23 ms·

Why I Left Google

947 points by cangencer 15y ago

whiletruefork 15y ago
The author states that in his time at Google he realizes it was always a company funded by ads, but that he did not have to personally feel the need for Ads in all products. That's a fair point. Where I lost him is his connection of Google+ with Ads. I disagree that G+ is an Ads play. It's a play for staying relevant on the internet. When you think about it, Facebook is a closed system. They want CNN to post articles into the CNN FB stream. They want people to read those articles on the CNN page (yes, this currently links to outside FB... that will change). They want to do this so that you never have to leave FB, and in fact if you look at the user behavior of 13-17 year olds you will see disturbing trends that this is the case. Facebook is a danger to a free and open internet by becoming the de-facto internet. I concede that this is a stretch, but it is within their power to do so and from my understanding is how their strategy is lined up. TL;DR: G+ is only about Ads in the way that Google needs users to serve Ads to and there is a threat that all users of the internet only go to Facebook and nowhere else.
- natrius 15y ago
  "When you think about it, Facebook is a closed system." People say this all the time without any justification. As far as I know, all content within Facebook that has no privacy restrictions can be viewed without being a Facebook user. Facebook has an API that can be used to both read and write. Facebook is stingy with phone numbers and email addresses, which is a significant failing in my opinion. Other than that, I can't imagine a more open social network that allows users to control who can see their content.
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    So what you're saying is that Facebook is open because you are allowed to fetch information that Facebook allows?
    - natrius 15y ago
      You're allowed to fetch data that users allow, with few exceptions.
taylorbuley 15y ago
> App Engine fees were raised. APIs that had been free for years were deprecated or provided for a fee. From where I'm sitting Google has been pretty rough on independent developers recently. I think their lack of caring (or understanding?) indy devs is best summed up by the Google+ API. Read-only is understandable as they get off their feet, but you can't even get a user's profile stream (you can only fetch profiles one by one). Now that the Buzz API is shut down I have yet to find a way to "share" anything programmatically on Google. How can you be social without a share API?
- JS_startup 15y ago
  Google's recent behavior was central in our decision not to embrace their technologies and APIs. If they're going to either be suddenly shut down or have prohibitive, anti-startup pricing applied to them then why should we hitch our wagon to their horse?
- mikeryan 15y ago
  Its not just independents, we're working with one of the largest US companies and they don't want to license (and by license I mean happy to pay for) google maps (for a traffic app) because the Goog can't guarantee that the maps will remain ad free.
- killpg 15y ago
  The real problem with G+ is that I forgot about it. Facebook nags you with emails every time something happens, but G+ just has a dropdown box that lets me approve friends or not from gmail, and I never see my "wall". If they made me go to the "wall" to approve friends, then I'd see what my few active G+ friends were posting and maybe post something back. I went months without seeing the wall, even though I have close friends who work at Google and post things I'd actually want to read. Also, the "circles" thing and their change of terminology seems like it's being different for the sake of being different, or to avoid being sued by Facebook or something. Stick to the terminology people know. G+ should have tried an "import Facebook" feature that takes all your pictures off Facebook and invites your friends to G+. This alone would help me not care about Facebook. I have a ton of pictures on Facebook that I'll never see again if I were to close my account. Facebook might try to block a feature like this, but it's sorely needed to make the transition. G+ is also a bad name.
deleted 15y ago
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beatle 15y ago
Google's Focus On Beating Facebook Is Wrecking The Company, Says This Former Engineer. Google's Focus On Beating Apple will seal the company's fate. Google's Motorola acquisition is going to be a disaster for Google.
kprobst 15y ago
Social seems to be to Google what mobile is to Microsoft... they might have good stuff here and there, but nobody's ringing the bell.
yanw 15y ago
Between attack ads and blog posts it seems like Google is all that Microsoft have to discuss lately. Not sure if Google is flattered by this obsession. Wonder why the author chose not to post on his personal blog, a Microsoft employee bashing Google on an official Microsoft blog rings hollow, specially with the use of the same generic talking points. And using engineers as PR people isn’t the most sepathetic thing either.
- vibrunazo 15y ago
  I avoid making generalization and try to stay away of anthropomorphizing companies. But this isn't the first, nor second, nor tenth time I watch Microsoft trying to smear the competition. Which doesn't seem to be common among other companies. It does gives us outsiders the impression that it's part of their company culture to try to sell more by smearing the competition instead of by building better products. How does that work on the managing level? Are Microsoft engineers encouraged from top down to do this? Is it just a culture that gets passed indirectly through informal conversation between employees that influences this behavior? Or is just the PR firm they hired that keeps insisting on the same weapon?
  - yanw 15y ago
    Not sure about the logistics but when the IE team announced that P3P circumvention "story" through a PR agency, it got me thinking that it's PR initiated. They are in the habit of hiring these firms: http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/02/how-microsoft-pays-big-money-to-smear-google-audaciously/ http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/02/how-microsoft-pays-big-money...
  - Splines 15y ago
    > Are Microsoft engineers encouraged from top down to do this? I'm an IC, and while there is bit a "boo Google" going on in the kool-aid, we don't sit around shaking our fist at them every moment we get. I try to use the best tools I can, whether it be that made by Google or MSFT or someone else. I look up MSDN documentation using Chrome, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
    - 15y ago
Tichy 15y ago
Weird choice to post such an article on msdn.com, of all places.
- sbisker 15y ago
  It's sort of a cultural thing amongst a lot of Microsoft employees, especially older ones (or in this case, ones that have returned), to run their blogs off of Microsoft's blogging platforms. In this regard, Microsoft's culture actually does a very good job of encouraging its employees to blog from the inside - I've never felt quite the level of direct engineer access and communication working on Google platforms as I have on MS platforms, even in cases where Google's platforms are actually superior. (Chalk it up to Google groups being a little opaque and Google product blogs being run by product managers.)
  - Tichy 15y ago
    So he ran from Google to Microsoft because Google did not live up to his ideals anymore. I am not actually a Microsoft hater, but I'll take that story with a grain of salt.
pessimist 15y ago
Valid reasons to quit Google, but then he joins Microsoft?
- wavephorm 15y ago
  From the perspective of wanting to work for a technology company, and not an advertising company, I suppose it makes sense.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  My impression is that Microsoft is actually very diversified and focused on technology. There was an article a while back about where the various large companies (Google, Apple and Microsoft) make their money; Microsoft had the most diversity by far. Microsoft is also not afraid to fail or try random things, which makes it much like the "old Google" in this blog post.
  - deleted 15y ago
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  - vineet 15y ago
    Microsoft's diversification is not really a good thing. IMO, it is no use building lots of technology without being good at any of it. My belief is that Microsoft will improve, but I would not go there because they already have their technology goals right. (I would go to Microsoft as an intrapreneur trying to fix their technology/innovation story).
- brudgers 15y ago
  Microsoft is unlikely to shut down MS Research. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/research/default.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/research/default.aspx [edit] If I have my James Whittaker's straight, he worked at Microsoft before going to Google. If I don't, he probably didn't.
  - hswolff 15y ago
    Looks like you have your Whittaker's straight: http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2009/06/james-whittaker-joins-google.html http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2009/06/james-whittaker-jo...
vineet 15y ago
I am not a Google Employee - but I do want to defend Google here. Yes, Google used to be a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. However, in the process they built a huge amount of UX Debt. Bad UX was forgivable a few years ago, but that is no longer the case. Google has not figured it out yet, but with the web maturing, I am glad that they are trying to evolve to be a more UX focused company.
- redthrowaway 15y ago
  I disagree. Search used to be fast and clean. Ditto GMail. Even Maps has gotten slower and more cluttered. Google's recent UI changes are about branding, not UX.
  - vineet 15y ago
    I agree with your points. I categorize them under growing pains. Good UX is not easy - especially when you have such a large number of users and products. If you look into the reasoning for many of the cluttered items, you will see things like "doing X would make it more readable/useful/etc for the general population". Perhaps I am just an optimist. My fingers are crossed.
arkitaip 15y ago
I think people here are being ungenerous towards the author. Too me this story sounds genuine and not like a pr move dictated by Microsoft. It strikes me to be a personal account by someone who's trying to make sense of the past and actually mourning what he believe is the death of old Google. This deserves our respect as professionals because inevitably we are all going to find ourselves in a similar situation, trying to learn from the past and seeking understanding by our peers.
- yanw 15y ago
  Doesn't seem that genuine posted on a corporate blog.
  - anon808 15y ago
    is it a corporate blog, or a personal blog part of the msdn developer community? I honestly don't know, but it doesn't look like a "Microsoft" blog.
    - jf 15y ago
      This blog is as personal a blog as a Microsoft employee can get without hosting one themselves. As a Microsoft employee, I could have my own blog on blogs.msdn.com - but the signup process was more complicated than Posterous, so I don't.
    - brown9-2 15y ago
      The latter, although obviously hosted on a MS flagship property.
- georgemcbay 15y ago
  I agree the responses seem a bit harsh. Also as someone who never worked at Google but has been a pretty big Google "fanboy" (of the search, Google Apps, Android, etc) his waning enthusiasm for the brand as an employee seems to have taken a very similar dip to my waning enthusiasm for them as a user, though due to personal investment his dip was probably faster and deeper than my own. I've loved Google in the past precisely because they weren't Apple and they weren't Facebook. It seems increasingly like they are trying to be Apple and Facebook rolled up into one, which (most importantly for me) sucks because I'm not a fan of Apple or Facebook and (most importantly for them) sucks because they aren't a very good Apple nor a very good Facebook, so they're trading in their old fans for the hope of new fans that probably aren't interested anyway. Larry Page, I am disppoint.
AmericanOP 15y ago
Google should focus on their product- the search bar. Google Plus Me should mean I can find anything of mine via the search bar. If I want to find a file on my computer, I should be able to search for it using google.com instead of spotlight. I should be able to do this even if I'm not on my normal machine. It's not just desktop files. If I want to show my dad pictures of my trip to Cabo, I shouldn't have to log into Facebook, find the always moving Photos app button, find the album, find the picture. I should be able to search 'My cabo pictures' in Google. The omnibar should really become omnipotent. That would be compelling, cool, futuristic must-have UX. That's what Google Plus Me means to me.
- talmand 15y ago
  You want to be able to search the files on your computer from another computer over the internet using Google? If such a thing exists, what would you do with it? Are you willing to open your entire hard drive to Google to transfer the found files to the second computer? Really?
  - OpieCunningham 15y ago
    That wouldn't be necessary. The indexing service could reside on your computer with the "omnibar" able to access it to find results (either built into Chrome or via extensions to other browsers). But since Google would probably want to know the content of your documents to better target ads, the omnibar would eventually, probably, become the nightmare you speak of.
    - talmand 15y ago
      It would be necessary, why search for files on a second computer if you don't want access to those files? Unless the search is restricted to one folder then the whole hard drive is open to Google. I remember Google Desktop being similar to what he wants other than secondary computer access.
  - deleted 15y ago
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talmand 15y ago
Is it me or does several of his complaints about the overly-aggressive targeted marketing apply to Facebook as well? He must really hate Facebook then. Personally, I think all this targeted stuff is not as good as stated by the people selling it. I can understand that he felt the need to leave because something changed for him and his attitude towards his employer. But I seem to remember the big statement someone made not too long ago that Google+ was the future of the company and if you didn't like it you were welcome to leave. I suppose he took their advice. As for any meaning or message one could get out of this about the future of Google, Facebook or even Microsoft; I see very little substance. It's one guy explaining to anyone who wishes to know why he left Google. That's it, let's not make more of this than what it is.
- talentdeficit 15y ago
  for the most part, facebook can only target you when you're on facebook. google now targets you across their properties some of which have significant lock in. it's not as easy to escape google being creepy as it is to escape facebook being creepy.
  - cromwellian 15y ago
    Facebook can target you across any site that has a Facebook Connect or Like button, and eventually they will turn those Like Buttons and Comment plugins into display ads.
  - talmand 15y ago
    I would say Facebook is far worse because they have easy access to more data about you that you more than likely provided. Then there's the data that they get about you from your friends. And as pointed out, Facebook has been tracking people outside of Facebook on any page that had their like button code in place.
davemel37 15y ago
I think Google+ 's mistake, like the author, has to do with a changing doctrine, but i think it has more to do with a branding issue than an innovation or technology issue. (it could be both, but i would argue perception comes before reality when it comes to success) I think "Google+ is a dud," has less to do with whether social is broken, but rather with human perception and branding. Much the way Google owned the category search in peoples minds, Facebook owns the category social in peoples minds. Google made two fundamental mistakes. 1. Using their brand that stands for Search on something else. The human mind is like wet cement, once a brand owns a category, that impressions is almost impossible to change. (Ever try to change someones mind from his political philosophies? almost impossible). 2. Building a product in a category that is already owned by another brand without positioning themselves opposite it. This is classic... Burger King will never take over Mcdonalds market share because they are trying to convince people that they are better. Since the category is owned already, they need to claim, "We are different" When it comes to branding, its all about human perception. Like the authors daughter said, "Facebook is where the people are." Even if that statement weren't true, the perception is ingrained in peoples minds. A good example of competing with an established brand is Coke vs. Pepsi... coke was the real thing, original coca cola, so pepsi came out and said were for the new generation. Why be old when you can be young and fresh. Avis didnt say we are better than hertz, they said, sine we are number 2, we try harder. Dominoes didn't say we have better pizza than pizza hut, they said, we will get it to you faster. Listerine didnt say we taste better than scope, they said, "the taste you hate twice a day." This is branding 101. A brand can only stand for One Thing. (a brand that stands for everything, stands for nothing.) If google wants to compete in the social game... They either need to create a niche of social like twitter, foursquare, and pinterest did, or they need to use a new brand name, and position themselves opposite facebook, not claim they are better... Big executives always talk about convergence, but the Human perception just doesn't work that way. When you combine two things, people assume you are compromising on quality on both sides. When you separate things, people assume you do that one thing much better than everyone else... Google owned the search brand because that was all they did, Search. The new ways of trying to get into other businesses like Paul Graham said," is a chink in their armor." Just my two cents.
- malnourish 15y ago
pradocchia 15y ago
I do miss the old Google. They had some good products. Search was search, and it was clearly designed to provide the very best search possible. Unadulterated and honest. Same story with Gmail, despite the ads. No lock in, no rent-seeking. Too bad, really. The new Google is obnoxious in a "why-are-you-doing-this?", Facebook kind of way.
- bo1024 15y ago
  I would put the difference this way. I used to feel like Google was providing me cool, useful services. Now I feel like Google is trying to figure out ways to collect my data. I think they will learn to their cost that trust doesn't grow back.
  - gnaffle 15y ago
    This pretty much sums up my feeling about Google, too. It's the same feeling that made me stop using Facebook.
antirez 15y ago
IMHO what's sad is that Google+ is not better than Facebook for average people. Better is, for them, more warm, where you may express more about you in a simpler way, and so forth. Google+ is clearly designed by people not exactly in touch (mentally speaking) with the average person using Facebook, that's why nobody of the non tech guys want to switch to it. p.s. IMHO Google is going to lose in the email space soon as well, times are mature to beat it in simple ways, only protection they have in this space is that there is a big "optimization" part in email that is anti-spam and they are good at it.
- hughw 15y ago
  G+ is Facebook for Asperger's.
- pragmatic 15y ago
  ^ this. G+ is a worse Facebook (and not in the worse is better sense). Gmail is getting slow and the recent changes haven't been for the better. In fact it's hurt usability for common users for the (dubious) benefit of "power" users. The unified google interface is rather crappy. I don't know which which i have to click/hover/etc to get to my account settings.
- ScottWhigham 15y ago
  IMHO Google is going to lose in the email space soon as well, times are mature to beat it in simple ways, only protection they have in this space is that there is a big "optimization" part in email that is anti-spam and they are good at it. The only thing that, for me, would cause Google to "lose in the email space soon" would be the exact thing you say they are good at: anti-spam. I've started getting more spam on gmail recently but it's now only 5 or so emails a week out of thousands. Think about how good that is and then ask the question, "If it was 0, would that inspire people to go through all of the hassle to switch emails?" I'd guess that the answer for most folks would be, "Meh - 5 spam messages a week for a free email service is fine. I'd rather not change."
iamgilesbowkett 15y ago
I think it's problematic to find this kind of story on Hacker News. The biggest problem I have with it is that it's very difficult to write an automated filter which rejects stories for being excessively corporate and insufficiently entrepreneurial, at least within the limits of my current skills. I can understand why people debate the strategies of very large corporations, it's kind of like discussing football teams, but it's not what I come here to read at all.
- jmduke 15y ago
  From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
    - cooldeal 15y ago
      >But if you're able to get behind Google+ in the first place, and you're able to call a move from Google to Microsoft an improvement, it's a pretty safe bet there isn't an entrepreneurial bone in your body. And it's not as if the guy's a hacker, either. He's some kind of suit, or polo shirt at best. I think it's pretty safe to bet that you don't like MS at all. There is a lot of cool stuff happening there and to paint a whole company like that and blame the guy here is a sure sign of this. Not to say that there is a shortage of people like you here. After all http://winsupersite.com http://winsupersite.com is hellbanned of HN, for the crime of being the premier site of new and inside info, probably due to flagging by people who are too invested in their biases. Atleast MS (and Apple) for the most part take your money upfront and leave you alone, whereas Google likes to give away stuff for free to users and OEMs and then try to make it back by tracking you across the web. That is an improvement to some.
      - 15y ago
paul 15y ago
I also miss the old Google. I think it's a mistake to blame this on ads though. I don't believe that the G+ crusade is being driving by advertising (though I'm sure it looks that way to people who assume that everything is about ads).
- rickmb 15y ago
  Really? Please enlighten me, what is Google+ (or Facebook for that matter) about if it isn't about advertising? Because as far as I know, every service that isn't about being so great people would pay for it is about advertising and nothing else.
  - frogpelt 15y ago
    Facebook is winning advertising because they have 750 Million users. Facebook wasn't created for advertising so much as advertising was the logical way to profit from having that many people use your product. Google certainly is motivated to compete with Facebook for that advertising revenue but their real motivation is just the user base which I'm sure they already have they just haven't been able to convert them to social users.
    - tatsuke95 15y ago
      Facebook isn't winning advertising. How many users do you think Google has? I'm not talking about Google+, I'm talking about Google products, in general, including search.
    - r00fus 15y ago
      > Facebook is winning advertising because they have 750 Million users. That's a rather bold claim. How many of those users see, much less click on those ads? I know for all my family (of which roughly half use FB), no one sees ads because I've disabled them. How many of those 750M are active accounts that represent real people? Fact is, we don't know and it's their revenue that shows us... and they're far far behind Google in that respect.
  - vibrunazo 15y ago
wilfra 15y ago
On the bright side, now all Google has to do to defend against antitrust claims is link to that post.
CurtHagenlocher 15y ago
As a Microsoft employee, I wish this hadn't been posted to a Microsoft-branded website. Other than that, I thought it was an interesting perspective and I loved the money quote: "I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.”"
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  But "the people" were on Myspace, Hi5, Friendster and other social networks before Facebook - hundreds of millions of them. So clearly it's something about the product, too.
  - pragmatic 15y ago
    Yes, those services were cool (at the time). Google+ is only cool for geeks, if even that. I'm not sure what to do with Google+. The technical folks I work with aren't sure. The non-technical people barely know it exists.
    - crdoconnor 15y ago
      Thing is, Google search used to be the exact same way.
    - donaq 15y ago
      Personally, I love Google+. It doesn't replace Facebook for me, but it has definitely replaced Twitter.
  - nirvdrum 15y ago
    While that's true, I don't think any of them really had critical mass. Of those you mentioned, I had precisely one friend on Myspace, none on Hi5 or Friendster. I had two friends on Orkut. I think Facebook played it smart by making it an exclusive network on college campuses at first, then opening it up.
    - 15y ago
cinquemb 15y ago
I thought google used to be a company of innovation (and still had potential to become better) and now that they find themselves competing with Facebook just brings them down from where they started. Rant: A company with so much money, and still no idea what to do with it. Here's a hint, use all that brainpower you waste optimizing advertising machines and make something that solves a problem that many people face using technology? maybe seek to reach out to a new audience? maybe quit sucking on the corporate tit that thinks advertising works in its current form? It's barely working for fb and thats because they dont care about user privacy (facebook actually sounds like a legal phishing company for advertisers, and i rather be shot than to put any of their API's on any site i create). Whatever, sheeps will be sheeps. And google isn't immune it seems.
Steko 15y ago
G+'s problem at it's root is that it's a FB clone. They copied the core functionality and tacked on a few specs that make it, literally, FB+1. The problem is no one is going to move their whole social network for FB+1 or FB+2. Google needed to build a product an order of magnitude better to win social. There are plenty of colas that are +1 better then Coke but to take away Coke's base you'd need to be Coke+100. The obvious solution is to stop trying to make a FB clone and do something else to get your ad demographics. I think they should stick with their core advantages and innovate in the vein of their own Adsense product: (1) Users sign up with Google and volunteer their demographics. (2) While signed in, Google tailors searches to them. (3) Google gives the user a tiny percentage of the increased ad revenue. It's peanuts for most people so make it Google Play credit. (4) If you're not signed in everything is anonymous. Test run the whole thing on a smaller scale with Android users that already have Google accounts and (for many) credit card info on file. Nielson families give up a lot of personal data about their viewing habits. This is rewarded with free cable, internet and cell phone service, heck they may even be paid. Even people that just take an hourlong phone survey about tv or radio are rewarded with $50+ checks. The reason market research companies pay this is because the data is extremely valuable to them and their clients. Obviously every web company wants to get that data "for free" like they do now but the giant tracking databases and all the personnel behind that certainly aren't free and create an adversarial relationship that can dilute your brand.
- justinru 15y ago
  I don't think giving users a percentage of ad revenue is a feasible business model. How/why would that work?
  - Steko 15y ago
    Shrug I thought I made the case already. If Google makes X on untargeted ads and X+Y on targeted ads then it comes out ahead by offering Y/10 of that money to the user somehow. Yeah it's peanuts so you make it Google Play credit. For some people maybe it's only one song a month, for others it might be one movie a quarter.
damian2000 15y ago
There is a ring of truth to this blog post. Especially in Google's seemingly blind, dogged attempts to beat Facebook at their own game, in the social space. It reminds me of how MS went after AOL with MSN - and we all know how that ended up.
ssn 15y ago
Google is at trouble. They are following Facebook on the web/search front, and following Apple on the mobile/media front. What are they leading?
ChuckMcM 15y ago
Ouch. Not enough people think about year 10. You know, that's when you're 10 years old as a company and you've got a lot of huge successes behind you. Kind of like teenagers when they realize that finding a job is suddenly not an 'optional' thing in their lives. James' rant here reminded me of a similar rant I read (internally) at Sun on its 10 year anniversary. They had published a book all about Sun's first decade, and somehow excised the fact that Sun had built a workstation called the 386i. It emphasized the successes, and papered over the mistakes. The rant was about how Sun, who had kicked DEC in the nuts and had them retreating to the data center, was walking right into that same data center because Microsoft was starting to make PC's as useful as workstations. (there used to be a real distinction there.) I remember thinking that somehow Sun had gone from bringing technology to the folks who could use it, to being all about being a more impressive Sun Microsystems. Sun's "Google+" moment was the day they announced they were going to merge System V and SunOS. In my brief time at Google I was exposed to the folks who had become more about 'The Google' and less about doing cool stuff. I saw many of the same things James did, and I hear Marissa's 'call to arms' about Social and said to myself "If she can't say what it is, how can she expect the troops to achieve it?" If you read the stuff about Mark and Facebook (and I have to believe that at least some of it is true.) the man is on a mission. And his mission was to make a new place in the universe that didn't exist before, he left it to others to figure out how to monetize it. Google did the same with search, make it real, then monetize. But I think at some point the operating committee at Google looked at monetization of all the things Google has done and if you included search advertising the in the bar graph everything else looked like zero. And you ask yourself "We've got all these smart people doing all these projects and not a single one even comes CLOSE to the income that search advertising does? Give me one good reason I shouldn't just fire all of them?" The sad thing is that I saw multimillion dollar a year businesses get tossed under the bus because they just didn't move the needle. Ten years on, ask yourself, "What value do you bring to the table?" if you don't know, that is a big problem.
- jf 15y ago
  > Ten years on, ask yourself, "What value do you bring to the table?" if you don't know, that is a big problem. Is there a reason you shouldn't be asking yourself that after every year you spent at a company?
cromwellian 15y ago
Why does he even bother bringing Wave into this? As a Googler he should know that Wave was never meant to be a social network. It didn't even have the subscribe of 'friends', it was an attempt to create a new kind of Email. He worked at Google but didn't realize that all that innovation, be it GMail, Android, Chrome, Search, Maps, Google Car, etc was paid for by ads?
brindle 15y ago
So you quit Google and headed over to M$. Hacker News, this should be Wanker News.
gruseom 15y ago
I wish Google had focused on being the champions of the open, pluralistic web, instead of on Google+, which ironically seems like Bing.
cromwellian 15y ago
http://www.quora.com/Who-is-the-Bing-Director-of-Test-that-left-Microsoft-for-Google-twice-over-a-span-of-a-few-days http://www.quora.com/Who-is-the-Bing-Director-of-Test-that-l... Maybe the third time will stick?
- laconian 15y ago
  Oh, that's the same guy? I remember being tickled by that particular blog post.
- ryanmolden 15y ago
  Is that the same guy (I honestly don't know)? There is no answer on Quora that I saw. If so, then yeah that post would be viewed in a very skeptical light. If not, well then unrelated. Edit: Looking at other responses about his history I doubt it, it sounds like he previously worked in DevDiv (my home), not OSD (the home of Bing).
crag 15y ago
Every company grows up. I'm old enough to remember when Microsoft was cool. I remember my first copy of Windows 286; all 12 floppy disks worth. I was excited. Now I fight with the MS sales team over MSDN prices. :) My point; it's part of the process. Google's grown up. Do I like it? No.
MatthewPhillips 15y ago
Larry Page is killing his company to chase after a market that is less profitable that the one he currently owns.
- koalaman 15y ago
  Larry Page, like anybody else with any chops in the business, understands that the internet is about communication, and communication is about identity, data, and a sharing protocol. If Facebook owns those things, they own everything. As long as all the users are on one identity and sharing platform you can develop all the open social APIs you want but it's totally pointless. We need at least a duopoly and angry users wanting to share with people not on their platform for any kind of standards to emerge. You're thinking ad money, ad money, ad money. And Microsoft and others are quite happy to feed that theory with there substantial PR budgets and lack of ethics. But I don't think that's what's on Larry's mind. I might not agree with his strategy, or particularly like Google+, but I think if you study the man you would come to the same conclusion.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    I'm reminded of the term "architecture astronaut". When you're discussing business strategy in highly abstract terms, I'm not sure whether you're onto something or whether you're being a business strategy astronaut. At first blush, Facebook's got a stronger foothold in "identity, data, and a sharing protocol". At second blush, they still make less revenue/profit than Google, which in turns makes less revenue/profit than Apple. And it's hard to see how that will change without flying up into the stratosphere talking about ungrounded abstractions. Facebook gets more buzz and is considered hotter shit because it's newer. It doesn't mean anything. What does mean something is that Facebook can provide targeted advertising, and obviously an amalgam of Facebook and Google could provide the most targeted advertising. For instance, if I googled something about online dating but my Google+ account said I was married, the CPC/CPM on Adwords for my search should be different than if my Google+ account said I was single. If Google has any business sense, Google+ is about targeted SERPs and targeted advertising, it's not about vague abstractions that may or may not have anything to do with turning a profit.
chj 15y ago
when the best a company can do is copying, no wonder people are leaving.
defen 15y ago
If life were a movie, all the "advice" Steve Jobs gave to Larry Page toward the end of Jobs' life was completely bogus, and part of a long con aimed at destroying Google in retaliation for Android being a "stolen product" (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/20/steve_jobs_vowed_to_destroy_google_android_called_it_a_stolen_product/ http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/20/steve_jobs_vow...) We all know Jobs was enough of a mastermind to pull it off; but was he that malicious?
- marshray 15y ago
  He may have truly believed in what he was doing. After all, this is the guy who believed every computer with a switching power supply was ripping off the Apple II. http://www.arcfn.com/2012/02/apple-didnt-revolutionize-power.html http://www.arcfn.com/2012/02/apple-didnt-revolutionize-power...
pasbesoin 15y ago
An observation from the inside of what I've been seeing/feeling from the outside. When Google started killing the "cool" stuff, I perceived (rightly or wrongly) the writing on the wall as far as attracting and retaining top talent. And they lost my semi-hesitant... "devotion". I wanted to believe they really did care about e.g. next generation energy sources, at a time when even our lame-ass federal government can't get its act together on that front. And Earth, Maps, various API's (Translate, for example), and the like produced fundamental changes in various environments and endeavors, both professional and hobbyist. Now, sliding into "corporate", lame-ass Google. So sad. Perhaps inevitable; nonetheless, if so, then "just another". P.S. As I reflect a bit more, I still have more respect for them than e.g. Facebook (manipulation) or Microsoft (domineering, monopolistic, and (perhaps resultantly) now fumbling senior management). But I fear the arrow is pointing in the wrong direction. And yeah, this is just one random guy's observation. I guess I've added it because in the past Googlers (and "Google") seem to have occasionally observed and perhaps absorbed some of the collection sentiment expressed on HN.
jroseattle 15y ago
Google has really taken it on the chops these last few years. I remember back in 2006 or whenever the time was when they were the shiznit, and were easily the most admired company in tech. And I remember thinking, let's see how well it goes when everyone is NOT cheering you on and you have a tailwind in your sails. Google is definitely in that situation now.
gamebit07 15y ago
Today google is doing what MS did some years back. Google wants to be facebook and some years back MS wanted to be Google(when they started bing). People at google say "don't be evil", you cant run business without being evil, google in its early days tried being the least possible evil, but as Shakespeare said: "lowliness is young ambitions ladder". But the ambitions of MS were clear from start and they did not even care about what was evil, they wanted their supremacy all over. By joining MS you have come to a place that is more evil, more evil than putting ads or compromising slightly on privacy of users, look at the open source initiatives that Google takes, agreed google labs has been shut down, app engine prices have gone high they have dedicated some of their focus working on Social Networks, but which company would not want to have a chunk and share in what is hot. By the way, what do you see on MS being done, even they are wannabe in their approach. free 90 days trial for azure and the sun will rise from west if they offer anything that is not free/freemium. The point i want to make here is When you talk about privacy, i am sure you would curse facebook for privacy, won't you. The only reason that compelled you to leave google, was you did not get a project that you would like to work on, more geeky, irrespective of what the company gave you, you should have tried paying it back by being proactive in your efforts and pointing out the errors. I respect google for what it has built, i am sure the amount of effort it has put, the horizons that it has opened the initiatives it has brought remains unsurpassed, yes there is a tinge of evil air that currently surrounds it, but again as you mentioned Google learns from its mistakes, and rectifies them. By joining MS you have done more bad than good, probably you will be given some hardcore engineering project, but you could have got them as google as well, with some efforts.
robocop 15y ago
This individual joined Google in 2009, and left before he'd been there 3 years. He's in no position to be waxing nostalgic about the "good old days" of Google.
jballanc 15y ago
Granted these charts are 2 years old now, but 2 years ago when I first saw them I thought they might be a pretty good indicator of the future for the respective companies... Google revenue broken down by product: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-24/tech/29964449_1 http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-24/tech/29964449... Microsoft revenue broken down by product: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-10/tech/29961217_1 http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-10/tech/29961217... Apple revenue broken down by product: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-04-21/tech/29988935_1_iphone-revenue-apple http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-04-21/tech/29988935... I know which company I would want to work for if I was interested in the opportunity to work on and be passionate about a variety of different projects. It also boggles my mind that the Apple chart is pre iPad...I would love to see what that chart looks like now.
tmsh 15y ago
I think the problem with larger companies is that they have something to lose. So fundamentally, almost at a physics level, they become less flexible. They have more momentum in a given direction. The problem with larger technology companies is that technology don't give a s*. And it's fast. Things iterate quickly. That's just how automation and computers work.
tambourine_man 15y ago
I dream of a day when the world will wake from this social sharing bad trip. Facebook is not only making the web worse, by breaking most of its core assumptions, but it's destroying one of the greatest companies to arise in recent years. Google has made accessing the world's information transformatively faster and easier. Facebook has made blogging more pervasive and closed.
- Karunamon 15y ago
  >Facebook has made blogging more pervasive and closed. I've got to disagree with you there. Blogging in general refers to longer-form posts than the average status update field on Facebook is comfortable for. If you're going the angle I think you are, you could make the same argument of Twitter.
  - tambourine_man 15y ago
    Facebook inspires a shorter writing than a typical blog post, yes. But Facebook is in a completly different category than Twitter. Tweets are encouraged to be public. You don't need to fill in a form a agree to EULA to follow a link. Anyone can compete with Google because the information they are indexing is public. Last “App” I did for Facebook required me to give them my cel phone number to access the information the user consent in giving.
  - tambourine_man 15y ago
    Facebook inspires a shorter writing than a typical blog post, yes. But Facebook is in a completly different category than Twitter. Tweets are encouraged to be public. You don't need to fill in a form or agree to an EULA to follow a link. Anyone can compete with Google in search because the information they are indexing is public. Last “App” I did for Facebook required me to give them my cel phone number to access the information the user consent in giving.
michaelochurch 15y ago
To understand why Google isn't what it used to be, one has to understand what happened in 2009-2011. This is the era when Google decided to get "real managers" and they hired a bunch of executives from places like Oracle, IBM, and Intel. If Google had told them to wipe their fucking feet off before tracking shitty culture into the place, it might have survived. It didn't. Google has an immense amount of talent "under its roof". Unfortunately, there's a necrotic layer of useless and counterproductive middle management coming up with a series of "innovations" that each have made the company worse. For a few examples: * 20% time is dead. It requires managerial approval. More on that later. * Until recently, people were hired "between levels" on the engineering ladder (which is generally a disaster at Google; see this: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/promotion-systems.html http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/promotion-systems.html) and then about 2/3 of them were "downslotted" to a lower level. It didn't affect their pay, but it blocked future raises, was a career kiss-of-death, and generally shat all over morale. What's amazing to me is that no one ever said, before this bit of syphilitic idiocy could reach implementation, "This is a terrible idea and you need to stop abusing cough syrup on the job." Fucking California culture, man. In New York, terrible ideas cause buildings to fall down kill people and so we refuse to tolerate them. Unfortunately, Google's executives seemed to lack the insight to recognize an obviously horrible idea as horrible. (Downslotting was abolished last year, but I'm astonished that such idiocy got in the door in the first place.) * Engineers (not just managers) literally drop everything for 1-2 weeks each year to write "Perf" (for themselves and peers). The high-stakes performance review process is just that important. * Google is resistant to any change that might improve engineer productivity beyond the rather plodding rate it has now. C++ and Java are the real house languages; Scala's not even on the table. Python is listed as a house language so Google can still hire people but it's rarely used and nearly deprecated in production. * Managers have free rein to fuck over an employee in Perf if they believe him to be "distracted" or at risk of future distraction by 20% time, even if that employee's performance is otherwise strong. This doesn't make Google any worse or any different from more traditionally managed companies. It does deprive them of the right to market 20% time as a perk without being called out as liars. * Last summer, it was announced that every employee had to have a 3-word "mission statement" that managers could change, and a 63-word quarterly summaries of their work. This was the infamous "7/20" all-hands in which the deprecation of 20%-time was announced. * HR ignores severe ethical lapses by influential managers, including a person who was outright proven to be using low performance scores and PIPs (Performance Improvement Plans, which stop transfers) to block transfers. To make it clear, Google still has some really great people and could turn itself around if it just fired most of the middle layers. The company still has an incredible number of immensely talented engineers of whom I think quite highly, but the company is so horribly managed that I see nothing but a cold, miserable twilight in its future.
bane 15y ago
" As the trappings of entrepreneurship were dismantled, derisive talk of the “old Google” and its feeble attempts at competing with Facebook surfaced to justify a “new Google” that promised “more wood behind fewer arrows.”" Simply put, Google stopped investing in it's future through building entrepreneurship in its engineering ranks. This is bad for Google's future growth prospects, full stop. They've drawn a line in the sand "we're about ads, not technology innovation!" and that is where the company will slowly age and die. Google is no longer about where it's going, but about how it ages.
Mordor 15y ago
Why didn't they just buy Facebook?
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juandg 15y ago
Smart move to leave Google b/c it was buying its way into social and then go to Microsoft who's trying to buy their way into relevance #fail
eliasmacpherson 15y ago
To be very honest I am glad he left google. The googletesting blog went to shit as soon as he came along. It was very enlightening to read it until he showed up. Whittaker reminded me of one of my over enthusiastic handwaving lecturers, very short on substance. Compare and contrast the articles written by Misko (Hevery) and Whittaker. I don't think his departure is a manifestation or representation of anything at Google, and I think it's telling he returned to MS.
InclinedPlane 15y ago
I think advertising has a lot to do with google's growing pains. Google clearly has empireitis and that alone is causing them to grow into something that the google of, say, 2000 would look on and despise. But aside from that the incentives of being an ad focused company are harmful to what used to be google's core values. The problem with any ad-focused company is that your users aren't your customers. Your customers are the ad companies, and your users are your product. There's less reason to make a product that people love passionately, deeply, and value greatly. There's only a reason to make a product that people use frequently. This is a subtle but hugely impactful distinction. It's the difference between a newspaper full of hard-hitting investigative journalism married to solid, thoughtful analysis and an run of the mill tabloid rag. When all that matters is how many eyeballs are looking at ads then it makes the most financial sense to maximize that at the cost of everything else.
toddnessa 15y ago
This article could easily be paired with the Godman-Sachs article to teach a business class on the value of having right priorities in business. Often businesses lose themselves placing the pressures of business ahead of the priorities that got them to where they are in the first place. Sort of the proverbial "putting the cart before the horse" analogy. Google should focus on being itself. It sounds as if they have lost touch with what they really were in the first place. After all, they were the search engine that changed the world to such a degree that most everyone now says "google it" in reference to searching the web.

947 points by cangencer 15y ago

The author states that in his time at Google he realizes it was always a company funded by ads, but that he did not have to personally feel the need for Ads in all products. That's a fair point. Where I lost him is his connection of Google+ with Ads. I disagree that G+ is an Ads play. It's a play for staying relevant on the internet. When you think about it, Facebook is a closed system. They want CNN to post articles into the CNN FB stream. They want people to read those articles on the CNN page (yes, this currently links to outside FB... that will change). They want to do this so that you never have to leave FB, and in fact if you look at the user behavior of 13-17 year olds you will see disturbing trends that this is the case. Facebook is a danger to a free and open internet by becoming the de-facto internet. I concede that this is a stretch, but it is within their power to do so and from my understanding is how their strategy is lined up. TL;DR: G+ is only about Ads in the way that Google needs users to serve Ads to and there is a threat that all users of the internet only go to Facebook and nowhere else.

natrius 15y ago
"When you think about it, Facebook is a closed system." People say this all the time without any justification. As far as I know, all content within Facebook that has no privacy restrictions can be viewed without being a Facebook user. Facebook has an API that can be used to both read and write. Facebook is stingy with phone numbers and email addresses, which is a significant failing in my opinion. Other than that, I can't imagine a more open social network that allows users to control who can see their content.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  So what you're saying is that Facebook is open because you are allowed to fetch information that Facebook allows?
  - natrius 15y ago
    You're allowed to fetch data that users allow, with few exceptions.

taylorbuley 15y ago

> App Engine fees were raised. APIs that had been free for years were deprecated or provided for a fee. From where I'm sitting Google has been pretty rough on independent developers recently. I think their lack of caring (or understanding?) indy devs is best summed up by the Google+ API. Read-only is understandable as they get off their feet, but you can't even get a user's profile stream (you can only fetch profiles one by one). Now that the Buzz API is shut down I have yet to find a way to "share" anything programmatically on Google. How can you be social without a share API?

JS_startup 15y ago
Google's recent behavior was central in our decision not to embrace their technologies and APIs. If they're going to either be suddenly shut down or have prohibitive, anti-startup pricing applied to them then why should we hitch our wagon to their horse?
mikeryan 15y ago
Its not just independents, we're working with one of the largest US companies and they don't want to license (and by license I mean happy to pay for) google maps (for a traffic app) because the Goog can't guarantee that the maps will remain ad free.
killpg 15y ago
The real problem with G+ is that I forgot about it. Facebook nags you with emails every time something happens, but G+ just has a dropdown box that lets me approve friends or not from gmail, and I never see my "wall". If they made me go to the "wall" to approve friends, then I'd see what my few active G+ friends were posting and maybe post something back. I went months without seeing the wall, even though I have close friends who work at Google and post things I'd actually want to read. Also, the "circles" thing and their change of terminology seems like it's being different for the sake of being different, or to avoid being sued by Facebook or something. Stick to the terminology people know. G+ should have tried an "import Facebook" feature that takes all your pictures off Facebook and invites your friends to G+. This alone would help me not care about Facebook. I have a ton of pictures on Facebook that I'll never see again if I were to close my account. Facebook might try to block a feature like this, but it's sorely needed to make the transition. G+ is also a bad name.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

beatle 15y ago

Google's Focus On Beating Facebook Is Wrecking The Company, Says This Former Engineer. Google's Focus On Beating Apple will seal the company's fate. Google's Motorola acquisition is going to be a disaster for Google.

kprobst 15y ago

Social seems to be to Google what mobile is to Microsoft... they might have good stuff here and there, but nobody's ringing the bell.

yanw 15y ago

Between attack ads and blog posts it seems like Google is all that Microsoft have to discuss lately. Not sure if Google is flattered by this obsession. Wonder why the author chose not to post on his personal blog, a Microsoft employee bashing Google on an official Microsoft blog rings hollow, specially with the use of the same generic talking points. And using engineers as PR people isn’t the most sepathetic thing either.

vibrunazo 15y ago
I avoid making generalization and try to stay away of anthropomorphizing companies. But this isn't the first, nor second, nor tenth time I watch Microsoft trying to smear the competition. Which doesn't seem to be common among other companies. It does gives us outsiders the impression that it's part of their company culture to try to sell more by smearing the competition instead of by building better products. How does that work on the managing level? Are Microsoft engineers encouraged from top down to do this? Is it just a culture that gets passed indirectly through informal conversation between employees that influences this behavior? Or is just the PR firm they hired that keeps insisting on the same weapon?
- yanw 15y ago
  Not sure about the logistics but when the IE team announced that P3P circumvention "story" through a PR agency, it got me thinking that it's PR initiated. They are in the habit of hiring these firms: http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/02/how-microsoft-pays-big-money-to-smear-google-audaciously/ http://falkvinge.net/2012/03/02/how-microsoft-pays-big-money...
- Splines 15y ago
  > Are Microsoft engineers encouraged from top down to do this? I'm an IC, and while there is bit a "boo Google" going on in the kool-aid, we don't sit around shaking our fist at them every moment we get. I try to use the best tools I can, whether it be that made by Google or MSFT or someone else. I look up MSDN documentation using Chrome, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
  - 15y ago

Tichy 15y ago

Weird choice to post such an article on msdn.com, of all places.

sbisker 15y ago
It's sort of a cultural thing amongst a lot of Microsoft employees, especially older ones (or in this case, ones that have returned), to run their blogs off of Microsoft's blogging platforms. In this regard, Microsoft's culture actually does a very good job of encouraging its employees to blog from the inside - I've never felt quite the level of direct engineer access and communication working on Google platforms as I have on MS platforms, even in cases where Google's platforms are actually superior. (Chalk it up to Google groups being a little opaque and Google product blogs being run by product managers.)
- Tichy 15y ago
  So he ran from Google to Microsoft because Google did not live up to his ideals anymore. I am not actually a Microsoft hater, but I'll take that story with a grain of salt.

pessimist 15y ago

Valid reasons to quit Google, but then he joins Microsoft?

wavephorm 15y ago
From the perspective of wanting to work for a technology company, and not an advertising company, I suppose it makes sense.
tikhonj 15y ago
My impression is that Microsoft is actually very diversified and focused on technology. There was an article a while back about where the various large companies (Google, Apple and Microsoft) make their money; Microsoft had the most diversity by far. Microsoft is also not afraid to fail or try random things, which makes it much like the "old Google" in this blog post.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- vineet 15y ago
  Microsoft's diversification is not really a good thing. IMO, it is no use building lots of technology without being good at any of it. My belief is that Microsoft will improve, but I would not go there because they already have their technology goals right. (I would go to Microsoft as an intrapreneur trying to fix their technology/innovation story).
brudgers 15y ago
Microsoft is unlikely to shut down MS Research. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/research/default.aspx http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/research/default.aspx [edit] If I have my James Whittaker's straight, he worked at Microsoft before going to Google. If I don't, he probably didn't.
- hswolff 15y ago
  Looks like you have your Whittaker's straight: http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2009/06/james-whittaker-joins-google.html http://googletesting.blogspot.com/2009/06/james-whittaker-jo...

vineet 15y ago

I am not a Google Employee - but I do want to defend Google here. Yes, Google used to be a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. However, in the process they built a huge amount of UX Debt. Bad UX was forgivable a few years ago, but that is no longer the case. Google has not figured it out yet, but with the web maturing, I am glad that they are trying to evolve to be a more UX focused company.

redthrowaway 15y ago
I disagree. Search used to be fast and clean. Ditto GMail. Even Maps has gotten slower and more cluttered. Google's recent UI changes are about branding, not UX.
- vineet 15y ago
  I agree with your points. I categorize them under growing pains. Good UX is not easy - especially when you have such a large number of users and products. If you look into the reasoning for many of the cluttered items, you will see things like "doing X would make it more readable/useful/etc for the general population". Perhaps I am just an optimist. My fingers are crossed.

arkitaip 15y ago

I think people here are being ungenerous towards the author. Too me this story sounds genuine and not like a pr move dictated by Microsoft. It strikes me to be a personal account by someone who's trying to make sense of the past and actually mourning what he believe is the death of old Google. This deserves our respect as professionals because inevitably we are all going to find ourselves in a similar situation, trying to learn from the past and seeking understanding by our peers.

yanw 15y ago
Doesn't seem that genuine posted on a corporate blog.
- anon808 15y ago
  is it a corporate blog, or a personal blog part of the msdn developer community? I honestly don't know, but it doesn't look like a "Microsoft" blog.
  - jf 15y ago
    This blog is as personal a blog as a Microsoft employee can get without hosting one themselves. As a Microsoft employee, I could have my own blog on blogs.msdn.com - but the signup process was more complicated than Posterous, so I don't.
  - brown9-2 15y ago
    The latter, although obviously hosted on a MS flagship property.
georgemcbay 15y ago
I agree the responses seem a bit harsh. Also as someone who never worked at Google but has been a pretty big Google "fanboy" (of the search, Google Apps, Android, etc) his waning enthusiasm for the brand as an employee seems to have taken a very similar dip to my waning enthusiasm for them as a user, though due to personal investment his dip was probably faster and deeper than my own. I've loved Google in the past precisely because they weren't Apple and they weren't Facebook. It seems increasingly like they are trying to be Apple and Facebook rolled up into one, which (most importantly for me) sucks because I'm not a fan of Apple or Facebook and (most importantly for them) sucks because they aren't a very good Apple nor a very good Facebook, so they're trading in their old fans for the hope of new fans that probably aren't interested anyway. Larry Page, I am disppoint.

AmericanOP 15y ago

Google should focus on their product- the search bar. Google Plus Me should mean I can find anything of mine via the search bar. If I want to find a file on my computer, I should be able to search for it using google.com instead of spotlight. I should be able to do this even if I'm not on my normal machine. It's not just desktop files. If I want to show my dad pictures of my trip to Cabo, I shouldn't have to log into Facebook, find the always moving Photos app button, find the album, find the picture. I should be able to search 'My cabo pictures' in Google. The omnibar should really become omnipotent. That would be compelling, cool, futuristic must-have UX. That's what Google Plus Me means to me.

talmand 15y ago
You want to be able to search the files on your computer from another computer over the internet using Google? If such a thing exists, what would you do with it? Are you willing to open your entire hard drive to Google to transfer the found files to the second computer? Really?
- OpieCunningham 15y ago
  That wouldn't be necessary. The indexing service could reside on your computer with the "omnibar" able to access it to find results (either built into Chrome or via extensions to other browsers). But since Google would probably want to know the content of your documents to better target ads, the omnibar would eventually, probably, become the nightmare you speak of.
  - talmand 15y ago
    It would be necessary, why search for files on a second computer if you don't want access to those files? Unless the search is restricted to one folder then the whole hard drive is open to Google. I remember Google Desktop being similar to what he wants other than secondary computer access.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

talmand 15y ago

Is it me or does several of his complaints about the overly-aggressive targeted marketing apply to Facebook as well? He must really hate Facebook then. Personally, I think all this targeted stuff is not as good as stated by the people selling it. I can understand that he felt the need to leave because something changed for him and his attitude towards his employer. But I seem to remember the big statement someone made not too long ago that Google+ was the future of the company and if you didn't like it you were welcome to leave. I suppose he took their advice. As for any meaning or message one could get out of this about the future of Google, Facebook or even Microsoft; I see very little substance. It's one guy explaining to anyone who wishes to know why he left Google. That's it, let's not make more of this than what it is.

talentdeficit 15y ago
for the most part, facebook can only target you when you're on facebook. google now targets you across their properties some of which have significant lock in. it's not as easy to escape google being creepy as it is to escape facebook being creepy.
- cromwellian 15y ago
  Facebook can target you across any site that has a Facebook Connect or Like button, and eventually they will turn those Like Buttons and Comment plugins into display ads.
- talmand 15y ago
  I would say Facebook is far worse because they have easy access to more data about you that you more than likely provided. Then there's the data that they get about you from your friends. And as pointed out, Facebook has been tracking people outside of Facebook on any page that had their like button code in place.

davemel37 15y ago

I think Google+ 's mistake, like the author, has to do with a changing doctrine, but i think it has more to do with a branding issue than an innovation or technology issue. (it could be both, but i would argue perception comes before reality when it comes to success) I think "Google+ is a dud," has less to do with whether social is broken, but rather with human perception and branding. Much the way Google owned the category search in peoples minds, Facebook owns the category social in peoples minds. Google made two fundamental mistakes. 1. Using their brand that stands for Search on something else. The human mind is like wet cement, once a brand owns a category, that impressions is almost impossible to change. (Ever try to change someones mind from his political philosophies? almost impossible). 2. Building a product in a category that is already owned by another brand without positioning themselves opposite it. This is classic... Burger King will never take over Mcdonalds market share because they are trying to convince people that they are better. Since the category is owned already, they need to claim, "We are different" When it comes to branding, its all about human perception. Like the authors daughter said, "Facebook is where the people are." Even if that statement weren't true, the perception is ingrained in peoples minds. A good example of competing with an established brand is Coke vs. Pepsi... coke was the real thing, original coca cola, so pepsi came out and said were for the new generation. Why be old when you can be young and fresh. Avis didnt say we are better than hertz, they said, sine we are number 2, we try harder. Dominoes didn't say we have better pizza than pizza hut, they said, we will get it to you faster. Listerine didnt say we taste better than scope, they said, "the taste you hate twice a day." This is branding 101. A brand can only stand for One Thing. (a brand that stands for everything, stands for nothing.) If google wants to compete in the social game... They either need to create a niche of social like twitter, foursquare, and pinterest did, or they need to use a new brand name, and position themselves opposite facebook, not claim they are better... Big executives always talk about convergence, but the Human perception just doesn't work that way. When you combine two things, people assume you are compromising on quality on both sides. When you separate things, people assume you do that one thing much better than everyone else... Google owned the search brand because that was all they did, Search. The new ways of trying to get into other businesses like Paul Graham said," is a chink in their armor." Just my two cents.

malnourish 15y ago

pradocchia 15y ago

I do miss the old Google. They had some good products. Search was search, and it was clearly designed to provide the very best search possible. Unadulterated and honest. Same story with Gmail, despite the ads. No lock in, no rent-seeking. Too bad, really. The new Google is obnoxious in a "why-are-you-doing-this?", Facebook kind of way.

bo1024 15y ago
I would put the difference this way. I used to feel like Google was providing me cool, useful services. Now I feel like Google is trying to figure out ways to collect my data. I think they will learn to their cost that trust doesn't grow back.
- gnaffle 15y ago
  This pretty much sums up my feeling about Google, too. It's the same feeling that made me stop using Facebook.

antirez 15y ago

IMHO what's sad is that Google+ is not better than Facebook for average people. Better is, for them, more warm, where you may express more about you in a simpler way, and so forth. Google+ is clearly designed by people not exactly in touch (mentally speaking) with the average person using Facebook, that's why nobody of the non tech guys want to switch to it. p.s. IMHO Google is going to lose in the email space soon as well, times are mature to beat it in simple ways, only protection they have in this space is that there is a big "optimization" part in email that is anti-spam and they are good at it.

hughw 15y ago
G+ is Facebook for Asperger's.
pragmatic 15y ago
^ this. G+ is a worse Facebook (and not in the worse is better sense). Gmail is getting slow and the recent changes haven't been for the better. In fact it's hurt usability for common users for the (dubious) benefit of "power" users. The unified google interface is rather crappy. I don't know which which i have to click/hover/etc to get to my account settings.
ScottWhigham 15y ago
IMHO Google is going to lose in the email space soon as well, times are mature to beat it in simple ways, only protection they have in this space is that there is a big "optimization" part in email that is anti-spam and they are good at it. The only thing that, for me, would cause Google to "lose in the email space soon" would be the exact thing you say they are good at: anti-spam. I've started getting more spam on gmail recently but it's now only 5 or so emails a week out of thousands. Think about how good that is and then ask the question, "If it was 0, would that inspire people to go through all of the hassle to switch emails?" I'd guess that the answer for most folks would be, "Meh - 5 spam messages a week for a free email service is fine. I'd rather not change."

iamgilesbowkett 15y ago

I think it's problematic to find this kind of story on Hacker News. The biggest problem I have with it is that it's very difficult to write an automated filter which rejects stories for being excessively corporate and insufficiently entrepreneurial, at least within the limits of my current skills. I can understand why people debate the strategies of very large corporations, it's kind of like discussing football teams, but it's not what I come here to read at all.

jmduke 15y ago
From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - cooldeal 15y ago
    >But if you're able to get behind Google+ in the first place, and you're able to call a move from Google to Microsoft an improvement, it's a pretty safe bet there isn't an entrepreneurial bone in your body. And it's not as if the guy's a hacker, either. He's some kind of suit, or polo shirt at best. I think it's pretty safe to bet that you don't like MS at all. There is a lot of cool stuff happening there and to paint a whole company like that and blame the guy here is a sure sign of this. Not to say that there is a shortage of people like you here. After all http://winsupersite.com http://winsupersite.com is hellbanned of HN, for the crime of being the premier site of new and inside info, probably due to flagging by people who are too invested in their biases. Atleast MS (and Apple) for the most part take your money upfront and leave you alone, whereas Google likes to give away stuff for free to users and OEMs and then try to make it back by tracking you across the web. That is an improvement to some.
    - 15y ago

paul 15y ago

I also miss the old Google. I think it's a mistake to blame this on ads though. I don't believe that the G+ crusade is being driving by advertising (though I'm sure it looks that way to people who assume that everything is about ads).

rickmb 15y ago
Really? Please enlighten me, what is Google+ (or Facebook for that matter) about if it isn't about advertising? Because as far as I know, every service that isn't about being so great people would pay for it is about advertising and nothing else.
- frogpelt 15y ago
  Facebook is winning advertising because they have 750 Million users. Facebook wasn't created for advertising so much as advertising was the logical way to profit from having that many people use your product. Google certainly is motivated to compete with Facebook for that advertising revenue but their real motivation is just the user base which I'm sure they already have they just haven't been able to convert them to social users.
  - tatsuke95 15y ago
    Facebook isn't winning advertising. How many users do you think Google has? I'm not talking about Google+, I'm talking about Google products, in general, including search.
  - r00fus 15y ago
    > Facebook is winning advertising because they have 750 Million users. That's a rather bold claim. How many of those users see, much less click on those ads? I know for all my family (of which roughly half use FB), no one sees ads because I've disabled them. How many of those 750M are active accounts that represent real people? Fact is, we don't know and it's their revenue that shows us... and they're far far behind Google in that respect.
- vibrunazo 15y ago

wilfra 15y ago

On the bright side, now all Google has to do to defend against antitrust claims is link to that post.

CurtHagenlocher 15y ago

As a Microsoft employee, I wish this hadn't been posted to a Microsoft-branded website. Other than that, I thought it was an interesting perspective and I loved the money quote: "I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.”"

nextparadigms 15y ago
But "the people" were on Myspace, Hi5, Friendster and other social networks before Facebook - hundreds of millions of them. So clearly it's something about the product, too.
- pragmatic 15y ago
  Yes, those services were cool (at the time). Google+ is only cool for geeks, if even that. I'm not sure what to do with Google+. The technical folks I work with aren't sure. The non-technical people barely know it exists.
  - crdoconnor 15y ago
    Thing is, Google search used to be the exact same way.
  - donaq 15y ago
    Personally, I love Google+. It doesn't replace Facebook for me, but it has definitely replaced Twitter.
- nirvdrum 15y ago
  While that's true, I don't think any of them really had critical mass. Of those you mentioned, I had precisely one friend on Myspace, none on Hi5 or Friendster. I had two friends on Orkut. I think Facebook played it smart by making it an exclusive network on college campuses at first, then opening it up.
  - 15y ago

cinquemb 15y ago

I thought google used to be a company of innovation (and still had potential to become better) and now that they find themselves competing with Facebook just brings them down from where they started. Rant: A company with so much money, and still no idea what to do with it. Here's a hint, use all that brainpower you waste optimizing advertising machines and make something that solves a problem that many people face using technology? maybe seek to reach out to a new audience? maybe quit sucking on the corporate tit that thinks advertising works in its current form? It's barely working for fb and thats because they dont care about user privacy (facebook actually sounds like a legal phishing company for advertisers, and i rather be shot than to put any of their API's on any site i create). Whatever, sheeps will be sheeps. And google isn't immune it seems.

Steko 15y ago

G+'s problem at it's root is that it's a FB clone. They copied the core functionality and tacked on a few specs that make it, literally, FB+1. The problem is no one is going to move their whole social network for FB+1 or FB+2. Google needed to build a product an order of magnitude better to win social. There are plenty of colas that are +1 better then Coke but to take away Coke's base you'd need to be Coke+100. The obvious solution is to stop trying to make a FB clone and do something else to get your ad demographics. I think they should stick with their core advantages and innovate in the vein of their own Adsense product: (1) Users sign up with Google and volunteer their demographics. (2) While signed in, Google tailors searches to them. (3) Google gives the user a tiny percentage of the increased ad revenue. It's peanuts for most people so make it Google Play credit. (4) If you're not signed in everything is anonymous. Test run the whole thing on a smaller scale with Android users that already have Google accounts and (for many) credit card info on file. Nielson families give up a lot of personal data about their viewing habits. This is rewarded with free cable, internet and cell phone service, heck they may even be paid. Even people that just take an hourlong phone survey about tv or radio are rewarded with $50+ checks. The reason market research companies pay this is because the data is extremely valuable to them and their clients. Obviously every web company wants to get that data "for free" like they do now but the giant tracking databases and all the personnel behind that certainly aren't free and create an adversarial relationship that can dilute your brand.

justinru 15y ago
I don't think giving users a percentage of ad revenue is a feasible business model. How/why would that work?
- Steko 15y ago
  Shrug I thought I made the case already. If Google makes X on untargeted ads and X+Y on targeted ads then it comes out ahead by offering Y/10 of that money to the user somehow. Yeah it's peanuts so you make it Google Play credit. For some people maybe it's only one song a month, for others it might be one movie a quarter.

damian2000 15y ago

There is a ring of truth to this blog post. Especially in Google's seemingly blind, dogged attempts to beat Facebook at their own game, in the social space. It reminds me of how MS went after AOL with MSN - and we all know how that ended up.

ssn 15y ago

Google is at trouble. They are following Facebook on the web/search front, and following Apple on the mobile/media front. What are they leading?

ChuckMcM 15y ago

Ouch. Not enough people think about year 10. You know, that's when you're 10 years old as a company and you've got a lot of huge successes behind you. Kind of like teenagers when they realize that finding a job is suddenly not an 'optional' thing in their lives. James' rant here reminded me of a similar rant I read (internally) at Sun on its 10 year anniversary. They had published a book all about Sun's first decade, and somehow excised the fact that Sun had built a workstation called the 386i. It emphasized the successes, and papered over the mistakes. The rant was about how Sun, who had kicked DEC in the nuts and had them retreating to the data center, was walking right into that same data center because Microsoft was starting to make PC's as useful as workstations. (there used to be a real distinction there.) I remember thinking that somehow Sun had gone from bringing technology to the folks who could use it, to being all about being a more impressive Sun Microsystems. Sun's "Google+" moment was the day they announced they were going to merge System V and SunOS. In my brief time at Google I was exposed to the folks who had become more about 'The Google' and less about doing cool stuff. I saw many of the same things James did, and I hear Marissa's 'call to arms' about Social and said to myself "If she can't say what it is, how can she expect the troops to achieve it?" If you read the stuff about Mark and Facebook (and I have to believe that at least some of it is true.) the man is on a mission. And his mission was to make a new place in the universe that didn't exist before, he left it to others to figure out how to monetize it. Google did the same with search, make it real, then monetize. But I think at some point the operating committee at Google looked at monetization of all the things Google has done and if you included search advertising the in the bar graph everything else looked like zero. And you ask yourself "We've got all these smart people doing all these projects and not a single one even comes CLOSE to the income that search advertising does? Give me one good reason I shouldn't just fire all of them?" The sad thing is that I saw multimillion dollar a year businesses get tossed under the bus because they just didn't move the needle. Ten years on, ask yourself, "What value do you bring to the table?" if you don't know, that is a big problem.

jf 15y ago
> Ten years on, ask yourself, "What value do you bring to the table?" if you don't know, that is a big problem. Is there a reason you shouldn't be asking yourself that after every year you spent at a company?

cromwellian 15y ago

Why does he even bother bringing Wave into this? As a Googler he should know that Wave was never meant to be a social network. It didn't even have the subscribe of 'friends', it was an attempt to create a new kind of Email. He worked at Google but didn't realize that all that innovation, be it GMail, Android, Chrome, Search, Maps, Google Car, etc was paid for by ads?

brindle 15y ago

So you quit Google and headed over to M$. Hacker News, this should be Wanker News.

gruseom 15y ago

I wish Google had focused on being the champions of the open, pluralistic web, instead of on Google+, which ironically seems like Bing.

cromwellian 15y ago

http://www.quora.com/Who-is-the-Bing-Director-of-Test-that-left-Microsoft-for-Google-twice-over-a-span-of-a-few-days http://www.quora.com/Who-is-the-Bing-Director-of-Test-that-l... Maybe the third time will stick?

laconian 15y ago
Oh, that's the same guy? I remember being tickled by that particular blog post.
ryanmolden 15y ago
Is that the same guy (I honestly don't know)? There is no answer on Quora that I saw. If so, then yeah that post would be viewed in a very skeptical light. If not, well then unrelated. Edit: Looking at other responses about his history I doubt it, it sounds like he previously worked in DevDiv (my home), not OSD (the home of Bing).

crag 15y ago

Every company grows up. I'm old enough to remember when Microsoft was cool. I remember my first copy of Windows 286; all 12 floppy disks worth. I was excited. Now I fight with the MS sales team over MSDN prices. :) My point; it's part of the process. Google's grown up. Do I like it? No.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago

Larry Page is killing his company to chase after a market that is less profitable that the one he currently owns.

koalaman 15y ago
Larry Page, like anybody else with any chops in the business, understands that the internet is about communication, and communication is about identity, data, and a sharing protocol. If Facebook owns those things, they own everything. As long as all the users are on one identity and sharing platform you can develop all the open social APIs you want but it's totally pointless. We need at least a duopoly and angry users wanting to share with people not on their platform for any kind of standards to emerge. You're thinking ad money, ad money, ad money. And Microsoft and others are quite happy to feed that theory with there substantial PR budgets and lack of ethics. But I don't think that's what's on Larry's mind. I might not agree with his strategy, or particularly like Google+, but I think if you study the man you would come to the same conclusion.
- philwelch 15y ago
  I'm reminded of the term "architecture astronaut". When you're discussing business strategy in highly abstract terms, I'm not sure whether you're onto something or whether you're being a business strategy astronaut. At first blush, Facebook's got a stronger foothold in "identity, data, and a sharing protocol". At second blush, they still make less revenue/profit than Google, which in turns makes less revenue/profit than Apple. And it's hard to see how that will change without flying up into the stratosphere talking about ungrounded abstractions. Facebook gets more buzz and is considered hotter shit because it's newer. It doesn't mean anything. What does mean something is that Facebook can provide targeted advertising, and obviously an amalgam of Facebook and Google could provide the most targeted advertising. For instance, if I googled something about online dating but my Google+ account said I was married, the CPC/CPM on Adwords for my search should be different than if my Google+ account said I was single. If Google has any business sense, Google+ is about targeted SERPs and targeted advertising, it's not about vague abstractions that may or may not have anything to do with turning a profit.

chj 15y ago

when the best a company can do is copying, no wonder people are leaving.

defen 15y ago

If life were a movie, all the "advice" Steve Jobs gave to Larry Page toward the end of Jobs' life was completely bogus, and part of a long con aimed at destroying Google in retaliation for Android being a "stolen product" (http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/20/steve_jobs_vowed_to_destroy_google_android_called_it_a_stolen_product/ http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/20/steve_jobs_vow...) We all know Jobs was enough of a mastermind to pull it off; but was he that malicious?

marshray 15y ago
He may have truly believed in what he was doing. After all, this is the guy who believed every computer with a switching power supply was ripping off the Apple II. http://www.arcfn.com/2012/02/apple-didnt-revolutionize-power.html http://www.arcfn.com/2012/02/apple-didnt-revolutionize-power...

pasbesoin 15y ago

An observation from the inside of what I've been seeing/feeling from the outside. When Google started killing the "cool" stuff, I perceived (rightly or wrongly) the writing on the wall as far as attracting and retaining top talent. And they lost my semi-hesitant... "devotion". I wanted to believe they really did care about e.g. next generation energy sources, at a time when even our lame-ass federal government can't get its act together on that front. And Earth, Maps, various API's (Translate, for example), and the like produced fundamental changes in various environments and endeavors, both professional and hobbyist. Now, sliding into "corporate", lame-ass Google. So sad. Perhaps inevitable; nonetheless, if so, then "just another". P.S. As I reflect a bit more, I still have more respect for them than e.g. Facebook (manipulation) or Microsoft (domineering, monopolistic, and (perhaps resultantly) now fumbling senior management). But I fear the arrow is pointing in the wrong direction. And yeah, this is just one random guy's observation. I guess I've added it because in the past Googlers (and "Google") seem to have occasionally observed and perhaps absorbed some of the collection sentiment expressed on HN.

jroseattle 15y ago

Google has really taken it on the chops these last few years. I remember back in 2006 or whenever the time was when they were the shiznit, and were easily the most admired company in tech. And I remember thinking, let's see how well it goes when everyone is NOT cheering you on and you have a tailwind in your sails. Google is definitely in that situation now.

gamebit07 15y ago

Today google is doing what MS did some years back. Google wants to be facebook and some years back MS wanted to be Google(when they started bing). People at google say "don't be evil", you cant run business without being evil, google in its early days tried being the least possible evil, but as Shakespeare said: "lowliness is young ambitions ladder". But the ambitions of MS were clear from start and they did not even care about what was evil, they wanted their supremacy all over. By joining MS you have come to a place that is more evil, more evil than putting ads or compromising slightly on privacy of users, look at the open source initiatives that Google takes, agreed google labs has been shut down, app engine prices have gone high they have dedicated some of their focus working on Social Networks, but which company would not want to have a chunk and share in what is hot. By the way, what do you see on MS being done, even they are wannabe in their approach. free 90 days trial for azure and the sun will rise from west if they offer anything that is not free/freemium. The point i want to make here is When you talk about privacy, i am sure you would curse facebook for privacy, won't you. The only reason that compelled you to leave google, was you did not get a project that you would like to work on, more geeky, irrespective of what the company gave you, you should have tried paying it back by being proactive in your efforts and pointing out the errors. I respect google for what it has built, i am sure the amount of effort it has put, the horizons that it has opened the initiatives it has brought remains unsurpassed, yes there is a tinge of evil air that currently surrounds it, but again as you mentioned Google learns from its mistakes, and rectifies them. By joining MS you have done more bad than good, probably you will be given some hardcore engineering project, but you could have got them as google as well, with some efforts.

robocop 15y ago

This individual joined Google in 2009, and left before he'd been there 3 years. He's in no position to be waxing nostalgic about the "good old days" of Google.

jballanc 15y ago

Granted these charts are 2 years old now, but 2 years ago when I first saw them I thought they might be a pretty good indicator of the future for the respective companies... Google revenue broken down by product: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-24/tech/29964449_1 http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-24/tech/29964449... Microsoft revenue broken down by product: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-10/tech/29961217_1 http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-10/tech/29961217... Apple revenue broken down by product: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-04-21/tech/29988935_1_iphone-revenue-apple http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-04-21/tech/29988935... I know which company I would want to work for if I was interested in the opportunity to work on and be passionate about a variety of different projects. It also boggles my mind that the Apple chart is pre iPad...I would love to see what that chart looks like now.

tmsh 15y ago

I think the problem with larger companies is that they have something to lose. So fundamentally, almost at a physics level, they become less flexible. They have more momentum in a given direction. The problem with larger technology companies is that technology don't give a s*. And it's fast. Things iterate quickly. That's just how automation and computers work.

tambourine_man 15y ago

I dream of a day when the world will wake from this social sharing bad trip. Facebook is not only making the web worse, by breaking most of its core assumptions, but it's destroying one of the greatest companies to arise in recent years. Google has made accessing the world's information transformatively faster and easier. Facebook has made blogging more pervasive and closed.

Karunamon 15y ago
>Facebook has made blogging more pervasive and closed. I've got to disagree with you there. Blogging in general refers to longer-form posts than the average status update field on Facebook is comfortable for. If you're going the angle I think you are, you could make the same argument of Twitter.
- tambourine_man 15y ago
  Facebook inspires a shorter writing than a typical blog post, yes. But Facebook is in a completly different category than Twitter. Tweets are encouraged to be public. You don't need to fill in a form a agree to EULA to follow a link. Anyone can compete with Google because the information they are indexing is public. Last “App” I did for Facebook required me to give them my cel phone number to access the information the user consent in giving.
- tambourine_man 15y ago
  Facebook inspires a shorter writing than a typical blog post, yes. But Facebook is in a completly different category than Twitter. Tweets are encouraged to be public. You don't need to fill in a form or agree to an EULA to follow a link. Anyone can compete with Google in search because the information they are indexing is public. Last “App” I did for Facebook required me to give them my cel phone number to access the information the user consent in giving.

michaelochurch 15y ago

To understand why Google isn't what it used to be, one has to understand what happened in 2009-2011. This is the era when Google decided to get "real managers" and they hired a bunch of executives from places like Oracle, IBM, and Intel. If Google had told them to wipe their fucking feet off before tracking shitty culture into the place, it might have survived. It didn't. Google has an immense amount of talent "under its roof". Unfortunately, there's a necrotic layer of useless and counterproductive middle management coming up with a series of "innovations" that each have made the company worse. For a few examples: * 20% time is dead. It requires managerial approval. More on that later. * Until recently, people were hired "between levels" on the engineering ladder (which is generally a disaster at Google; see this: http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/promotion-systems.html http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/promotion-systems.html) and then about 2/3 of them were "downslotted" to a lower level. It didn't affect their pay, but it blocked future raises, was a career kiss-of-death, and generally shat all over morale. What's amazing to me is that no one ever said, before this bit of syphilitic idiocy could reach implementation, "This is a terrible idea and you need to stop abusing cough syrup on the job." Fucking California culture, man. In New York, terrible ideas cause buildings to fall down kill people and so we refuse to tolerate them. Unfortunately, Google's executives seemed to lack the insight to recognize an obviously horrible idea as horrible. (Downslotting was abolished last year, but I'm astonished that such idiocy got in the door in the first place.) * Engineers (not just managers) literally drop everything for 1-2 weeks each year to write "Perf" (for themselves and peers). The high-stakes performance review process is just that important. * Google is resistant to any change that might improve engineer productivity beyond the rather plodding rate it has now. C++ and Java are the real house languages; Scala's not even on the table. Python is listed as a house language so Google can still hire people but it's rarely used and nearly deprecated in production. * Managers have free rein to fuck over an employee in Perf if they believe him to be "distracted" or at risk of future distraction by 20% time, even if that employee's performance is otherwise strong. This doesn't make Google any worse or any different from more traditionally managed companies. It does deprive them of the right to market 20% time as a perk without being called out as liars. * Last summer, it was announced that every employee had to have a 3-word "mission statement" that managers could change, and a 63-word quarterly summaries of their work. This was the infamous "7/20" all-hands in which the deprecation of 20%-time was announced. * HR ignores severe ethical lapses by influential managers, including a person who was outright proven to be using low performance scores and PIPs (Performance Improvement Plans, which stop transfers) to block transfers. To make it clear, Google still has some really great people and could turn itself around if it just fired most of the middle layers. The company still has an incredible number of immensely talented engineers of whom I think quite highly, but the company is so horribly managed that I see nothing but a cold, miserable twilight in its future.

bane 15y ago

" As the trappings of entrepreneurship were dismantled, derisive talk of the “old Google” and its feeble attempts at competing with Facebook surfaced to justify a “new Google” that promised “more wood behind fewer arrows.”" Simply put, Google stopped investing in it's future through building entrepreneurship in its engineering ranks. This is bad for Google's future growth prospects, full stop. They've drawn a line in the sand "we're about ads, not technology innovation!" and that is where the company will slowly age and die. Google is no longer about where it's going, but about how it ages.

Mordor 15y ago

Why didn't they just buy Facebook?

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juandg 15y ago

Smart move to leave Google b/c it was buying its way into social and then go to Microsoft who's trying to buy their way into relevance #fail

eliasmacpherson 15y ago

To be very honest I am glad he left google. The googletesting blog went to shit as soon as he came along. It was very enlightening to read it until he showed up. Whittaker reminded me of one of my over enthusiastic handwaving lecturers, very short on substance. Compare and contrast the articles written by Misko (Hevery) and Whittaker. I don't think his departure is a manifestation or representation of anything at Google, and I think it's telling he returned to MS.

InclinedPlane 15y ago

I think advertising has a lot to do with google's growing pains. Google clearly has empireitis and that alone is causing them to grow into something that the google of, say, 2000 would look on and despise. But aside from that the incentives of being an ad focused company are harmful to what used to be google's core values. The problem with any ad-focused company is that your users aren't your customers. Your customers are the ad companies, and your users are your product. There's less reason to make a product that people love passionately, deeply, and value greatly. There's only a reason to make a product that people use frequently. This is a subtle but hugely impactful distinction. It's the difference between a newspaper full of hard-hitting investigative journalism married to solid, thoughtful analysis and an run of the mill tabloid rag. When all that matters is how many eyeballs are looking at ads then it makes the most financial sense to maximize that at the cost of everything else.

toddnessa 15y ago

This article could easily be paired with the Godman-Sachs article to teach a business class on the value of having right priorities in business. Often businesses lose themselves placing the pressures of business ahead of the priorities that got them to where they are in the first place. Sort of the proverbial "putting the cart before the horse" analogy. Google should focus on being itself. It sounds as if they have lost touch with what they really were in the first place. After all, they were the search engine that changed the world to such a degree that most everyone now says "google it" in reference to searching the web.