11 ms·
Why I left Google (2012)
- wslh 14y agoAre Google's driverless car just a way to show more ads? Instead of driving a car you could be watching an ad.
- Hitchhiker 14y agoNo , that is the first foray of Skynet .. much more interesting than ads.. and provably the single handed elimination of human drivers from taxi services ;-).
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- knome 14y agoAutomated cabs would be a great place to advertise for nearby businesses and things. "Google, what restaurants are nearby?" which gives a list sorted by relevance ( X of Y users returned to restaurant Z more than twice ), with a few purchased restaurant advertisements proceeding them
- VLM 14y agoUnfortunately, as per the article, the response would most likely be: "sponsored suggestion to “Buy a restaurants are nearby at Wal-Mart.”"
- criley 14y agoYou know, after using Google Now on my phone, I'm confident that Google can deliver context-sensitive results that make sense. Not always, not for everything, but I bet they could pull it off in a cab just fine. EDIT: I guess it's worth pointing out, however, that Google Now doesn't show ads.
- 6cxs2hd6 14y ago> EDIT: I guess it's worth pointing out, however, that Google Now doesn't show ads. Not yet.
- lurker14 14y agoGoogle Now shows unsolicited restaurant recommendations. They might not be paid (I don't know), but they are certainly ads.
- sses 14y agoThat's a very loose definition of ads. Advertising typically implies that it's the restaurant promoting itself.
- wutbrodo 14y agoI think being paid is pretty integral to the concept of an ad.
- bennyg 14y agoThis is a reply to those below you, because I can't reply to them specifically. Word of mouth is considered the best form of advertising you can get. Almost 100% of the time it's not even paid for.
- equalarrow 14y agoWell, don't forget, they bought Zagat. So even if it doesn't look like an ad, 'recommendations' are probably just another form.
- dale386 14y agoNo, they are a way to more effectively collect photos for Street View and WiFi AP locations for GPS-free location based services... both are which are products of Google Maps which itself is a vessel for selling advertising.
- skrebbel 14y agothat sounds very far fetched.
- subsystem 14y agoWhile there's surely some nice research being done, it always seemed like a PR project to me.
- meerita 14y agoAnd Google Glasses? Chromebook? Nexus? Jesus this guy is plainly wrong.
- kbouw 14y agoAnd don't forget to mention Google Shoes :P http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/11/google-shoes_n_2853098.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/11/google-shoes_n_2853...
- meerita 14y agoBut the phone is good (i'm iPhone owner), and the rest of the projects looks promising.
- lurker14 14y agoMy Chromebook and Nexus are full of ads.
- photorized 14y agoGlass doesn't have a compelling use case yet. At least they have not unveiled it. With iPad, for example, it was very clearly positioned as a media consumption device from the very beginning. With Google Glass, potential customers are being asked to brainstorm what they would do if they had Glass. Does not seem particularly innovative to me.
- JoCoLa 14y agoAbsolutely. American spend more time communing than ever before. That's a lot of time spent steering that could be spent swiping.
- frogpelt 14y agoI believe the overarching focus at Google is search. To search Google must index. To continue indexing and searching Google has to make money. The most obvious path to billions is leveraging the indexing and searching into ad revenue. What makes me more nervous than Google being capitalistic is Google not having boundaries about who/what/when/where/how they will index the whole world's data.
- voodoomagicman 14y agoSo he goes to microsoft?
- thinkling 14y agoSee: "Why I joined Microsoft", http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/14/why-i-joined-microsoft.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/14/why-i-...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jaredmcateer 14y agoMore interestingly he actually went back to Microsoft. http://googletesting.blogspot.ca/2009/06/james-whittaker-joins-google.html http://googletesting.blogspot.ca/2009/06/james-whittaker-joi...
- numbsafari 14y agoThe way these things read... I wonder if people are getting paid an extra bonus to have PR write up a "why I left the other guy" post and put their name on it as way to just bundle up a bunch of FUD in one place. I'm not a big fan of either Google or Microsoft, so I don't really care about what they say. It's just that these "why I quit" letters have become boilerplate PR pieces that don't really offer anything new or interesting.
- niggler 14y agoI look at it as a more public exit interview. I don't doubt that his expressed concerns were part of why he did leave (I also don't doubt that there are other factors)), and by making those concerns public there's a chance that more people may see it and try to rectify the problems.
- numbsafari 14y agoYeah, but in the entire history of people quitting and writing "letters to the editor", has any manager ever actually read it and thought anything other than "whatever, dude wasn't on board, glad he left"? Do you really think Sergey Brin or Larry Page or Eric Schmidt are going to read this and think "oh man, we better change what we're doing". Nope. People who are fans of MS are going to read it and say "yeah, see, I told you google is evil. Even his 15 year old daughter had a poignant critique of Google+ that shows she's not only wise beyond her years, but that Google+ sucks just like I always thought already." It just doesn't sound genuine.
- lurker14 14y agoIf they are hearing the same complaints murmured (muted, more anonymized and filtered) inside the company, but saying, "whatevs, they'll stay for the paycheck", and people start walking away from the paycheck and announcing it, it might sink in. Of course, when leaving Google for Microsoft, it's hard to claim that culture/mission/vision are really the reason for leaving, as opposed to: MSFT offered $X,000, and GOOG managers said "you're not worth that to us"
- 14y ago
- mannu4u4u 14y agoGoogle's New Portal Provides Help for Hacked Sites http://www.hackersnewsbulletin.com/2013/03/googles-new-portal-provides-help-for.html http://www.hackersnewsbulletin.com/2013/03/googles-new-porta...
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- niggler 14y agoHate to be that guy, but who is James Whittaker? (nice writeup, as it mirrors the feelings many of my google friends feel)
- enginous 14y agoHe was an engineering director for a couple of years working on the dev/test tool chain and Google+. He's done a few books, including one he co-authored called How Google Tests Software, which is a fairly pragmatic discussion of large-scale testing practices at Google. (I'm not sure if this is still the case, but Nooglers used to read this book as a part of their orientation.)
- jrockway 14y agoThis is from March of last year, BTW, and has been discussed numerous other times on HN. (Ironically, there have been so many other articles titled "Why I left Google" on HN that I can't actually find this one in the archives. But it's there :)
- niggler 14y agoNext time search by url: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700277 was the previous discussion (910 upvotes, 370 days ago)
- Hitchhiker 14y agoironically, i did not mean for this to go through as I was trying to locate the discussion on it.. obviously the url regex ain't working for this corner-case.
- niggler 14y agoI'm not a fan of frequent reposting (if the last submission was a week or month ago) but once a year is tolerable :) "I was trying to locate the discussion on it.. obviously the url regex ain't working for this corner-case" I copy-pasted the url in the box. There are a few results: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.msdn.com%2Fb%2Fjw_on_tech%2Farchive%2F2012%2F03%2F13%2Fwhy-i-left-google.aspx https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=http%3A%2F...
- Hitchhiker 14y agoneither am I.. you can provably do a check on my prior submits.. and hopefully that shows the type of topics .. I was honestly trying to locate the darn discussion on the blog.. :-).
- LukeShu 14y ago
- troebr 14y agoThis blog post is one year old.
- namenotrequired 14y agoI'm sure I've seen it on hackernews before.
- Colliwinks 14y ago"Sharing is not broken" "Share this on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, LinkedIn, SlashDot, Myspace, Technorati, Friendfeed, Messenger, or Stumbleupon."
- rburhum 14y agoOnly two of those are relevant. With the right content, a third one may also work. The rest, you can ignore
- fatjokes 14y agoProbably what somebody said about Reader, when all the Google services were listed.
- Apocryphon 14y agoI suppose we should be thankful that HN doesn't come with a share plugin.
- Gormo 14y agoWhat is the juxtaposition of these two sentences supposed to convey? They seem to be pretty consistent: "sharing is not broken - here are some the places that people are already sharing stuff without Google's involvement".
- aviraldg 14y agoI lost all interest in reading the article after looking at the msdn.com domain. EDIT: Downvoters, I don't see how this is wrong. Microsoft has a long history of spreading FUD about competitors (Florian Mueller/FOSSPatents, http://www.scroogled.com/ http://www.scroogled.com/ [when their own practices are very much the same], sponsoring fake studies that show that the TCO of Linux is much greater than that of Windows, and so on.) I certainly would be interested in an unbiased opinion on the topic, but I don't think anyone on Microsoft's payroll can give me that.
- jere 14y agoThe article is all about the difference between the innovation being created by low level employees and the stupid decisions by top level management who want to shut it all down. The author is among the former and even says he doesn't like ads, so I think your proposition that he is a Microsoft shill working in an elaborate anti-Google marketing campaign is misguided. There's not much excuse for not reading things and then complaining about them.
- twinge 14y agoJames Whittaker was not a "low level employee," he was a director of engineering. This is the same level as Kurzweil. At that level he was responsible for many management decisions, some of them probably "stupid."
- jere 14y agoFair enough. I may have read that incorrectly by focusing on him saying "shipping code", but he's still not the part of management at the very top making company wide decisions that have the power to crush large swaths of innovation (i.e. everything has to fit into google+) and that is more what I was referring to.
- chetanahuja 14y agoA company the size of Google has 100's of "Director"s. There are probably 3 or 4 layers between a director and the CEO... if not more. I doubt he had much to do with the actual market direction of the company (ironically... since the word "Director" would lead you to believe that it had something to do with directing).
- lucb1e 14y agoShouldn't the title be Quitting Google instead? This title sounds like Google is quitting, when instead an employee quit Google.
- piyush_soni 14y agoRight. That's what I thought while clicking the link "Google quitting what? "
- qompiler 14y agoThat's it folks, Sergey pulled the plug out of the Google server below his desk. Everyone go home.
- dclowd9901 14y agoMaybe it's a play on words, initially as the author participating in the act of "google quitting" but also meant to be interpreted as google itself quitting being the google it was.
- sidcool 14y agoWhy is this being upvoted now is beyond me. Am I missing something?
- Mahn 14y agoHN works in mysterious ways.
- michaelwww 14y agoSo he leaves Google because of steps they are taking to protect and enhance their revenue stream, and joins Microsoft? As a former Microsoftie, all I can say is that is like going from the kettle to the fire and doesn't make sense.
- forgotAgain 14y agoI've worked for neither company but my thought was the same as yours. Anyone who licenses software from Microsoft knows that lately their most important objective is increasing licensing revenues. Changing products to increase licensing or changing them to enhance a different revenue stream is six of one, half a dozen of the other for me.
- michaelwww 14y agoAfter reading this (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/05/25/google-20-time-vs-the-microsoft-garage.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/05/25/google...) I think his preference is mostly cultural. I never worked at Google, but I was born, raised and work in tech in the Bay Area. Microsoft culture rubbed me the wrong way when I was there. It seemed more what I imagine to be an organized and orderly Northern European governance under the cloudy, rainy skies. California Bay Area culture is more sunny and free libertarian with a dash of anarchy thrown in. You may discount my general characterization, but these things matter and people definitely have a preference.
- qompiler 14y agoI don't like Google. But I don't like Microsoft either. And this guy has evil written all over him. He worked at Microsoft for 3 years prior to joining Google. He is now back working for Microsoft. Blogging on msdn.com. http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-whittaker/13/878/229 http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-whittaker/13/878/229
- chollida1 14y ago> And this guy has evil written all over him. Can you explain what about him makes him "evil"?
- paranoiacblack 14y agoI think it's fairly clear that if you work for a large company like Google or Microsoft, you are quite literally the spawn of Satan.
- jdolitsky 14y ago^^ hahaha
- mikelat 14y agoI caught him munching on the bones of ethnic minorities once
- nchlswu 14y agoI feel like I've read or seen a fair bit of Google criticism from ex-Googlers on the msdn blogs. Can anyone confirm I haven't just been seeing this post over and over? I don't care if it's just optics; having a post about this on your current employers blog platform makes me highly suspicions, no matter how many people share his opinion
- angular 14y ago> is jaded by corporate greed and lack of innovation > goes to work at MSFT
- piyush_soni 14y agoThe fact that this 'personal blog' is on blogs.msdn.com says a lot :)
- mikecane 14y agoSo it's a year later and sharing still isn't broken and Google still isn't part of it. Maybe that's the point?
- petrel 14y agoGoogle first Kills or acquire small companies and then kill the acquired company for integrating it with Google Plus. Then turn off the service without thinking about the peoples using it. It is the power of huge money, monopoly and over confidence.
- ttrreeww 14y agoThe guy joined Microsoft as a Partner, Partners got it good at Microsoft, 500k/year (range is around 300k to 1 million a year) average and they were exempt from the yearly 10% mandatory cut the rest of the workers are exposed to.
- nilkn 14y agoThis guy was only at Google for three years (less, in fact), but this reads like he was a 10 year veteran or something. I can't really take it all that seriously because of that. He was offered a Partner position at Microsoft. That's why he left. No need to philosophize about corporate culture here.
- platinum1 14y agoThe funny thing is, before he was at Google, he was at Microsoft... and here's what he had to say to CNN/Fortune (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/29/the-problem-with-micr... http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/29/the-problem-with-micr...) in 2011 about Microsoft: "You want to innovate in mobile? ...deal with the made men who run the relevant cartel. And if they don't like you or your idea, your innovation goes nowhere."
- Apocryphon 14y agoBetween this piece and other comments I've seen in the wake of the anti-Google backlash of this past week, why is it that supposedly under Eric Schmidt, a "business guy" Google was all innovation and tech, and then when Larry Page, a very technical cofounder, took over, the company is now some sort of ad machine? If this is true, what does this say about leading personalities and company culture?
- ohsnapman 14y agoI've always felt that Ben Horowitz's characterization was the best: http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/15/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo/ http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/15/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo/ TLDR Eric was a peacetime CEO and could allow the company to do the things he allowed. Larry is a wartime CEO. Hard decisions need to be made, and the company needs to be driven with focus.
- qdog 14y agoI think this person's opinion is rather colored. Google has been about ads since before they were public. I personally don't have a Facebook page, and don't use g+ that much, so I'm not as infatuated with social networking as much as some I suppose, but I keep track of my karma on HN hourly when I post a message here, so to each his own. I have no idea what his second article about Microsoft and the mobile space is getting at. Look, if you think g+ is failing, what makes you think Microsoft is going to suddenly own the mobile space? I interviewed at a place in Seattle about 7 years ago that was doing Windows phone stuff, and again at MSFT at a different point for the windows mobile team as an embedded SWE. Microsoft has been in the mobile space forever, yet he's saying they are the innovative company capable to turning on a dime and taking over a new space? I don't believe it. My wife has a windows phone, I don't like it, she hates the Bing search. I just bought a nexus 4 to replace my G2 because I want software updates for a long time. My wife is probably moving to an iPhone or Nexus. Last I looked gmail supports imap, you don't have to view ads. I only see ads on my nexus when I use google services, they don't flash up on my screen randomly. I work on security for Windows, but for my own personal use, I just bought an ARM chromebook. It's a great price, despite the 'secure bootloader', it took me about 5 minutes to get the Ubuntu install started on an SD card, and if I screw up the recovery is drop dead simple. Right now, we are sweating bullets because if we make a mistake on Win8 boot, we are going to hose up the machine and recovery is long and painful. Google has plenty of problems, and sure if you ask me, Google+ has a terrible interface and shipping it without a good API was brain dead, but Microsoft sure doesn't seem to be setting the mobile world on fire. So I'd take this and many articles like it with a giant cake of salt.
- herdrick 14y agoI don't know. Google has come up with Glass and is working hard on the self driving car. Sounds pretty innovative still to me. I hope the author is wrong about the pipeline of new stuff.
- kushti 14y agoGoogle+ is a bizarre
- ok_craig 14y agoThis is going to come back every time Google does something the community here doesn't like, or which they see as "corporate-minded focus" over innovation.
- shreeshga 14y ago"Why I left Google" - said no Guido ever.
- packetslave 14y agoUm, you do know that Guido works at Dropbox now, right?
- nailer 14y agoThis site has very wide columns. Here's a readability link that might be easier to scan: http://www.readability.com/articles/nljhmuka http://www.readability.com/articles/nljhmuka
- nailer 14y agoThis site has very wide columns. Here's a readability link: http://www.readability.com/articles/nljhmuka http://www.readability.com/articles/nljhmuka
- weix 14y agoWorking at Google have much higher pressure than MS. not a place for loser.
- flyinRyan 14y agoNice personal attack for someone who's writing is barely comprehensible.
- saturdaysaint 14y agoLittle mention of Android and Chrome? No mention of Docs/Drive, self driving cars, Go, Google Fiber or their growing forays into hardware (Nexus, Glass)? As a lot of these indicate, one of Google's chief contributions in recent memory is helping to make computing cheap, ubiquitous and decidedly not monopolized by Microsoft. In the blink of an eye, we've gone from a world where everything the average person owns that can install software runs on Windows to a world where more like 1/3 (and shrinking) of a household's computing devices run Windows. And in 2013, Chromebooks and Steamboxes look like they could displace a lot more of MS's presence. There's a conflict of interest here. Even if their game is more complex than Coke vs Pepsi, these are very direct competitors. An ambitious Microsoftie has something to gain in a coy, well written put down that conveniently ignores the competition's bigger recent achievements.
- elaineo 14y agoI recently switched from using the Google Translate API to the Bing/Microsoft Translator API for my Android app, because Google charges usage fees while MS is free at the lowest tier. This was the first time I saw Google charge money for a service that Microsoft offers for free.
- nivla 14y agoCan you be kind enough to comment on the quality of translations? I am in need of a translation API for one of my projects and it is down to Google or Bing.
- elaineo 14y agoI have only used English-Spanish, but as far as I can tell, the results are approximately the same (translating individual words with appropriate verb conjugation but no regard for context). You can test them out in their browser apps: http://www.bing.com/translator/ http://www.bing.com/translator/ http://translate.google.com/ http://translate.google.com/
- nivla 14y agoCool.. thanx for your input! :)
- anotherbadlogin 14y ago"Exhibit A: www.facebook.com/nike, a company with the power and clout of Nike putting their own brand after Facebook’s?" Pretty pathetic, really. Hopefully someday that URL will carry the same credibility penalty as an AOL E-mail address. To a lot of us, it already does.
- arthurrr 14y agoThe way I see it, Google is the new Microsoft, and Microsoft is not dead yet, but becoming more and more irrelevant. Now, what has to happen for Google to become irrelevant?
- qwertzlcoatl 14y ago"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads." - Jeff Hammerbacher, Facebook
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]