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Looks like my quoted text didn't work as expected. Thanks Rotatebyteleft for fixing the "To use Alphabet/Google for anything other than search is totally absurd!!" comment with strikethru.

LOL. That was *exactly* what I thought as well when I read his comment.

I know it's been three years, and I know it's going off-topic, but hey, my heart goes out to you. I'm coming up on 25 years, and while I have no idea what you went through in particular, I can't imagine such a loss. I can only hope I go first (probably will)! It sounds like you're taking good care of yourself now, which is great, and hopefully you can treasure how lucky you were to have had those 35 years with someone you cared about so deeply. I know I do, but many people never experience that at all. If this was weird, sorry, not sure why I felt compelled to comment on this, just did.

Knee-jerk wasn't the best choice of words, and after resurrecting my account after a move/hiatus my post was stuck awaiting moderation, uneditable. What I meant was closer to "reactionary". And as a response to the hacking attacks it could easily be construed as petulant, but I know there was more at play than just that. Again, this was a decision that I could mostly respect, even if I don't respect the what the company does overall.

But in re-reading the Spiegel article again now though, I found this telling: Brin: The hacking attacks were the straw that broke the camel's back. There were several aspects there: the attack directly on Google, which we believe was an attempt to gain access to Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. But there is also a broader pattern we then discovered of simply the surveillance of human rights activists.

It comes across like Brin is trying to say that previously they didn't really understand the surveillance that China was performing on their citizens. That's complete bullshit. If any tech leader understands the nature of government monitoring, it's Brin. So what could he have really meant?

Let's think logically about how this relates to the differences between Apple and Google's decisions with regard to China. I think Brin realized that because of the very nature of Google's business, which is essentially surveillance and profiling, that it was just too dangerous for them to continue to operate in China without terrible repercussions for a lot of people. The nature and very soul of Google is personal profiles. That's where and why they make the bulk of their money, I think we can all agree on that much. Perhaps the writing was on the wall at that point that if they were to continue in China that concessions would be required (or perhaps already were being requested), such as the "servers must be in-country" today. That, along with the hacking, probably made them realize that there was no way they'd be able to protect that data over time, so they bailed. Not necessarily a bad decision, as I said earlier, it will take years to understand how it all plays out.

Apple, while they do have visibility into many of their customers, the same kind of deep profiling is clearly not the mainstay of their business, and it's possible to use their hardware without giving an ounce of personal data back to Apple at all. I am proof of that. Even if the decision matrix both companies used was based on the same factors, the coefficients would be very different.

Then again, for all we know Cook/Jobs/Brin/Page and the whole gang all got together over lunch and played rock, paper, scissors...

I think you only have to look as far as the past week's news about Cook meeting with Trump and others in Washington. He was very clear in his reasoning: [i]You don't effect changes by running away, you effect changes by having a seat at the table. [/i]

Unless somehow you think he's lying about this, it makes sense, and is consistent with much of what Apple has done over many years, even if it might seem imperfect at a glance. Google did what they felt they had to do in China, and it's one of the few large decisions where I mostly respect what they did, but I also think it was a bit of a knee-jerk response. It will take many years to see how it all plays out.