It is a little ironic but true that it always easier to be evil, be bad, compared with good deeds. It's also normal that a company fights its way through numerous obstacles to develop really good product before first debut. Ambition at that time is about making great product, making big money, and be extremely successful. To achieve so, we soon realise that the only way is to find a problem, then provide a solution, which people love, talk about and are willing to pay for. We go out of our way to improve the quality, to make users happy and fall in love with us. Those who made it understand the importance of marrying passion with down-to-earth approach. Since at hat moment, they have nothing, but a chance to make a good product. In fact, that would be the only thing they are evaluated on. I remember a line from a podcast somewhere about the criteria to use for making decision - "if you are not sure how and what to choose from thousands of things to do, do those which will make your customers happy". This is extremely important for budding organisations which often operate on the edge of living or dying. Some more tenacious species of us will make it, and eventually able to build up their own tribes, raise their influencing weights, attract investment, be successful.
However, what happens next is what I would like to talk about here. It is very difficult to make our way from scratch through the first success - first successful product launch, first major investment; it is even more so when we have chance to get to the next ladder. When we are successful, many start to bully or ignore users. Not we like that, simply because that is the easier way out, or at least it seems so in the beginning. We start to get lazy and evil, start to release software without testing and rely on luck to not hit the rock, start to be arrogant to users' feedback as we know better (otherwise how could we succeed?) We start to focus on getting more and more investment to build up a giant empire because that seems to give the success new and real meaning. We start to stare at stock price rather than test reports. We have gone to the dark side, unfortunately, which majority of big organisations do, seemly unavoidably.
From this point on, we start to offer users less and less choices and provide them thousands of configuration options which gives us the professionally pretentious appearance. What we do not realise is that we start to lose people's love and trust, we start to see the baseline of the game changing and we do not have the support from those once being loyal to the products and marketing for us by words of mouth. We become extremely thick and reluctant to accept criticisms. The only possible outcome is that products sliding away from making people happy to annoying and belittling users, where no good is going to come out.
Google is able to recognise why so many once successful organisations failed to continue their glory. Being able to maintain this type of startup spirit could not be more important. It is so easy and convenient to just do evil, admittedly we all have tendencies of doing that. No matter how accountants and bankers mess up with the economy, at the end of day, it is the maker who decide the ball spinning, it is the product which actually provide the drive. So, be good.
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