The IBM of the 80s ceded the throne to Microsoft of the 90s. But Microsoft, has for various reasons, the most obvious of which are the loss of market share and the vast measures of philanthropy by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, lost most if not all of the stigma carried by the term.*

How about Google?

Google hasn’t really picked up the title even though during its meteoric rise when people certainly expected it to. As many ‘don’t be evil’ jokes as we’ll all continue to make, and as much as the company is clearly using rather personal statistics about all of us to serve the best ads, Google’s outspoken liberal standards and visible philanthropic division have prevented it from slipping into karmic disrepute.

Well, Apple then?

The uncertainty surrounding distribution via the App Store which prevailed until rather recently certainly didn’t put them in great standing with some of their own community’s developers. You also can’t really argue that they pulled the rug out from underneath a significant minority again with the new rules about in-app purchases. Nevertheless, the App Store is their platform and being the good capitalists that we as Americans** are, we do empathize. Similarly, Apple isn’t exactly the most philanthropic company, but it is after all their money that they have the right to chose to spend as they want. Let’s be clear, from most consumers’ perspective Apple is great. Sure their products are pricey, but you’re paying for the Genius Bar support. Anyway, we’d all pay extra for the stylish cutting edge. We all want to be part of pushing the fold, and the company that brought the mp3 player and the smart phone out of geeky obscurity and to the mass (premium) market, and pulled the whole concept of tablets back from the horrific legacy of pen computing*** deserves its swath of credit in doing that.

Apple aims to make, and rarely fails at making, great encapsulated products. They do it because Jobs wants to, they do it because they like the products they make, and lastly but most importantly, they do it because it is what consumers want. ‘Easy’ beats everything, even ‘Free’. This customer orientation keeps them off the Evil Empire throne even as they make life hard for members of their developer community, and even as their empire takes over.

Oh, right. It’s Facebook. No?

Well, they’ve done some skeezy stuff. No one would really disagree with that there’s a strong case for the argument that Facebook is a net detriment to society. We’re really still just entering the era of truly universal social networking, and already our notion of privacy has taken a huge hit. While I certainly don’t think that this is inherently a bad thing, there are many people who do. Either way, there are clear negative repercussions in the realm of relationships and other notable domains outside of the obvious projection of bullying to the cyber-realm of the integration of social networking into our lives. But still, the benefits may well outweigh the costs, and we won’t be able to see the full picture until at least a generation from now, and anyway, how much of this is really Facebook’s fault? Social networking has been progressing for more than a decade. Facebook was just best when it mattered.

Facebook also probably outshines Google when it comes to monetizing your personal information. But do we care? It depends on who ‘we’ is of course. Lots of people just want to use Facebook and don’t give half a thought to the fact that Facebook also wants to use them. Others are more conservative, and that may end up being great for them, but for now they’re in the minority and (admittedly, far from the outside****) their gains seem to be mainly an intangible feel-good factor. In the end, we just don’t yet know if Facebook is ‘evil’, if the concepts it is built upon are detrimental, or if the small amounts of friction to it that society exerts will dissipate or increase over time. Even if it earns that checkmark, its dominance is at least currently restricted to a domain that is very different to that of the IBMs and Microsofts of yesteryear.

No matter how much of social networking is their monopoly it’s at least dubious to give them the same ‘Evil Empire’ title.

So we’re past evil?

If it isn’t any these guys, I’d argue that the title doesn’t really belong to anyone. And I’d credit this to the growth of the web. I just don’t think you can be a company that is as brazenly monopolistic in an age where information spreads as fast, and perhaps more importantly to as many people, as it now does.

I mark the beginning of the end around the moment that public outcry led Microsoft to chose to remove their revenue generating smart tags from the final release of IE6, and when IE6′s selective P3P support which would have blocked DoubleClick‘s cookies by default but made Microsoft’s servers privy to the cross-domain information, was scaled back. At this point in time, not only had enough of the public had become passionate about technology that they were interested in speaking out against these slightly abstract injustices, but also the web as we now know it was in its blossoming stages and in democratizing the prevalent public voice, taking the world by storm.

Of course these two events were both related to Internet Explorer, so maybe I’m not giving the US’s anti-trust action enough credit in sparking the change. That said, I do truly believe that it speaks volumes to the power of the enfranchised public voice that it has been a decade without the world seeing a similar case or anointing a new Evil Empire.

Endnotes:

• * disclaimer: I’ll be working for MSFT this summer. (Wow, that was weird to have to do. It’s like I’m in the real world.)
• ** OK, so full disclosure: My paternal half is Swedish, and we all know they’re basically communists.
• *** Not that you couldn’t do rather cool things with pen computing. And I did love my Palm Tungsten T, but styluses prevailed as a result of two negative things: interaction with old touch screens being crap, and companies attempting to shove too desktop functionality in a handheld machine. And yes, I know hindsight is easy.
• **** I am well aware that I am slowly tending towards the controversial state that is radical transparency, at least within social media.

This is an email from Facebook. After I switched my language settings it started sending me mixed language emails.

And this is a terrific feature that I just noticed. I’m probably way behind the curve. Clicking the button downloads an ICS file which contains all the events invitation and opens with your favourite calendar program.