Dropbox doesn't matter. Your money does. It speaks volumes about you that you are outspoken on ethical issues except where your wallet is. Like the vast majority of Americans. Of course, that's precisely the attitude that gets us gay marriage (good), two wars, a dying environment, and an absolutely unsustainable economy based on putting our lower class out of work.
Right. I work in a position where I am somewhat responsible for decisions such as whether to use AWS or not, which at other companies has been a different decision such as what hardware to purchase and where to install it.
This is a difficult situation to balance, because what you are suggesting, from my perspective, ends up being about saying, "I will quit working here unless we quit using Vendor X!" - that will end predictably, and I have lost that fight over GoDaddy as well. At the end of a day of following such a philosophy, I have no job, the Evil Vendor(tm) still gets their money, and I have to explain to people at Next Potential Job(tm) why I don't seem to be a team player.
That said, these are important fights to fight at some level. When I was dealing with hardware, I found many of our decisions frustrating. I found it frustrating that we cared about the USD$ cost of power, and not the environmental cost of it. I found it frustrating that we turned off almost all power saving features of our hardware because they don't deliver as one would hope and tend to harm the workload in a way that may actually require more gear which is expensive, has a carbon cost to manufacture, and has a carbon cost to operate and cool. Guess what? a 2U Rackmount server that sometimes runs at 1.5Ghz for a few seconds instead of running at 2.8GHz all of the time doesn't have a significant impact on the cooling bill, and it can reasonably be expected that your cooling power budget will be roughly equal to your equipment power budget, probably higher because of infrastructure overhead.
It is difficult to find a framework in which to push these decisions because the day to day business does not center around them.
The solution is for decision makers to make them a priority, just like worker safety and other things which don't obviously contribute to the short-term bottom line. I can't spend all of my time advocating up for socially responsible decisions.
Also, Amazon may be in a difficult place wrt other contracts with the government, they may have gotten themselves somewhat entangled. Dropbox does not need Condoleeza Rice on its' board, and it's hard to envision what value she will have other than internally advocating for cooperation with the government and its' defense armature.
I mean, I use EC2 and see nothing wrong with it. I'm just pointing out the double standard of making a big fuss when what you're fussing about is probably a waste of energy and what you're not fussing about would be much more effective if you DID fuss about it.
There is something to be said for making sacrifices, including on behalf of your entire family, in the face of ethics, and that most massive ethical challenges the human race has faced are because of people who would not refuse to participate.
But this structure can be applied to varying degrees in varying situations. A company who keeps an unencrypted copy of all my files and welcomes, for no particularly good reason, an INCREDIBLE advocate of overreach in government surveillance, not to mention violent tactics such as torture to extract information, and an architect of today's guantanamo bay facility, onto their board is a reason to be concerned about doing business with that company.
It's a false dichotomy that you either have to let your kids starve or support evil companies. Again, it's this dichotomy that has led to the present situation.
But your false dichotomy ignores reality, sure he could leave his current job (assuming he can't ditch evil company X at his current job), but will he then find another job at an "ideal" company that is a) not evil and b) uses no evil companies products, probably not
