terms of standard operating procedures - "whether it be a combat mission in Iraq or how we might fight a three-legged alien in outer space."

While our military is busy pondering defense strategies against Camaro-bots and aliens, I'll do something equally worthwhile and tweak one of the CIA's "inspirations for future storylines" into my first feature-length action flick: "The Ten Commandments of Counterintelligence." I'm thinking early-20th-century religious allegory with lots of explosions, fedoras, and Mel Gibson. But if Mel's busy, I'll just start an indie band called "Robert Fulton's Skyhook and Operation Cold Feet," named after one of the Agency's canned movie treatments. Thanks, CIA! You're my heroes!

Wired.com has been expanding the hive mind with technology, science and geek culture news since 1995.

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Are These Stone Speakers Really 20,000 Percent Greener than Other Speakers? [Speakers]

Throwing a figure like 20,000% around seems absurd. Rarely is anything we use in our normal lives 20,000% more/less/better/worse/whatever than a competing product. Yet, AudioMasons claim their stone speakers are 20,000% greener than other speakers. Seriously?

In addition to desirable resonance qualities, the stone used to make their speakers is apparently highly sustainable. The $1146, 2-way Comet speaker features 7-inch and 1-inch drivers, with a frequency response of 42Hz - 20kHz.

But Treehugger's Lloyd Alter isn't so sold on that idea. First, he points out that their touting of LEED qualification is strage: that's generally for buildings and structures as opposed to consumer products. Secondly, the 20,000% figure comes primarilyfrom comparing the stone encasements of their speakers to a speaker whose enclosure is cast from virgin aluminum (though they also calculate the energy saved as well). And sure, there are aluminum-encased speakers, but I wouldn't call them the de facto standard of audio gear. And lastly, Alter points out that the process of cutting and shaping stone isn't all that green. The claim to eco-supremacy appears to be hype more than anything else. [AudioMasons via TreeHugger]

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Someone Really Needs to Make a Good $100 Tablet [All Giz Wants]

Today we heard that the UK is getting jobbed out of its final shipment of $100 TouchPads, with only HP employees being eligible to buy them. Sozzlepops, UK chaps.

But that got us to thinking: With all the fuss over the TouchPad firesale the past few weeks, when will this very obvious demand for a good, cheap tablet be met?

First off, yes, there are a ton of reasons why a good, cheap tablet hasn't happened yet. For starters, there's cost. Building the TouchPad cost $306 in materials and manufacturing per tablet, and the 32GB model $328—plus whatever R&D went into it. That's a bloodbath. And no one's really in position to challenge Apple's incredible integration, from supply chain to retail, which allows it to keep its price lower than competitors.

But this can definitely be done, people. The Nook Color is the closest we have so far, but it's a measly 7 inches and still $250. It has also to be rooted to run Android at the moment. Any tablet that's going to make a run at the saliva-inspiring TouchPad price range is probably going to have to run stock Android by default.

What probably needs to happen, though, is for tablets to make a much bigger impact than they have to this point. There's plenty of room: as of May, only 8 percent of Americans owned a tablet, even though 90 percent wanted one. If Amazon's Kindle tablet sells at a hurricane clip, it should go a long way toward pushing down supply chain costs across the board.

And if tablets can make that inroad, it's basically a waiting game for them to hit their sweet spot, like anything else in tech. The first iPhone cost an insane $500 and $600—on contract! Now you can get a 3GS for 50 bucks. And we don't really need anything near that level of price depression to see a good tablet for ~$100. We just need a few generations to go by to lower manufacturing costs to where the previous gen is both good and affordable. Would you jump on an iPad 1 for $150 next year? I think you would.

Know this going in: the TouchPad firesale is in all likelihood a singular event, and you're not going to get this class of hardware for ~$100 anytime soon. But obviously we're willing to make concessions—we're all drooling over the same chunk o' junk that we poo-pooed with lukewarm and disappointed reviews just a few months ago. But it also can't be so dumpy that it's basically one of the cheap ass Android tablets that are already available.

The reason the $100 tablet is so attractive is that every decent tablet to this point has been at least $500. So those of us who want a tablet to be a unitasker device (sorry Alton!), but don't necessarily want to pay handsomely for handsome performance in every other area are sort of stuck. I just want it to read comics; Sam Biddle only wants to watch movies on the subway; Matt Buchanan wanted an Instapaper and magazine machine. I suspect most folks fall into a similar category.

That list of tasks means it probably has to be around-or-about 10 inches, and pretty good quality. The TouchPad's screen was $69, so that's a good chunk of our budget straight away, but we can also probably skimp on accuracy a bit for the capacitive touchscreen to make up a few dollars.

As for what's important specs-wise, it's probably the classics: an above-average processor, a usable amount of RAM, and decent battery life. The TouchPad has 1GB of RAM, but the iPad 2 gets along just fine with 512MB. We could also probably tolerate a thicker profile, and the battery doesn't have to last all day—just long enough to get through a movie on a plane, and maybe catch up on news in the cab.

Whoever makes a run at this is going to have to have an established marketplace in place to reap the benefits of bringing in a huge amount of users with a low-maybe-negative-margin product—sort of like Sony did with PlayStations for several years.

Google seems like a possibility, since they've shown that they're willing to give stuff away just to get people on the internet and in their sandbox. But even with their recent acquisition of Motorola, they don't really have the infrastructure to make a big tablet push.

So it probably falls to Amazon. Again. They have the ecosystem in place to capitalize on a huge influx of users, they're already jumping into the tablet game, and they've already been rumored to consider straight up giving hardware away to funnel customers to their services. And actually, they might already be working on all of this.

Or I suppose the alternative is for us all to start hoping really hard for Samsung to go under so we can make a run on Galaxy Tabs.

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If You Really Want Instagram on Your Mac, You Can Pay 5 Bucks for Carousel [Apps]

Instagram is the lovely. Sadly though, it's really only available on your iPhone. With Carousel, you can peep Instagram on your Mac.

Some of you may not see the need for a photo sharing network but Instagram is a really neat way to see life through your friends' eyes (and alternatively, judge them on their picture taking skills). The problem? It's not really usable outside your iPhone. Carousel puts Instagram on your Mac but its problem?

It's 5 bucks.

Which is really sorta obscene given Instagram itself is free but until Instagram develops something more than a lame picture frame for the web, Instagram addicts are stuck. Price aside, Carousel itself looks wonderful, in fact, it looks a lot like what you'd think Instagram would look like on the Mac. You can see your feed and popular photos and even save the awesome ones straight to your Mac. Desktop specific features like full keyboard support, viewing photos at full resolution and other features come packed in too. Not bad at all, but 5 bucks? A little to 'spensive for my wallet. [Mac App Store]

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Smoking Weed Is Really Bad for the Environment (Doing Other Drugs Is Less Bad) [Factoid]

Marijuana, hue notwithstanding, is not exactly new school green. In fact, it's the worst drug for the environment. Marijuana growers use $5 billion worth of electricity to power lightbulbs, fans, dehumidifiers and whatever else it takes to grow weed. That's 1% of the national electricity consumption.

Not only that, smoking a joint is worth two pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. Who knew getting high could have such environmental consequences! We'll ignore the fact that if it was legal, growers could grow out in the open and not damage the environment with energy consumption. Thanks lawmakers. As for the other drugs: Cocaine powers the deforestation of rain forests, as farmers chop down trees to grow the coca. Also, according to National Geographic:

Farmers also use a number of harmful insecticides, fungicides, and fertilizers to grow the [coca] plants. Petroleum products are also a key ingredient in the process of turning coca into cocaine. To extract the drug from the plant, farmers mash coca leaves and soak the paste in petroleum products such as gasoline or kerosene. According to the U.S. State Department, as many as 85 quarts (80 liters) of kerosene are used to manufacture every kilogram of cocaine that makes its way to the street market.

Making meth uses energy, along with toxic ingredients like drain cleaner, lye, camping stove fuel and more. According to the EPA, the production of a pound of methamphetamine creates five or six pounds of toxic waste. Extracting heroin requires toxic substances like ammonia, acetone, hydrochloric acid, etc. that often ruins the environment the process takes place in.

Basically, any illegal drug you take to gets high, takes a toll on Mother Earth too. Think about the planet the next time you smoke/snort/tweak/shoot drugs. Or just eat shrooms. [National Geographic, Image Credit: Pashabo/Shutterstock]

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The Gundam Leica Camera That Doesn't Really Have Anything to Do With Anime [Cameras]

When I first heard about a new Leica camera being designed by Kunio Okawara-sama, the man responsible for the mechanical design of the insanely popular Gundam anime series, I nearly shit myself in excitement. Then I saw what it looked like.

I believe "disappointment" is too weak a sentiment. This "Okawara Factory" limited edition—only 200 will be produced—V-LUX 30 is a regular V-LUX 30 but has a laser engraved design that makes the camera appear as if it is in the process of disassembly. Wait, that's it? $1150 for a camera that just looks like it's been partially stripped. What. The. Fuck. [Highsnobiety via Peta Pixel]

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Rumor: Google Wants Hulu Really, Really Bad [Hulu]

All Things D's Peter Kafka says that Google is willing to offer significantly more than what Amazon, Yahoo or Dish Network would be willing to offer in the bidding war for Hulu. But they also want more than what's being offered.

Kafka doesn't have exact details from his sources, but he believes Google wants more exclusive content for a longer period of time.

Google seems to want something much more than that, and is willing to pay much more to get it. If you want to speculate, you could imagine Google asking for access to more content, for a longer period of time, and perhaps offering up a couple billion dollars more.

Since that's not what Hulu's owners have put on the table, "normally we would have thrown people out if they'd said that," says an executive familiar with the sales process. But Google "indicated that there's enough money" involved so that Hulu's owners are at least thinking about continuing the discussion.

But money alone won't guarantee a successful acquisition for Google. Studios and networks are notoriously gun shy about making their content freely available and given how new and unpredictable online TV still is, locking themselves into a long-term deal is something they probably don't want to do (hello Starz!). And though Google's willingness to toss cash at Hulu is promising, we still want Amazon to prevail in this fatal four-way. [AllThingsD]

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7 Tools for Being Really, Really Creepy [Toolkit]

Summer's dead, which means it's time to focus on work and study. Which means you're going to be surrounded by friends. And strangers. And strangers who might someday be friends. Oh, but what if they won't? Let's creep 'em out.

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Here's Where the Word Luddite Really Comes From [History]

Dude, you don't use Instagram? What are you, some kind of Luddite? Believe it or not, Luddites aren't just people who cross their arms at, lag behind of, or turn up their nose at tech. Originally, they smashed it apart.

The Luddites were violent radicals. Only instead of attacking people, as is the case with most violent radicals, their enemy was the machine. The Luddites, named after the mythical English folk hero Ned "King" Ludd, were terrified of what Industrial Revolution tech meant for their lives. For many of them, it meant the destruction of their lives—the loss of their vocations. Sound familiar?

Like those autoworkers who saw robotic arms replacing their craft, countless English men and women who worked in the cotton trade—refining it for sale—saw mill technology usurping their labor. The jobs they did, machines could do faster and cheaper. And that's exactly what the machines did. So the laborers decided to destroy these machines.

Using hammers and arson, Luddite armies of furious laborers destroyed the machines that encroached on their vocation—causing a staggering £100,000 worth of damage between 1811 and 1812. They left factories in ruin, and earned a reputation as heroes of the working class—an "unprecedented" "character of daring and ferocity," wrote the Annual Register in 1812.

The British Empire, which saw a rise in wealth unprecedented in the whole of human history through the use of industrial machinery, naturally, wasn't going to take this. They dispatched the military against Luddite groups, quashing, arresting, imprisoning, and executing them. Laws were passed to make the destruction of equipment a grave crime. Force was used until workers were too scared to resist the progress of history and technology.

It's a struggle that's still felt in this country and every country across the world—and a problem all of us grapple with. What hands did once, gears replaced. What gears did once, robotic arms replace. What paper did once, screens do now. Though we all enjoy modern life too much to ever smash it apart or burn down the local Best Buy, the struggle of the Luddite remains, at least in abstract. So next time you're called one because you don't want to upgrade your smartphone, tell your friend to kindly shut up and read a history book. Whether it's a Kindle or a paperback is your problem.

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Samsung's Pure Breeze Launcher for Android Is Really Weird [Video]

Launchers for Android are pretty wonderful, as they can transform your phone into something totally different. There's already awesome launchers like Launcher Pro and ADWLauncher but Samsung wants to throw their hat in the game too.

I know what you're thinking. Samsung? With their freaking TouchWiz UI? Luckily, we dodged a bullet there and it's not going to be TouchWiz. Instead, it's a new interface called Pure Breeze that's, um, a little weird. The emphasis of Pure Breeze is to manage your applications with groups. On launch, it's a long vertical list of apps that isn't side scrollable, you throw the apps you want to organize into the bottom bar (which is side scrollable). There's also a floating "home screen", called The Kite, which is always easily accessible (and the place you can store your favoritest apps and widgets).

'm not sure if I like these small tweaks (I'm so used to side scrolling homescreen on Android phones) but I just know I feel really weird using them. [Android Market via TechCrunch]

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Nuking a Hurricane Would Be a Really Bad Idea [Irene]

Did we learn nothing from Independence Day? Nuking things for nuking's sake just doesn't work like we think it might. Take a hurricane, for example. It'd be relatively immune to whatever ordinance Bill Pullman—sorry, humanity—might throw at it.

First of all there'd be the obvious nuclear fallout. Because hurricanes are coziest in the tradewinds, NOAA says all that residual awfulness would spread quickly and efficiently to areas well outside the hurricane's predicted cone of travel. Firing a nuke into Irene would have likely made that minor hurricane into a beast more formidable than Isabel or Katrina, which at a Category 5 was the worst of the worst.

But what of the physics? Say we were immune to fallout and could lob nukes into storms to our heart's content. Would they do anything to a storm?

Again, NOAA is less than optimistic about our chances. As a species we're just too damn weak:

A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20x1013 watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a rate of 1013 watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the power of a hurricane.

But Jack! Something, something shock waves! I read about those once and how they can be deceptively deadly!

Well, yes, you're right my little pyro, but when it comes to hurricanes those shockwaves still wouldn't be powerful enough to downgrade a hurricane from Cat5 to Cat 2:

[A shock wave] doesn't raise the barometric pressure after the shock has passed because barometric pressure in the atmosphere reflects the weight of the air above the ground. For normal atmospheric pressure, there are about ten metric tons (1000 kilograms per ton) of air bearing down on each square meter of surface. In the strongest hurricanes there are nine. To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion (500,000,000) tons for a 20 km radius eye.

And don't think we could preempt a hurricane by targeting its tropical storm/depression beginnings. Even if such a storm used 10% of the energy of a hurricane, that's still an incredible amount of energy. Besides, there are far too many storms and depressions that develop each year for such a strategy to be practical anyway. [NOAA via Matt Yglesias]

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Would You Really Cut Off Your Own Arm for a Robotic One? [Video]

Filmmaker Rob Spence, otherwise known as the Eyeborg, has been toying with robotics for some time. Now, with the help of some engineers, he has a robotic eye that can record near everything he sees. He thinks voluntary prosthesis is the future.

Now, we've made some remarkable strides in replacing the lost body parts of people. But I don't know if I'd volunteer to have my legs cut off just so I could jump higher. Call me old-fashioned. [Sky News via I Heart Chaos]

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Working Out Barefoot with the Adidas Adipure Trainers Is Really Weird (But Good for You?) [Shoes]

I'm wearing the new Adidas adipure Trainers right now. They're barefoot shoes. My toes are spread apart (which is good), my feet are closer to the ground (which is great) and I feel like an ass (which is normal). Adidas says it'll make me a better athlete.

Though the popularity of barefoot running shoes has been well documented, these Adidas barefoot shoes aren't like those. They're the first barefoot models exclusively targeted for the gym.

So how do they feel? Actually good. The shoe's upper is similar to low profile water shoes (better quality, natch)—elastic, stretchy and hardly noticeable around the top part of your foot. I do, however, feel a bit of restriction around my toes. The ethylene and vinyl acetate midsoles—essentially a ton of foam cells that contain air—are perfect though. When your foot lands, the foam compresses and the air gets pushed out, then sucked back in. Unlike Nike Frees which focus on re-creating a barefoot (read: less shock absorbent) feel, the Adidas Adipures provide a cushion so you don't feel every jagged edge of the ground. But it doesn't try to overcompensate on that cushioning, so when you're doing exercises like box jumps you'll feel your toes and feet searching for balance, trying to grab the ground. It's like doing brand new core exercises for your feet—working the important little muscles that mean more than the big swooping ones.

But even with all these athlete-approved, trainer-recommended benefits, they're still unabashedly weird. Beyond all possibilities of weird, really. And to that end I say who cares? It's the gym, form follows function. They fit a specific purpose: attempting to improve your posture and alignment so you can get more out of your workouts. You'll find yourself searching for balance and using muscles you never knew existed. One thing: probably not ideal for those who predominantly run.

They're out on November 1st for 90 bucks. [Adidas]

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This Is What Google Really Meant By "Don't Be Evil" [Google]

Google has been throwing its weight around and pissing a lot of people off.

It allegedly leaned on Motorola not to use a competing location-detecting service from Skyhook. Then it turned around and dropped $12.5 billion on Motorola to get into the phone market, competing directly against partners like Samsung and LG.

It changes its search algorithms with no warning, sending certain businesses plunging in the rankings.
It charged into Facebook's territory a couple months ago with Google+ and is playing hardball with tactics like taking a much smaller cut of in-game sales to draw developers to its platform.

It looks a lot like Microsoft in its heyday.

Every time Google makes one of these moves, it's easy (and fun!) to point the finger at the motto which appeared in its IPO prospectus: "Don't be evil."

But as computer researcher and social activist Aaron Swartz points out, Google had a very specific definition of evil.

It had nothing to do with market tactics like stabbing former partners in the back or playing hardball with weaker competitors.

It was all about users.

Google gave three examples: it would only show relevant ads, would never show pop-ups or other annoying "tricky" ads, and would never sell search results.

In other words, it would never make a product worse for users just to make a quick buck.

So look back at Google's actions from the last year and they're mostly in line with this credo.

• Tightening the restrictions and source code releases on Android, and buying a hardware maker to create "reference" phones (free of the crapware that carriers install, for instance) makes Android better for users.

• Changing its search algorithm to get rid of crummy results makes Google search better for users.

• Adding a social network gives Google access to data that users are sharing with each other, which makes Google search better for users. Taking less money so developers will create games for it makes Google+ better for users.

Sometimes the line gets blurry, particularly with acquisitions — buying travel information provider ITA looked a lot like Google was trying to own a supplier of critical data to a competitor, Microsoft's Bing. (Did Google really need to OWN it to provide better travel search results?)

But if avoiding evil means pleasing customers, that's just smart business.

And that's why Google is winning.

Google anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts also points out that there's a big difference between "don't be evil" and "do no evil." When writers misquote Google as saying "do no evil," they usually have a bone to pick.

Republished with permission from The Business Insider

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