goat
Sergey Brin and Larry Page have been young and naive when they came with the Don't be evil motto in 2004. By 2019, having seemingly realized how ridiculous it is, both they and the motto all but disappeared from public eye. The same cannot be said for Google, one of the most powerful companies in the world, clinging to the illusion of being not evil while enabling mass surveillance, political censorship, weapons development, tax evasion, and exploiting monopoly position.
All sins come from hubris and Google employees, who - without a trace of irony - call themselves Googlers, are epitome of it. This is how we get diverse Nazis, useless search, callous disregard for users of cancelled products and my favorite: navigation app that assumes you can fly, or at least jump, over ravines.
Not so long ago, hiking in Dolomites, we were accosted by two Italian women frantically asking if we could help them return to their car. They had phones and they knew where they parked. And, being in Italy, they even had a working data connection. They were also trying to use a navigation app developed in Silicon Valley where walking is a forgotten activity.
Google Maps is brilliant for driving, anticipating every turn, counting traffic lights, mapping every intersection. It is mediocre at best when it comes to walking when it ignores any path that doesn't run along busy road. And it is an absolute disaster when, lulled into complacency by a seamless drive to the trailhead, you decide to use it to navigate your hike. As it becomes quickly and painfully obvious, brilliant programmers at Google place hikers somewhere between cars and mountain goats. A mapped route haphazardly leads to a mountain peak along a forest road and, after running out of the road, along an arbitrary dotted curved line bypassing terrain features absolutely non-negotiable on foot.
It is worth noting here that the task of calculating a route that follows a well established trail is not insurmountable. Practically any navigation app that isn't Google Maps is capable of it.
I wish Googlers got out of their cars occasionally or, if that's too much to ask, somehow discouraged casual hikers from using Google Maps on the trail.