Google's motto may be "do no evil," but that hasn't fooled an organization that rates the most ethical companies in the world.
This year, the Ethisphere Institute named Microsoft to its list of its 110 most ethical companies in the world, but Google didn't make the list.
Neither did Apple or Facebook.
More than 3,000 companies applied to be on the list. Ethisphere ranks them based on factors like history of regulatory infractions, sustainable business practices, and peer nominations.
Microsoft started to make a big "corporate citizenship" push in the early 2000s following the negative fallout from its antitrust trials, and has since donated millions to non-profits, invested in programs for economic development, and tightened up its internal reporting processes. All of this was apparently enough to get the company on the list this year.
Any company that has had significant legal trouble in the last five years automatically gets kicked off the list, which means that the EU's antitrust investigation into Google probably sank it.
Other tech companies that made the list include Adobe, Cisco, and eBay. Weirdly, Zappos is also on the list, even though Amazon -- which bought Zappos in 2009 -- is not.
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Microsoft Is More Ethical Than Google, Apple, Or Facebook (MSFT, AAPL)
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