Google to Exit China

A new article from MSNBC states that Google’s vaunted content filtering software seems to be leaking like a broken collander.  In a personal test, both information about Tibet’s history (from Western sources) and Tiananmen Square returned meaningful results on www.google.cn

The same article also mentions the projected effects of Google’s predicted pullout from China on China’s economy and IT development ecosystem.

My personal take on the issue is: If a company is not willing to work within the laws of a country and the country is not willing to change the laws to work with the company, then a split is inevitable.  Logically, if neither side is willing to compromise on the issue at hand, then a relationship is not feasible.

From a moral standpoint, the idea that Google pulling out will put a lot of people in China out of job is a sticking point.  However, if Google is willing to give up revenue (however much or little revenue it might be) in order to stick to its morals, then that is their choice to make.  Just as no one can keep you as an individual from standing on the corner and handing out your money to passerby, no country can force a company to not do something that will hurt its bottom line.  Is it unfortunate that people will be put out of a job?  Sure.  Does that matter in business? No.  Should it matter in business? Absolutely not, businesses are moral-less entities and as such people’s employment does not affect a business.  It might affect individual people, but not businesses as a whole.

Overall, I am firmly against censorship so I am firmly on Google’s side on this issue.  If they don’t want to follow the law, then they should leave.  Otherwise they would be breaking the law and could be fined (or maybe even jailed although the logistics of that are kind of tough) for breaking the law.  If the Chinese government does not want to allow free flow of information, then they should not get access to the services provided by Google.

The Vicious Cycle of Complexity

I recently started a new job, which I truly enjoy. However, in my short time here I have stumbled upon one absolute truth. Business begets complexity, which begets support business, which begets complexity ad infinitum.

If you do not believe me, try to think of how enerprise class software works. There is usually a database, and a data layer, and a busines layer, and a platform layer and at some point the application layer. Now, I don't know about you, but with all those layers, that sounds like a good cake to me. So good in fact that eating too much might overwhelm you.

And so too is the case with enterprise software, if you use too much you end up with to much complexity and end up getting overwhelmed.  But why does this happen? One word: customers.

Customers want a variety of things, things outside of the original design, things that simply require hacks to work. And sometimes the new features are deemed worthy to be introduced into the core source code, along with the hacks. After all, we'll sometimes have the time to fix any issues.

But in reality the problems never get fixed, they just get worked around until they become too big to ignore. The workarounds become a regular part of life and complexity ensues with exceptions to the rules and weird incantations that must be performed to get the system to work.

This is a problem and enterprise developers need to monitor their environments carefully to prevent things like what I described from comin to pass.