9 ms·

No longer loving Google

246 points by robk 15y ago

untog 15y ago
Google is too powerful, too arrogant, too entrenched to be worth our love. Let them defend themselves Wise words. I think the same applies to companies like Apple as well- I'll never understand why people dedicate so much personal energy to defending a company that needs no help. They're big enough to look after themselves.
- spencernelson 15y ago
  They're big enough to look after themselves for sure, but one way they do so is by convincing people to dedicate a lot of personal energy to defending them. That's one of the benefits of a marketing/PR strategy based on building a small army of feverishly devoted fans. So in a way, actually, those people defending the company really are helping - they're doing active PR work for free, and the main company (like Apple or Google or whoever) is distanced enough that they don't have any responsibility if any of their footsoldiers says or does anything crazy. You get the benefits of an aggressive campaign without most of the downsides.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - untog 15y ago
    So in a way, actually, those people defending the company really are helping Oh, I don't dispute that. But I'm still unsure of why they would feel the need to help- Apple and Google would do fine without them. Just a confusing use of time for me, I suppose.
    - mechanical_fish 15y ago
      Perhaps you don't remember that Apple went through a near-death experience in the mid-1990s? They came within months of bankruptcy. Apple needed all the customer loyalty it could get to survive the 1990s, and all the old-time Mac users remember those days a little too well. Meanwhile, Google is indeed doing fine, but it also hasn't been sorely tested.
- sek 15y ago
  This is bullshit. To bring these few examples to discredit Google here. Think of their record: OpenSource, Android, SOPA, Fight against Software Patens and so on. Google is still on our side and we need them against all the Microsoft and MPAAs. To be on so many battlefields and doing so few problematic things is impressive. Did they ever really compromise their core values? Google tries not to compromise them, but they are not naive, look what happened to Sun. I don't trust Google as a company as i trust the values of the Founders. I am convinced they are legacy focused and as long as they are in charge they try their best.
  - waqf 15y ago
    What happened to Sun? (Or rather, what are you implying about the causes of its decline?)
    - marshray 15y ago
      It was the beginning of the end for them when they started bundling pay-per install crapware (Yahoo toolbar) with the JRE installer (the first impression and only Sun product for the vast majority of their users).
    - jrockway 15y ago
      They got bought by Oracle, who then sued users of Java and shut down all of Sun's (numerous!) open source projects. Remember Hudson and OpenOffice.org? Neither do I. They're Jenkins and LibreOffice now.
  - beachgeek 15y ago
    I could never understand how Scott figured that a jihad against Microsoft was a viable business strategy.
- beachgeek 15y ago
  Was there ever a time when they weren't arrogant? I had a round of interviews go on for 9-12 months in 2004-2005 until I finally told the recruiter he could go fsck himself.
Johnyma22 15y ago
Relevant: http://mclear.co.uk/2011/12/15/the-day-i-gave-up-on-google/ http://mclear.co.uk/2011/12/15/the-day-i-gave-up-on-google/
- fennecfoxen 15y ago
  Relevant? Incoherent.
fady 15y ago
some very good thoughts indeed. it's interesting to see your point of view, especially the part about how they're just worrying about market position, etc. i'm curious to know from current employees, if the change of ceo has made things better, worse? how are things internally these days with larry running the show?
- NelsonMinar 15y ago
  Hi, I wrote the linked blog post. I don't have many friends left at Google but from what I've heard there's a lot of internal debate about the direction of the company now. There's been years of grumbling about how big the company has gotten, but more lately there's a lot of dissent around the outsized role of Google+. If you believe this story, the debate is quite heated: http://pandodaily.com/2012/01/24/larry-page-to-googlers-if-you-dont-get-spyw-work-somewhere-else/ http://pandodaily.com/2012/01/24/larry-page-to-googlers-if-y...
  - cromwellian 15y ago
    I wouldn't trust everything you see on PandoDaily if I were you. You're never going to find any large organization that satisfies all of your wishes, even a non-profit has internal political struggles. But on a relative scale of evilness, which big companies would you want to work for? For example, Apple (Doesn't trust employees, has them work on fake products, super-compartmentalized secrecy on campus, has agents spying on people to stop leaks, abusive douche-bag boss (Jobs) of shitting on people when the demo doesn't meet expectations, squeezing all partners for every last nickle, super-controlled closed proprietary ecosystem, on and on)? Apple sounds like a place to work on amazing products, but shitty otherwise. Google made a mistake by coining "Don't be evil", because they are held to a much much higher standard now than any other company because of it. The smallest change or transgression is hyper-analyzed by a cadre of people just waiting, sometimes wishing, to find a mis-step, anything they can run to the blogosphere with and claim "See! Evil!" Basic cynicism in people seems to relish those who preach superior ethics to fail. A guy who talks about "Don't cheat on your wife" will be scrutinized much more than someone who doesn't. And if he is seen in public having a business dinner with an attractive lady, of course the stories will be "See! Mr White Knight is unfaithful!"
mahmud 15y ago
Is there a check-list for Google products & alternatives? I was just thinking of going through this exercise last night. Don't feel comfortable with them anymore.
- romland 15y ago
  It would indeed be useful, and since I had a shell open I ventured over with the mouse and typed $ whois googlealternatives.com The result made me chuckle. :) Registrant: DNS Admin Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CA 94043 US
- dataminer 15y ago
  I have been trying duckduckgo since last week for search, so far over 95% of my queries are resulting in good results, its my default now in pentadactyl. I will be installing Zimbra ZCS opensource edition on one of my servers for mail, calendaring. Haven't found any alternative for youtube yet.
  - darkandbrooding 15y ago
    I've been using duckduckgo for about a week now, and I'm very happy with it. I managed an in-house instance of Zimbra at my last job, and I remain a vocal, enthusiastic supporter of that product. If your organization's requirements list aligns with Zimbra's feature list, I wholeheartedly recommend it.
    - cageface 15y ago
      For personal email, I've been happy with fastmail.fm so far, although their spam filtering doesn't seem to be as good as gmail's.
    - cynwoody 15y ago
      I've been using them off and on since learning of their existence on this forum a couple of weeks ago. They are surprisingly good! But I did have the damnedest time remembering their domain name! "Google" was an inspired name choice, including the trademark-friendly intentional misspelling. "Duckduckgo" not so much! I had to re-find the name several times. However, DDG has a nice shortcut, which turned out to fit within my limited wet-ware RAM: http://ddg.gg http://ddg.gg.
ohashi 15y ago
This echoes my sentiments quite well. I had a discussion with a colleague today about Google and I realized that I used to be very passionate and trusting of them but as of the past month they are teetering on the edge of that trust I still have for them. Where once I had respect and admiration, a growing mistrust exists. They are powerful and entrenched but I think it's a dangerous misstep to really offend their core users (I would think I am one being a user of their search, paying customer, publisher and many other services). I am not locked in entirely and would be more willing to try alternatives if I stop believing in a company.
pamelafox 15y ago
When I first started working at Google, I truly loved them as a user-facing company. And for the first few years, I thought I would work there forever and I could imagine no other place for me. But by the time I left, I was bitter and no longer in love. For various reasons, I felt like I had been betrayed by what I thought Google was at the beginning. It is my fault for having such idealistic expectations for what ultimately boils down to a money-driven company but I also think that there is a world in which I could have left Google loving it, or at least not so entirely disenchanted. I look back on my grade school and college with fond memories; I wish I could look back on Google the same way. Oh well, onwards and upwards.
- NelsonMinar 15y ago
  Hey Pamela! I fear you had a particularly rough time at Google. Bad project luck, also coming in later. I do look back at my time on Google as fondly as, say, graduate school. Particularly the early years, 2001–2004, it was a truly amazing place to be. That's why I wrote this post up, I just feel sad about where Google is now. Fortunately there's organizations like Y Combinator and places like Hacker News with a lot of startup passion and excitement.
  - cdibona 15y ago
    You know, I miss both of you at Google. I'm clearly fine with where Google is (or I'd leave) but I wish that you both felt differently. (edit: I changed we to I, I mean, this is more a personal thing..)
    - fred_nada 15y ago
      @nelsonMinar @pamelafox @cidbona and any other googlers. Do you think it could actually ever go back to the way it was? Or is it too late? The beauty of Google in 2001-3 was that it gave you hope for what a company could be in the future. We all knew about the Jobs/Gates/Ellison shenanigans and some of us hoped for a better future. Better work environments for employees, innovating vs stealing, 100% focusing on the user, and not throwing integrity out the window for a couple of dollars per share. Can they get back there? or is it gone?
kprobst 15y ago
I don't understand why people thought that somehow a publicly traded corporation was going to behave forever in the same way as a garage startup. Once Google reached a certain size, a certain revenue level, and became beholden to institutional shareholders plus (in this case) found itself in a position of largely uncontested market control, I think it was inevitable that it would turn into the all too familiar caricature of a corporation.
- Aloisius 15y ago
  Don't Sergey and Brin have 10x voting rights? I was under the impression that common shareholders couldn't do a darn thing to them.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    Yes, assuming things haven't changed since 2007: In particular, as of December 31, 2007, our two founders and our CEO, Larry, Sergey and Eric, owned approximately 88% of our outstanding Class B common stock, representing approximately 67% of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock. https://investor.google.com/documents/2007_Google_AnnualReport.html https://investor.google.com/documents/2007_Google_AnnualRepo...
  - abruzzi 15y ago
    The problem is its not just who has the most votes, but in the US, companies have a legal obligation to do what is in the best interest of the shareholders (even minority shareholders) over all other claimants. California just created a new corporation type that allows 'public benefit' to take precedence over shareholder interest: http://www.alston.com/environmentalandlandblog/?entry=4488 http://www.alston.com/environmentalandlandblog/?entry=4488
    - magicalist 15y ago
      no they do not. not only is this not established in law (in fact, congress has made it harder for civil suits to be filed), they are almost never brought unless there has been a large drop in stock price (not for tepid or slower-than-desired growth), the ones that are brought are usually dismissed, and the ones that are not dismissed are almost universally settled. take a look at, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule
gabaix 15y ago
Mozilla Foundation has not moved on its position of bringing good. I think any IPO company is ultimately compelled to choose profits over values.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - fpgeek 15y ago
    How do you see that? I'd say Apple's values come from Steve Jobs' vision of how Apple can best make a profit, so any lack of conflict is trivial.
- hbar 15y ago
  In a public corporation, this is always true. The first responsibility is to the shareholders. This point seems to be frequently overlooked.
  - ekianjo 15y ago
    Agree, but they should always keep in mind what made them successful in the first place: the fact that they had backing from users. The day you start listening more to your shareholders than you spend time with your users, there's something really wrong going on.
pg 15y ago
Like any anti-Google post lately, this one has been reflexively upvoted, but if you look at his reasons for not loving Google, they're pretty thin. The Kenyan episode was obviously one rogue branch with insufficient oversight; as soon as the guys in Mountain View found out what was going on, they stopped it, and with a minimum of the sort of corporate doublespeak you'd expect from most big companies. The changes to privacy policies are the sort of thing hackers love to gripe about, but don't actually matter much. (How many HN readers are going to stop using Google because of them, for example?) All it really boils down to is that he's mad because his friend got cut off by Adsense. And it is uncool the way Google just blows people off like that, but it's not new. They've always been that way. So if you didn't hate Google 5 years ago, this post offers no reason to hate them now.
- NelsonMinar 15y ago
  I buried this in the post, but of all the things Google's done this month the promotion of Google Search Plus Your World (aka Search+) is what concerns me the most. The other negative stories are less significant, I only mentioned them because they're part of the trend I'm feeling. I think it's interesting that anti-Google posts are reflexively upvoted. Ten years ago that would have been Microsoft.
  - fpgeek 15y ago
    I'd say Search Plus Your World is a cause for concern, but not for the reasons most people think. I'd say SPYW isn't evil, it is an admission of failure. In particular, I think it is an admission that Google believes that without new kinds of input (i.e. social signals) it will not be able to stay ahead of SEO spam and the like over the long haul.
    - landhar 15y ago
      > Google believes that without new kinds of input (i.e. social signals) it will not be able to stay ahead of SEO spam and the like over the long haul Assuming you're right, I am very curious as to what research led them to believe that social signals would be that much more beneficial for search results. My own experience with what's on my social dashboards (facebook, google+, and the like) is that it's at best useful for discovery (HN is really good at it and sometimes there are a few gems in the others) but most of the time it's noisy and mediocre content, and more to the point: it's an ecosystem that values popularity above everything else. I'm not trying to sound like a hipster here, and I understand that SEO is also about having your content show as popular in the search engine rankings. But except for communities like HN, most social streams are not regulated by any means. My main concern with SPYW is that I don't want to start having to curate my social graph in order to avoid getting articles from theOnion when I make a query about foreign politics.
jrockway 15y ago
Google's problem is that their public communications only communicate a tiny fraction of the information they have available. For example, people are worried about privacy, so they say "you can choose what to share with these cool buttons" rather than discuss their internal procedures for employee access to user data. The other day, someone on HN wrote, "I trust Google, but what about a laptop with malware?" Google could respond and say, "we believe it's physically impossible for an infected laptop to access the production network", but they don't. This makes people fear the worst. They think that Google is withholding information because it would make them look bad, rather than withholding information because they think their message has already been clearly communicated. (The more evil you think Google is being, the more likely they're doing the opposite of what you think they are.) Employees don't speak up very often because we aren't really supposed to say more than what's been publicly announced. (And, they're focused on programming and not PR.) Everyone hates big companies, but Google is near the bottom of my list of companies to hate. The only thing that worries me is the customer service reputation, but customer service is expensive and nobody else provides it either. Search Plus Your World and Google+ are, like every Google product, works in progress. They will get better over time, and if people don't like them or don't use them, they'll go away. To provide the best product, you have to experiment. Right now, many Googlers think that social signals are going to make everyone's life much better, and so they're writing code, deploying it, and seeing if it works like they think it will. The result is better search results and better software. That's progress, not evil.
- thebrokencube 15y ago
  > Search Plus Your World and Google+ are, like every Google product, works in progress. I don't understand why so many people don't get this, and especially here on HN of all places (maybe I'm missing something, I dunno). Isn't that how startup products work? Release early, release often? Maybe Google isn't specifically saying this, but it seriously seems like that's the road they take for the majority of their products.
  - marshray 15y ago
    Google Search isn't a startup product. You can't just tack on big sections of stuff smack in the middle of the top results and claim that it's just a WiP.
batista 15y ago
And if a big company like Google can't avoid being evil, then what world-changing enterprise can? A company owned by actual persons, i.e. a privately owned company, can better avoid turning evil. There are lots of world-changing privately owned companies, especially in Europe. Profit seeking by committee (a.k.a. board and stockholders), turns companies into un-ethical, maximum-profit seeking machines. Even more so, since noone feels like he has "real" responsibility for the whole company's actions).
- amac 15y ago
  True, public companies are driven more by quarterly results, but they can also be more accountable and transparent. Private companies can be as equally evil as public ones. FWIW, I believe private companies tend to be better run and usually operate with a longer or more rounded perspective. In this sense, I would favour being a stakeholder of some sort in a private company over a public one.
logn 15y ago
Whether we love or hate google, we sure love to either love or hate google. Companies like, say, 3M would kill to be "hated" and "evil" like google is. Our hate is really more like us picking on that girl we like.
- rickmb 15y ago
  3M has no influence over my life. 3M could disappear tomorrow and I couldn't give a toss. 3M doesn't know enough about me and mine to harm me, and I don't depend on 3M in a way that would hurt me if I could no longer use their products. At worst, it would be slightly annoying. Google has the power to seriously fuck with my life. I neither love nor hate Google, but I do care about what they do more than most companies, and certainly more than any company in our industry, and for good reasons. Google is not "that girl we like". Google is "that guy that stands behind us with a big stick", and we don't know if he's going to use it to defend us or beat the shit out of us.
  - marshray 15y ago
    I think I understand your point, but 3M is probably not a great company to compare to. My understanding of their business is that most of their revenue does not come from retail products. Wikipedia:"With over 80,000 employees, they produce more than 55,000 products, including: adhesives, abrasives, laminates, passive fire protection, dental products, electronic materials, medical products, car care products (such as sun films, polish, wax, car shampoo, treatment for the exterior, interior and the under chassis rust protection), electronic circuits and optical films" So unless you influence the purchase of these products, 3M will be perfectly happy for you not to care about them. In fact, they may prefer it that way. Manufacturers in the US seem to be quite shy. Perhaps a better example would be Sony. They would love it if you couldn't live without your Sony pictures, BluRay, Playstation 3, Sony cellphone, VAIO laptop, Sony Camera, Sony Camcorder, Sony video editing software, etc.
MrScruff 15y ago
I think in the past the 'Don't be evil' thing as an informal company ethos was ok, and people respected that as a target. Then they started using this as a stick to beat their competitors with and it had the result of putting their own conduct under greater scrutiny. Now with the SPYW stuff, they look pretty hypocritical and appear to have abandoned their principals in order to play catch up. They might not be evil yet but the trajectory they're on isn't promising.
alexyoung 15y ago
I'd like to print out the following quote from this article in a huge font and read it before I'm tempted to write anything pro/anti Google/Apple/Microsoft in the future: "I'd rather devote my emotional energy to the upstarts and startups. They deserve our passion."
DirkScheuring 15y ago
I can't quite understand this "privacy problem". What's wrong with just accepting Google's TOS, use it for what it's worth (doing "public" stuff), and making room for "private" operations elsewhere? Aren't higher levels of "privacy" just a browser profile/user profile/machine profile away any more?
alimbada 15y ago
I think Tim O'Reilly has the right of it: https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/fWJtC2mb3Eq https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/fWJtC2mb...

246 points by robk 15y ago

untog 15y ago

Google is too powerful, too arrogant, too entrenched to be worth our love. Let them defend themselves Wise words. I think the same applies to companies like Apple as well- I'll never understand why people dedicate so much personal energy to defending a company that needs no help. They're big enough to look after themselves.

spencernelson 15y ago
They're big enough to look after themselves for sure, but one way they do so is by convincing people to dedicate a lot of personal energy to defending them. That's one of the benefits of a marketing/PR strategy based on building a small army of feverishly devoted fans. So in a way, actually, those people defending the company really are helping - they're doing active PR work for free, and the main company (like Apple or Google or whoever) is distanced enough that they don't have any responsibility if any of their footsoldiers says or does anything crazy. You get the benefits of an aggressive campaign without most of the downsides.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- untog 15y ago
  So in a way, actually, those people defending the company really are helping Oh, I don't dispute that. But I'm still unsure of why they would feel the need to help- Apple and Google would do fine without them. Just a confusing use of time for me, I suppose.
  - mechanical_fish 15y ago
    Perhaps you don't remember that Apple went through a near-death experience in the mid-1990s? They came within months of bankruptcy. Apple needed all the customer loyalty it could get to survive the 1990s, and all the old-time Mac users remember those days a little too well. Meanwhile, Google is indeed doing fine, but it also hasn't been sorely tested.
sek 15y ago
This is bullshit. To bring these few examples to discredit Google here. Think of their record: OpenSource, Android, SOPA, Fight against Software Patens and so on. Google is still on our side and we need them against all the Microsoft and MPAAs. To be on so many battlefields and doing so few problematic things is impressive. Did they ever really compromise their core values? Google tries not to compromise them, but they are not naive, look what happened to Sun. I don't trust Google as a company as i trust the values of the Founders. I am convinced they are legacy focused and as long as they are in charge they try their best.
- waqf 15y ago
  What happened to Sun? (Or rather, what are you implying about the causes of its decline?)
  - marshray 15y ago
    It was the beginning of the end for them when they started bundling pay-per install crapware (Yahoo toolbar) with the JRE installer (the first impression and only Sun product for the vast majority of their users).
  - jrockway 15y ago
    They got bought by Oracle, who then sued users of Java and shut down all of Sun's (numerous!) open source projects. Remember Hudson and OpenOffice.org? Neither do I. They're Jenkins and LibreOffice now.
- beachgeek 15y ago
  I could never understand how Scott figured that a jihad against Microsoft was a viable business strategy.
beachgeek 15y ago
Was there ever a time when they weren't arrogant? I had a round of interviews go on for 9-12 months in 2004-2005 until I finally told the recruiter he could go fsck himself.

Johnyma22 15y ago

Relevant: http://mclear.co.uk/2011/12/15/the-day-i-gave-up-on-google/ http://mclear.co.uk/2011/12/15/the-day-i-gave-up-on-google/

fennecfoxen 15y ago
Relevant? Incoherent.

fady 15y ago

some very good thoughts indeed. it's interesting to see your point of view, especially the part about how they're just worrying about market position, etc. i'm curious to know from current employees, if the change of ceo has made things better, worse? how are things internally these days with larry running the show?

NelsonMinar 15y ago
Hi, I wrote the linked blog post. I don't have many friends left at Google but from what I've heard there's a lot of internal debate about the direction of the company now. There's been years of grumbling about how big the company has gotten, but more lately there's a lot of dissent around the outsized role of Google+. If you believe this story, the debate is quite heated: http://pandodaily.com/2012/01/24/larry-page-to-googlers-if-you-dont-get-spyw-work-somewhere-else/ http://pandodaily.com/2012/01/24/larry-page-to-googlers-if-y...
- cromwellian 15y ago
  I wouldn't trust everything you see on PandoDaily if I were you. You're never going to find any large organization that satisfies all of your wishes, even a non-profit has internal political struggles. But on a relative scale of evilness, which big companies would you want to work for? For example, Apple (Doesn't trust employees, has them work on fake products, super-compartmentalized secrecy on campus, has agents spying on people to stop leaks, abusive douche-bag boss (Jobs) of shitting on people when the demo doesn't meet expectations, squeezing all partners for every last nickle, super-controlled closed proprietary ecosystem, on and on)? Apple sounds like a place to work on amazing products, but shitty otherwise. Google made a mistake by coining "Don't be evil", because they are held to a much much higher standard now than any other company because of it. The smallest change or transgression is hyper-analyzed by a cadre of people just waiting, sometimes wishing, to find a mis-step, anything they can run to the blogosphere with and claim "See! Evil!" Basic cynicism in people seems to relish those who preach superior ethics to fail. A guy who talks about "Don't cheat on your wife" will be scrutinized much more than someone who doesn't. And if he is seen in public having a business dinner with an attractive lady, of course the stories will be "See! Mr White Knight is unfaithful!"

mahmud 15y ago

Is there a check-list for Google products & alternatives? I was just thinking of going through this exercise last night. Don't feel comfortable with them anymore.

romland 15y ago
It would indeed be useful, and since I had a shell open I ventured over with the mouse and typed $ whois googlealternatives.com The result made me chuckle. :) Registrant: DNS Admin Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CA 94043 US
dataminer 15y ago
I have been trying duckduckgo since last week for search, so far over 95% of my queries are resulting in good results, its my default now in pentadactyl. I will be installing Zimbra ZCS opensource edition on one of my servers for mail, calendaring. Haven't found any alternative for youtube yet.
- darkandbrooding 15y ago
  I've been using duckduckgo for about a week now, and I'm very happy with it. I managed an in-house instance of Zimbra at my last job, and I remain a vocal, enthusiastic supporter of that product. If your organization's requirements list aligns with Zimbra's feature list, I wholeheartedly recommend it.
  - cageface 15y ago
    For personal email, I've been happy with fastmail.fm so far, although their spam filtering doesn't seem to be as good as gmail's.
  - cynwoody 15y ago
    I've been using them off and on since learning of their existence on this forum a couple of weeks ago. They are surprisingly good! But I did have the damnedest time remembering their domain name! "Google" was an inspired name choice, including the trademark-friendly intentional misspelling. "Duckduckgo" not so much! I had to re-find the name several times. However, DDG has a nice shortcut, which turned out to fit within my limited wet-ware RAM: http://ddg.gg http://ddg.gg.

ohashi 15y ago

This echoes my sentiments quite well. I had a discussion with a colleague today about Google and I realized that I used to be very passionate and trusting of them but as of the past month they are teetering on the edge of that trust I still have for them. Where once I had respect and admiration, a growing mistrust exists. They are powerful and entrenched but I think it's a dangerous misstep to really offend their core users (I would think I am one being a user of their search, paying customer, publisher and many other services). I am not locked in entirely and would be more willing to try alternatives if I stop believing in a company.

pamelafox 15y ago

When I first started working at Google, I truly loved them as a user-facing company. And for the first few years, I thought I would work there forever and I could imagine no other place for me. But by the time I left, I was bitter and no longer in love. For various reasons, I felt like I had been betrayed by what I thought Google was at the beginning. It is my fault for having such idealistic expectations for what ultimately boils down to a money-driven company but I also think that there is a world in which I could have left Google loving it, or at least not so entirely disenchanted. I look back on my grade school and college with fond memories; I wish I could look back on Google the same way. Oh well, onwards and upwards.

NelsonMinar 15y ago
Hey Pamela! I fear you had a particularly rough time at Google. Bad project luck, also coming in later. I do look back at my time on Google as fondly as, say, graduate school. Particularly the early years, 2001–2004, it was a truly amazing place to be. That's why I wrote this post up, I just feel sad about where Google is now. Fortunately there's organizations like Y Combinator and places like Hacker News with a lot of startup passion and excitement.
- cdibona 15y ago
  You know, I miss both of you at Google. I'm clearly fine with where Google is (or I'd leave) but I wish that you both felt differently. (edit: I changed we to I, I mean, this is more a personal thing..)
  - fred_nada 15y ago
    @nelsonMinar @pamelafox @cidbona and any other googlers. Do you think it could actually ever go back to the way it was? Or is it too late? The beauty of Google in 2001-3 was that it gave you hope for what a company could be in the future. We all knew about the Jobs/Gates/Ellison shenanigans and some of us hoped for a better future. Better work environments for employees, innovating vs stealing, 100% focusing on the user, and not throwing integrity out the window for a couple of dollars per share. Can they get back there? or is it gone?

kprobst 15y ago

I don't understand why people thought that somehow a publicly traded corporation was going to behave forever in the same way as a garage startup. Once Google reached a certain size, a certain revenue level, and became beholden to institutional shareholders plus (in this case) found itself in a position of largely uncontested market control, I think it was inevitable that it would turn into the all too familiar caricature of a corporation.

Aloisius 15y ago
Don't Sergey and Brin have 10x voting rights? I was under the impression that common shareholders couldn't do a darn thing to them.
- icebraining 15y ago
  Yes, assuming things haven't changed since 2007: In particular, as of December 31, 2007, our two founders and our CEO, Larry, Sergey and Eric, owned approximately 88% of our outstanding Class B common stock, representing approximately 67% of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock. https://investor.google.com/documents/2007_Google_AnnualReport.html https://investor.google.com/documents/2007_Google_AnnualRepo...
- abruzzi 15y ago
  The problem is its not just who has the most votes, but in the US, companies have a legal obligation to do what is in the best interest of the shareholders (even minority shareholders) over all other claimants. California just created a new corporation type that allows 'public benefit' to take precedence over shareholder interest: http://www.alston.com/environmentalandlandblog/?entry=4488 http://www.alston.com/environmentalandlandblog/?entry=4488
  - magicalist 15y ago
    no they do not. not only is this not established in law (in fact, congress has made it harder for civil suits to be filed), they are almost never brought unless there has been a large drop in stock price (not for tepid or slower-than-desired growth), the ones that are brought are usually dismissed, and the ones that are not dismissed are almost universally settled. take a look at, for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule

gabaix 15y ago

Mozilla Foundation has not moved on its position of bringing good. I think any IPO company is ultimately compelled to choose profits over values.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- fpgeek 15y ago
  How do you see that? I'd say Apple's values come from Steve Jobs' vision of how Apple can best make a profit, so any lack of conflict is trivial.
hbar 15y ago
In a public corporation, this is always true. The first responsibility is to the shareholders. This point seems to be frequently overlooked.
- ekianjo 15y ago
  Agree, but they should always keep in mind what made them successful in the first place: the fact that they had backing from users. The day you start listening more to your shareholders than you spend time with your users, there's something really wrong going on.

pg 15y ago

Like any anti-Google post lately, this one has been reflexively upvoted, but if you look at his reasons for not loving Google, they're pretty thin. The Kenyan episode was obviously one rogue branch with insufficient oversight; as soon as the guys in Mountain View found out what was going on, they stopped it, and with a minimum of the sort of corporate doublespeak you'd expect from most big companies. The changes to privacy policies are the sort of thing hackers love to gripe about, but don't actually matter much. (How many HN readers are going to stop using Google because of them, for example?) All it really boils down to is that he's mad because his friend got cut off by Adsense. And it is uncool the way Google just blows people off like that, but it's not new. They've always been that way. So if you didn't hate Google 5 years ago, this post offers no reason to hate them now.

NelsonMinar 15y ago
I buried this in the post, but of all the things Google's done this month the promotion of Google Search Plus Your World (aka Search+) is what concerns me the most. The other negative stories are less significant, I only mentioned them because they're part of the trend I'm feeling. I think it's interesting that anti-Google posts are reflexively upvoted. Ten years ago that would have been Microsoft.
- fpgeek 15y ago
  I'd say Search Plus Your World is a cause for concern, but not for the reasons most people think. I'd say SPYW isn't evil, it is an admission of failure. In particular, I think it is an admission that Google believes that without new kinds of input (i.e. social signals) it will not be able to stay ahead of SEO spam and the like over the long haul.
  - landhar 15y ago
    > Google believes that without new kinds of input (i.e. social signals) it will not be able to stay ahead of SEO spam and the like over the long haul Assuming you're right, I am very curious as to what research led them to believe that social signals would be that much more beneficial for search results. My own experience with what's on my social dashboards (facebook, google+, and the like) is that it's at best useful for discovery (HN is really good at it and sometimes there are a few gems in the others) but most of the time it's noisy and mediocre content, and more to the point: it's an ecosystem that values popularity above everything else. I'm not trying to sound like a hipster here, and I understand that SEO is also about having your content show as popular in the search engine rankings. But except for communities like HN, most social streams are not regulated by any means. My main concern with SPYW is that I don't want to start having to curate my social graph in order to avoid getting articles from theOnion when I make a query about foreign politics.

jrockway 15y ago

Google's problem is that their public communications only communicate a tiny fraction of the information they have available. For example, people are worried about privacy, so they say "you can choose what to share with these cool buttons" rather than discuss their internal procedures for employee access to user data. The other day, someone on HN wrote, "I trust Google, but what about a laptop with malware?" Google could respond and say, "we believe it's physically impossible for an infected laptop to access the production network", but they don't. This makes people fear the worst. They think that Google is withholding information because it would make them look bad, rather than withholding information because they think their message has already been clearly communicated. (The more evil you think Google is being, the more likely they're doing the opposite of what you think they are.) Employees don't speak up very often because we aren't really supposed to say more than what's been publicly announced. (And, they're focused on programming and not PR.) Everyone hates big companies, but Google is near the bottom of my list of companies to hate. The only thing that worries me is the customer service reputation, but customer service is expensive and nobody else provides it either. Search Plus Your World and Google+ are, like every Google product, works in progress. They will get better over time, and if people don't like them or don't use them, they'll go away. To provide the best product, you have to experiment. Right now, many Googlers think that social signals are going to make everyone's life much better, and so they're writing code, deploying it, and seeing if it works like they think it will. The result is better search results and better software. That's progress, not evil.

thebrokencube 15y ago
> Search Plus Your World and Google+ are, like every Google product, works in progress. I don't understand why so many people don't get this, and especially here on HN of all places (maybe I'm missing something, I dunno). Isn't that how startup products work? Release early, release often? Maybe Google isn't specifically saying this, but it seriously seems like that's the road they take for the majority of their products.
- marshray 15y ago
  Google Search isn't a startup product. You can't just tack on big sections of stuff smack in the middle of the top results and claim that it's just a WiP.

batista 15y ago

And if a big company like Google can't avoid being evil, then what world-changing enterprise can? A company owned by actual persons, i.e. a privately owned company, can better avoid turning evil. There are lots of world-changing privately owned companies, especially in Europe. Profit seeking by committee (a.k.a. board and stockholders), turns companies into un-ethical, maximum-profit seeking machines. Even more so, since noone feels like he has "real" responsibility for the whole company's actions).

amac 15y ago
True, public companies are driven more by quarterly results, but they can also be more accountable and transparent. Private companies can be as equally evil as public ones. FWIW, I believe private companies tend to be better run and usually operate with a longer or more rounded perspective. In this sense, I would favour being a stakeholder of some sort in a private company over a public one.

logn 15y ago

Whether we love or hate google, we sure love to either love or hate google. Companies like, say, 3M would kill to be "hated" and "evil" like google is. Our hate is really more like us picking on that girl we like.

rickmb 15y ago
3M has no influence over my life. 3M could disappear tomorrow and I couldn't give a toss. 3M doesn't know enough about me and mine to harm me, and I don't depend on 3M in a way that would hurt me if I could no longer use their products. At worst, it would be slightly annoying. Google has the power to seriously fuck with my life. I neither love nor hate Google, but I do care about what they do more than most companies, and certainly more than any company in our industry, and for good reasons. Google is not "that girl we like". Google is "that guy that stands behind us with a big stick", and we don't know if he's going to use it to defend us or beat the shit out of us.
- marshray 15y ago
  I think I understand your point, but 3M is probably not a great company to compare to. My understanding of their business is that most of their revenue does not come from retail products. Wikipedia:"With over 80,000 employees, they produce more than 55,000 products, including: adhesives, abrasives, laminates, passive fire protection, dental products, electronic materials, medical products, car care products (such as sun films, polish, wax, car shampoo, treatment for the exterior, interior and the under chassis rust protection), electronic circuits and optical films" So unless you influence the purchase of these products, 3M will be perfectly happy for you not to care about them. In fact, they may prefer it that way. Manufacturers in the US seem to be quite shy. Perhaps a better example would be Sony. They would love it if you couldn't live without your Sony pictures, BluRay, Playstation 3, Sony cellphone, VAIO laptop, Sony Camera, Sony Camcorder, Sony video editing software, etc.

MrScruff 15y ago

I think in the past the 'Don't be evil' thing as an informal company ethos was ok, and people respected that as a target. Then they started using this as a stick to beat their competitors with and it had the result of putting their own conduct under greater scrutiny. Now with the SPYW stuff, they look pretty hypocritical and appear to have abandoned their principals in order to play catch up. They might not be evil yet but the trajectory they're on isn't promising.

alexyoung 15y ago

I'd like to print out the following quote from this article in a huge font and read it before I'm tempted to write anything pro/anti Google/Apple/Microsoft in the future: "I'd rather devote my emotional energy to the upstarts and startups. They deserve our passion."

DirkScheuring 15y ago

I can't quite understand this "privacy problem". What's wrong with just accepting Google's TOS, use it for what it's worth (doing "public" stuff), and making room for "private" operations elsewhere? Aren't higher levels of "privacy" just a browser profile/user profile/machine profile away any more?

alimbada 15y ago

I think Tim O'Reilly has the right of it: https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/fWJtC2mb3Eq https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/fWJtC2mb...