4 ms·

> It's not surprising, google has been on the road to becoming the next Microsoft for a while. I've heard this a lot. Are there any specific anecdotes that re

> It's not surprising, google has been on the road to becoming the next Microsoft for a while. I've heard this a lot. Are there any specific anecdotes that really show a strong analogy between the two? Do I have to assume that today's "Cloud" is yesteryear's PC-Compatible?

InclinedPlane 14y ago
It's a general feeling, mostly. Google seems to be growing more and more out of touch with its users in general. Some major warning signs for a company going down this road are: pet projects being given importance well beyond any hard-headed rational assessment; "strategy tax" behavior, making decisions which only make sense in the broader sense of serving the "greater good" of advancing a platform or what-have-you; making big decisions that are out of touch with what the market/public wants; using sheer size and resources as a market weapon instead of letting competition do its work. Google's social endeavors have always shown them to be out of touch and incapable of engaging the market with a product that people care about (orkut, knol, buzz, wave, and now plus). Their approach to "customer service" for many of their products is to actively disconnect from their users and let the natural release cycle take care of things. They have a long history of ugly interfaces with poor usability. Youtube is a good example, discoverability of new content has only gotten worse over the years and many fundamental features are really very broken or at best poorly implemented (such as playlists), despite being an otherwise mature product. They've killed off lots of small products and projects for the sin of not fitting in to the grand strategy. And they've tried as much as they dare to force people into using google+ whether they want to or not. Google still has a huge number of world-class engineers, and that will enable them to continue making some truly great things over the next years and perhaps decades. But fundamentally google is on a track toward becoming just another run-of-the-mill mega-corp, and if they continue along that route eventually a lot of the talent is going to evaporate away (as has happened and is continuing to happen at MS) and there won't be anything to save them from mediocrity.

InclinedPlane 14y ago

It's a general feeling, mostly. Google seems to be growing more and more out of touch with its users in general. Some major warning signs for a company going down this road are: pet projects being given importance well beyond any hard-headed rational assessment; "strategy tax" behavior, making decisions which only make sense in the broader sense of serving the "greater good" of advancing a platform or what-have-you; making big decisions that are out of touch with what the market/public wants; using sheer size and resources as a market weapon instead of letting competition do its work. Google's social endeavors have always shown them to be out of touch and incapable of engaging the market with a product that people care about (orkut, knol, buzz, wave, and now plus). Their approach to "customer service" for many of their products is to actively disconnect from their users and let the natural release cycle take care of things. They have a long history of ugly interfaces with poor usability. Youtube is a good example, discoverability of new content has only gotten worse over the years and many fundamental features are really very broken or at best poorly implemented (such as playlists), despite being an otherwise mature product. They've killed off lots of small products and projects for the sin of not fitting in to the grand strategy. And they've tried as much as they dare to force people into using google+ whether they want to or not. Google still has a huge number of world-class engineers, and that will enable them to continue making some truly great things over the next years and perhaps decades. But fundamentally google is on a track toward becoming just another run-of-the-mill mega-corp, and if they continue along that route eventually a lot of the talent is going to evaporate away (as has happened and is continuing to happen at MS) and there won't be anything to save them from mediocrity.