19 ms·

Google's Decline Really Bugs Me

411 points by blackhole 13y ago

lazyjones 13y ago
Google was the antithesis of Microsoft as the author writes and is now doomed to become the same. It's a monopoly that has come to dictate its terms for maximum profit and resilience against competition. By becoming "evil", it is opening opportunities for a new antithesis of itself. Perhaps Twitter will take that spot, perhaps some entirely different company from the Far East? That's the way it goes ...
- twelvechairs 13y ago
  twitter are showing signs of going the same way. what it takes is someone prepared to take a low-prifit long-haul trust based approach rather than 'monetise now!'. this is a hard choice to make at the moment when its so easy to make money from investors who think they can both make big profits and keep users signing up.
  - TylerE 13y ago
    e.g. Amazon
- wrongc0ntinent 13y ago
  Initially it was just the best at what it did, pretty much leaving all others behind. I didn't hate yahoo, but they got smoked. And remember the "AOL keyword"? I think we romanticize here a little bit, I don't remember Microsoft being the enemy early on, as disliked as they were.
yapcguy 13y ago
The rot was setting in long before Larry Page became CEO. For me, the first sign was GMail and their broken/perverted IMAP model.
- stephenr 13y ago
  I never understood why they didn't just expose their tags as imap keywords?
  - saurik 13y ago
    I think the argument is that no existing client that a user would actually have on their PC supported flags in any meaningful way: they weren't stored efficiently, they weren't presented in a way the user could effectively see, and in many cases they were limited to a random subset of flags (in the case of some clients, like Thunderbird, you could have exactly five flags with the names flag1 through flag5). The support in some clients has become more reasonable, but it is still not really usable. Even at the protocol level it is only recently that there is any effective way where flags could be efficiently resynchronized between the client and the server, and AFAIK there still isn't a standard to let flags have remap able high-level Unicode names. Sure, it would be interesting to push client developers to start maybe considering flags to be an interesting thing to support sufficiently to let a user work with Gmail, but frankly wouldn't we expect Google, as users, to build something actually usable?
stephenr 13y ago
Steve jobs didn't say to maximise profits. He said make great products, rather than simply adequate products.
birken 13y ago
Here are 3 pertinent facts related to your post: 1) When I worked there, long before Larry Page was CEO, 20% time barely existed and Google cared a heck of a lot about making money. 2) The share price going up makes employees, former employees, and all sorts of non-"wall street investors" very happy. 3) Your hacker news about section links to your Google+ page
- dewiz 13y ago
  >> 3) Your hacker news about section links to your Google+ page ..where he published a link to the same article. I don't understand why you point this out, the user says he's using Google products, so what ?
- nostrademons 13y ago
  1) 20% time still exists. I used it to write an HTML parser [1] that's had some modest success, and I have coworkers that have 20%ed on robotics, quantum computation, elementary school education, Project Loon, Flu Trends, and a variety of other interesting things. Google Now came out of a 20% project. It is something that you have to take a lot of initiative on to pull off successfully, but the opportunity is still available. [1] https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser
  - mathattack 13y ago
    Does 20% realistically come between 80 and 100%, 100 and 120, or 120 and 140%?
    - na85 13y ago
      What does that even mean? edit: Yes, let's downmod the guy who doesn't understand an obtusely-worded question. Well done.
      - reikonomusha 13y ago
        He's asking if the 20% time is exclusively: 1. genuinely 20% of one's full-time schedule; 2. 20% beyond one's full-time schedule; or 3. 20% beyond one's over-time schedule.
wrongc0ntinent 13y ago
Back when I was showing off my Google T-shirt, this is what they were (archive.org): https://web.archive.org/web/20001203022500/http://www.google.com https://web.archive.org/web/20001203022500/http://www.google... A lot more's changed than just a CEO.
- onedev 13y ago
  Have any cool stories to share?
- jonathonf 13y ago
  Tried and was disappointed I couldn't search the 2000-era web.
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    One query works: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+in+1998 https://www.google.com/search?q=google+in+1998
  - asveikau 13y ago
    The old school yahoo style categorization of links works. I was pretty surprised, I used google back then and didn't remember them having that...
  - dyoo1979 13y ago
    In Google search, select the "Search tools". You can set a custom range, and that effectively allows you to search the index from the 20th century.
devindotcom 13y ago
Yeah, I had many of the same sentiments that I wrote up around the time the death of Reader was announced (http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/17/god-damn-it-google/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/17/god-damn-it-google/). I can't really look to them for inspiration any more, which is a greater loss than I would have admitted a year or two ago when I finally admitted Google was no longer Google. Oh well. Next!
IBM 13y ago
They are the new Microsoft but they're trying to avoid the same fate of companies like Yahoo and Microsoft; i.e viewed as stodgy old companies that aren't great places to work. The perception about Google needs to be "innovative" which is why there is lots of PR about their X Labs initiatives. But if you think about all of the high profile ones, they aren't really attractive businesses. Driverless cars? It's technology that all the major car companies have been working on for years and is close to market. This means they aren't going to create a business of licensing that tech to them. Are they going to get into the high capex business of car manufacturing? Google Fiber? Same story. Capex heavy business with lower margins than being an ad company. It also takes a lot of time to scale it up and roll it out to cities. Most of these things are for PR rather than real businesses that will be successful and change Google's revenue mix from 90%+ advertising to anything else. Even in their core business, Cost Per Clicks continue to trend down. This is a deterioration in pricing power largely being driven by the shift to computing on mobile devices. Their latest quarterly results were good because they are essentially "making it up in volume", but there is a limit to how much ad inventory you can squeeze out of all your properties to keep driving aggregate clicks up without pissing off users or trashing your products.
- antonius 13y ago
  "Companies like Yahoo and Microsoft; i.e viewed as stodgy old companies that aren't great places to work." For what reasons is Microsoft not a great place to work? I may be biased because my brother works there full-time and a friend is interning there but both of them very much enjoy it.
  - IBM 13y ago
    My comment about them is how they're perceived in the industry, in reality they may be great places to work.
    - MAGZine 13y ago
      Other than stack-ranking thing/general office politics, I don't really have a negative preception of Microsoft. Is this a supposed-perception, or an actual perception? I don't know anything about Yahoo!, but my perceptions of them are still positive. If you have an awful work environment, people will just go elsewhere. especially if you're qualified to work at either company.
dictum 13y ago
> Now it's just another large company - only concerned about maximizing profit. > Google was a company that, for a time, I loved. To me, they represented the antithesis of Microsoft, a rebellion against a poisonous corporate culture dominated by profiteering that had no regard for its users. Maybe You're Just Not Their Target Demographic Anymore™ Google had better ideals, sure. But I'd say their current actions are actually making Google's products better for more people. Unfortunately, as their products improve for the majority of people, they become less accommodating[1] of early users and people who actually care about privacy, restraint in advertising, and domain-specific needs. However, OP doesn't provide specific examples of what Google did that made him worry, just a general discomfort with Google that's been voiced countless times since their IPO. I hate their general attitude about privacy, their gradual shoving of ads everywhere, and the usual we-are-open stuff used to divert questioning, but maybe it's time to admit that Google is just getting better at things that don't matter to you. [1]: It's a false choice, yes: they could keep honoring their initial principles and still grow and profit, but has any behemoth corporation ever done that?
- lazyjones 13y ago
  > But I'd say their current actions are actually making Google's products better for more people. Can you explain how forcing people to use their real names (or something that passes as such) is making Google's products better for more people? How about the inbox spam in Gmail, or the large ads they have been testing on Google itself apparently (http://www.seroundtable.com/google-adwords-huge-image-ad-17568.html http://www.seroundtable.com/google-adwords-huge-image-ad-175...) while they penalize large ads above the fold on indexed pages (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.at/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.at/2012/01/page-la...), or, like someone else pointed out here, killing Reader? Frankly, I may not be their target demographic either, but for most of the recent changes they got flak over I simply have to shake my head and wonder what they were thinking and how they could actually claim to make things better for anyone but themselves. Perhaps I'm too stupid to understand ...
  - dictum 13y ago
    Maybe I'm just jaded and never really saw Google as a a nice company with good intentions, but I just can't be sad about Google's new directions. My suggestion to everyone who's worried about Google: other companies would be really happy to service your needs. There are other companies offering e-mail services, ad services, internet search (the one thing there's no absolute replacement for yet[1], but with your patronage, a new competitor could get there), internet messaging, website analytics, maps, mobile operating systems... and new companies could appear in these areas. > Can you explain how forcing people to use their real names (or something that passes as such) is making Google's products better for more people? I dislike their new real names policy, but: human faces. Humans are drawn to other humans' faces. That's why they're pushing to use Google+ photos on ads. Also, people are drawn to names of people they know. That's why they nudged website owners to associate their domains with their personal Google+ accounts. They're essentially trying to make their services more like a social network so people discover YouTube videos while browsing YouTube, not Twitter or Facebook, for instance. A simpler explanation: Google is trying to remain relevant and grow even more using the same magic that made Facebook big: your friends. [1]: In my experience, DDG is good at searches related to programming, mediocre at searches related to non-tech stuff, and terrible at searches in languages other than English. It's getting better, though.
guybrushT 13y ago
Reports of Google's decline are greatly exaggerated :) G+ is annoying, but these days no large company can make all their users happy, with all their products/features/changes, all the time. The so-called erosion of 'Don't be evil' has just become more apparent now, but as long as I have known google, they always made money from ads - and ads are fundamentally evil (IMHO). Search, maps, email etc are quite nice and I use those everyday. Fast, reliable, solid products - vastly improved since I first used them (many years ago). Where is the decline?
- Someone 13y ago
  Ads are _fundamentally_ evil? What mechanism do you propose for bringing new products to the attention of customers, then? Or are new products and/or customers also fundamentally evil, IYHO?
  - kbenson 13y ago
    I wouldn't say they are fundamentally evil, but I think as the field of advertising has advanced along with psychology, there's some troubling current and possible future uses we should be wary of. At this point I think having a wary stance towards advertising is not only acceptable, it's prudent.
  - dingaling 13y ago
    Most ads are designed to resonate on an emotional level, rather than being purely informative. It's the sophistication of their design in order to pierce our emotional 'firewall' that makes them 'evil'; they're basically exploits against the human mind.
    - izolate 13y ago
      Such poetic diction. I agree completely.
  - pit 13y ago
    Word of mouth.
  - 13y ago
dpmehta02 13y ago
This article would have been much more persuasive had it specified the actual decisions made by Google that illustrate exactly how that company has "lost its way" (i.e., chosen profit over solving important problems).
jdreaver 13y ago
> Larry Page worshiped Steve Jobs, who gave him a bunch of bad advice centered around maximizing profit. What is so bad about maximizing profit? If you make a profit, it means people are willingly giving you money for the service you provide. You make more profit when people feel they benefit more from your service. People can complain about Google until the end of time, but as long as the cash keeps flowing then Google is getting the signal that everything they are doing is in the interest of the consumer. Now, I don't know if the "decline" of Google, as asserted by the OP, has actually affected their bottom line, because I'm not on the board at Google. I just think it's silly to throw around the word "profit" as if it's some sort of evil goal. Profit is the foundation of a monetary-based economy, and therefore modern human civilization. There is no signal available that is as efficient as profit as a proxy for the wants of the consumer, and how to most efficiently allocate scarce resources.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  >You make more profit when people feel they benefit more from your service. // That's clearly not the only way to make more profit. If for example one has entrenched users and cuts the level of service markedly, or increases the cost, then profit increases. There is no need for anyone to benefit more other than the shareholders. You can also improve a service without charging more. Again profit and benefit will not be directly correlated. For me Google's search has been doing down-hill for a year or so, to my recollection. I've been using them for about 15 years. It's my primary point of contact despite using webmaster tools and a couple of other offerings. Usually I try alternate SE about once every year to see if I can find something that works better for me. I just changed my primary SE to duckduckgo. Being so used to Google's interface it's proving hard but not impossible (as it was a last year for me); still not sure I'll settle on it but continually convinced Google isn't working any more.
  - jdreaver 13y ago
    Excellent point. I was implicitly assuming that your costs were unchanged, but of course there are more ways to make a profit than more revenue.
  - 13y ago
RexRollman 13y ago
I don't think Google is "evil" but I do think it really all comes down to how Google makes their money. They are not like Microsoft or Apple, who actually sells things to end users. I suspect we will see the same thing with Twitter too, as they seek to monetize their service.
znowi 13y ago
I loved the early Google. A lot. But it's dead now. What's left is just the name and a dusty plaque in the corner that reads: don't be evil. It will still attract smart people, but they will be of other kind to match the new company culture. The kind that joins Microsoft and Oracle. Those who follow the protocol, happy in their bubble, with the prime goal of maximization of profit. At all costs.
gilgoomesh 13y ago
The paragraph involving Steve Jobs is a misquote at best or a completely wrong at worst. If you read the article that paragraph links, it doesn't mention "maximizing profit" or money at all. I think this paragraphs reflects badly on the entire article – it makes the article appear to be a struggle to create a connect-the-dots conspiracy behind Google's actions (evil Steve Jobs told Larry Page to be evil and now Google is evil). Steve Jobs told Larry Page to gave a strong focus on key products. You could certainly argue that Google are too strongly focussed on AdWords and Google+ but that's not the point that McClure argues.
- dmak 13y ago
  After reading the Steve Jobs book, the biggest emphasis was focus on making a great product. He was never in it for the money; He was making $1 a year at one point.
  - Fomite 13y ago
    $1 a year and a massive pile of stock. That's a big show of faith in your abilities and your company, but that's hardly "Never in it for the money".
    - Amadou 13y ago
      That's a big show of faith in your abilities and your company It's a tax dodge if the company's share price is at least level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-dollar_salary#Instances_of_alternative_compensation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-dollar_salary#Instances_of...
    - enraged_camel 13y ago
      He really was not in it for the money though. He genuinely believed that if you make fantastic products, the rest (including money) falls into place.
  - teddyroo 13y ago
    Jobs made way more money off Pixar than Apple
SloughFeg 13y ago
I stopped reading at "I'm not female, so I don't have to worry about getting thousands of rape threats every month". Inserting unsubstantiated claims for shock value into an argument just detracts from any other points he is trying to make.
- kordless 13y ago
  I read the damn thing three times and can't find a point to any of it. What I see is a bunch of rambling doom and gloom statements: "and then it all came tumbling down". What exactly has tumbled here? The fact they jacked with the YouTube comment system?
  - ehmish 13y ago
    XMPP Syndication, (And with that interoperability), an increase of invasiveness of their ads (for those without adblock), the death of Google Reader, there's plenty more if you read up.
- ehmish 13y ago
  I disagree, It seems women get more rape threats than men, hence privacy would have a higher concern for them. As I've never had a rape threat directed at me, I'm far more relaxed about my privacy than I can imagine someone who has had a rape threat directed at them would be.
- wpietri 13y ago
  That hardly needs substantiation if you pay even modest attention to the experience of outspoken women on the Internet. Just off the top of my head: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/internet/2012/06/dear-internet-why-you-cant-have-anything-nice http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/internet/2012/06/dear-inte... http://www.clutchmagonline.com/2013/03/adria-richards-receives-rape-threats-and-loses-her-job-for-reporting-sexual-harassment/ http://www.clutchmagonline.com/2013/03/adria-richards-receiv... http://www.cosmopolitan.com/advice/work-money/lindy-west-bullied-for-having-an-opinion-on-rape http://www.cosmopolitan.com/advice/work-money/lindy-west-bul...
- workbench 13y ago
auggierose 13y ago
I admire the guys who can pull off something great with just 20%. I could not do that. When I have something that excites me, it soon grabs 100% of me.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  20% time is the idea that it's OK to put "only" 32 hours (or, in practice, 25-30) on your assigned project, but there is certainly not an 8-hour maximum on the side project. If you want a promotion, you'll have to put in more time than 25-32 hpw; but you won't get in trouble at that effort level. Of course, this is true in most companies-- a 25-hour effort on your assigned work is not low enough to get you fired, almost anywhere; it means that you're not outrunning the bear but you're outrunning someone-- but the difference is that you don't have to hide side projects. That makes a pretty substantial difference. It's a good idea, not because the number means anything, but because it means that (under most managers, although there are exceptions) you don't have to deny or hide working on other things ("skunk works") that might prove useful. You can talk about them openly. In companies without 20%T projects, people still do those types of projects, but are afraid to share their work, which means those projects go nowhere. Google doesn't seem to have that problem. If you build a demo and share it, that's encouraged. Google is still better than many companies (yes, I'll say it; it is, if you land in the right place, a great place to work) but an incredible amount depends on your manager. The biggest moral failing of Google probably is how easily a manager can become a SPOF for your career. That's not different from most companies, but any firm that wants to call itself progressive ought to solve that problem. You'd think it would be a first order of business.
  - auggierose 13y ago
    Still, a certain mental makeup is necessary to be able to switch between projects like that. When I work on a project that interests me, I go to bed thinking about it, and in the morning I want to continue where I left it. Often I'll see things clearer after such a sleep break, and then I cannot just switch to another project instead of trying out an idea I had.
    - 13y ago
untilHellbanned 13y ago
"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" -Mark Twain/Google
mangala 13y ago
Here Here!
amaks 13y ago
Steve Jobs' advice was not (only) to maximize profits, but to consolidate the products, reduce the number of products "because Google was all over the place". That's from the Steve Jobs autobiography by Walter Isaacson. So far, it looks like Larry Page took Steve Jobs advice to his heart and executes precisely on that vision: all products get integrated together (including through the Google+), innovation rate is still high and growing, company is super successful in post PC world.
matthewmacleod 13y ago
What's with the sudden outpouring of Google-hate of late? I totally get that Google is changing, and has been doing so for a while. But I don't see that as "evil," and I'm struggling to see why anybody would. Google around maybe five or six years ago was a wasteland of shoddy, broken, unintegrated products, many with half-assed, confusing interfaces. That's been tightened up - many of their products are now substantially better; there's a coherent account and profile system in place; the weak products have been culled. Their focus is a lot better. I'm probably using Google resources less than I used to - GMail's interface pisses me off, the new Maps layout is infuriating, and search is broadly speaking totally broken for me in places. I'm also acutely aware that Google's audience has changed - it's no longer tech-savvy early adopters, but almost everybody who has an Internet connection. Unfortunately, the interests of the minority groups of users are going to fall by the wayside as the business evolves. To some extent, that's great - it opens up gaps in the market where other products can get a look-in. If Google's search sucks, I'm sure a competitor will pop up. Same with Gmail, or Docs, or Hangouts… etc. There are unsurprisingly some areas in which Google's record is not 100% clean - they stopped supporting RSS, removed XMPP federation, require profile verification (apparently) - but in most cases, I can certainly see how the business or technical case for these could legitimately be made. These are not evil actions - they're just ones that you (and I) don't agree with. Fair enough - we're under no obligation to use Google's services. In the meantime, they continue to develop a huge diversity of open-source software and protocols, and I hear it's still a great place to work. I guess at the end of the day you could be right - Google has declined from your perspective. But I doubt that's true from the perspective of their wider user base.
- kruipen 13y ago
  http://rbt.asia/g/thread/S38087806#p38088073 http://rbt.asia/g/thread/S38087806#p38088073
- Zoomla 13y ago
  it looks like you answered your own question (at least partially): "GMail's [new] interface pisses me off, the new Maps layout is infuriating" ... but there is many other reasons to dislike Google's choices... I still miss the - and + operator when using Google search for example (this change happened when they started to push Google+)
mempko 13y ago
Only reason to be disappointed is if you expected something else out of capitalists....
- Brakenshire 13y ago
  It's not so much about capitalism, I suspect, as about becoming a public company, with a mindset which inevitably becomes centred around quarterly returns.
- wpietri 13y ago
  I expected them to retain some of their academic ethos. My problem isn't that I expected too much out of capitalists; I just expected them not to become pure capitalists. And here by "capitalist" I mean the current American zeitgeist's version of that term, mainly as defined by MBAs. I think there are other versions of capitalism that are much more interesting.
- Grue3 13y ago
  Capitalism isn't usually known for delivering subpar products. "Maximizing profits" has resulted in some incredibly functional and effective websites in the past. Google thinks stuffing them with ads and making users give away their personal data will bring them maximum profit? Well, antagonizing customers is usually not the best business strategy.
michaelochurch 13y ago
This is not worth getting "bugged" about. I say this as one who made that exact mistake. It's really traumatic to see those who are supposed to be leading fail, but it's an ahistorical truth not worth getting emotional about. I don't care to speak about Google, but more generally, here's something everyone needs to know. Regarding the way we assess companies, it's probably the truest thing in the world. Here it is: reputation is positively correlated with past moral decency and negatively correlated with future* moral decency.* That might seem strange, but keep in mind that organizations change and, within 5 years, it will be a different set of people. Doing the right thing begets a good reputation (such as that held by Microsoft in 1997, Google in 2013, Silicon Valley until recently) but that reputation also admits complacency. If the same people were in charge, they'd possibly continue doing the right thing. But a new set of people inherit that favorable standing and use it as an excuse to get away with bad behavior. This is as old as dirt. It's why there is a centuries-old hatred of inherited wealth and position in all modernized cultures. The same applies to "Silicon Valley". It's easy to look at its fall from grace with hatred and disgust; but the fact is that the people now on top are 50 years separated from the ones who built it; so why, exactly, is it a surprise that the ones on top now are so shitty? It shouldn't be. They inherited the reputations of their forebears (which is why they have favorable tax laws, a "cool" image not shared by more traditional companies, and their pick of top young talent) but not the values. Preventing this kind of moral decay requires growing slowly: very slowly. Look at Valve, weighing in around 330 people after 17 years. If they'd had VCs breathing down their necks to reach 2000 people at 5 years, there's no way they could have maintained that open allocation culture. If something grows organically and sanely, then there is a chance for there to be enough stability that reputation carries a positive signal (because past good behavior is a likely sign of the future) but if it grows at a venture-capital pace, reputation almost always predicts low moral decency in the future (especially since that reputation is usually bought from the tech press, not established organically over years).
- yuhong 13y ago
  On Google, I hope you have read this: http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-its-a-game-of-thrones-in-mountain-view-2013-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-it...
vuck 13y ago
I really wish people would shut up about Google's "ideals". They're a company, not a messiah. Companies operate on a midpoint between what they want to do and what they need to do, and Google (like every company) has slid towards their "evil" neccessities over time. Don't like it? That's fine, neither do I. But stop preaching about a morality that was never there.
brosco45 13y ago
Yeah, I noticed Google interviewers are no longer showing enthusiasm during the interview, it's a very worrying sign.
- dchichkov 13y ago
  Shouldn't be a problem. Just start a rumor that you like interviewees that are showing their enthusiasm a lot. They would start showing it.
- gdulli 13y ago
  It took a while for me to be able to articulate it, but that was what bothered me about my interview. The recruiter was all positivity, but the first real person who interviewed me seemed like he hated his job. It was the biggest turn-off.
- drewhk 13y ago
  Same here. On one screening the guy actually said "it is not like how you imagine it to be". And it did not sound as an encouragement.
kailuowang 13y ago
I agree that Google is becoming a lot more intrusive towards her end users and the incentive behind it is probably profit. But at lease for software developers, from my experience, we as a group benefit from Google MORE than 5 years ago. Chrome AngularJS Go Selenium Webdriver dart Even Google Hangout with screen share helped our distributed team a lot. 5 years ago, what did Google offer? GWT? And, of course, the search engine, we developers probably use it more than many other groups users. I hardly heard anyone use alternative search engine for day-to-day software development related search. All these are of zero cost to us.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- zobzu 13y ago
  arguably half the stuff you listed would be seen as useless or even bad from another point of view. heck 5years ago at least google results weren't a bunch of advertisements and i'm not talking of the first 5 "sponsored results". That alone, was a huge bonus to humanity in general. Nothing less.
timr 13y ago
If you ask me, one of Google's biggest strategic successes was their ability to convince an entire generation of engineers that they were something other than a company. The way many (otherwise intelligent) people talk about it, you'd think it was a religion. What you're seeing here is not the shattering of a dream, but of an illusion -- Google hasn't been a scrappy, idealistic startup for many years. It's a fine company, but it's a big company -- a collection of tens of thousands of people, all motivated by different hopes and dreams. No institution of that size behaves consistently, let alone consistently benevolently. In other words: stop setting up false idols, and your reality won't be shattered when they disappoint you.
- 1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago
  You mean it isn't? http://www.thechurchofgoogle.org/ http://www.thechurchofgoogle.org/
  - pantalaimon 13y ago
    > Facebook social plugin HERETICS
- alaskamiller 13y ago
  While eating my second dinner plate of something delicious on the campus I looked around and saw how many children and families were around. The company provides, so much, for you, for your family. You wouldn't to ever lose what you have now gotten used to, for yourself, for your family. So now you become a company man. What's good for the company must be good for you. What's good about knowing more people, how they think, how they behave, what they want, must be good for the company, which turn must be good for you, good for your family. It's just a series of intricate goodness being passed around from group to group, people to people. No one inherently is evil, but the system can end up be directed towards evil inevitably. Either way, it just was damn good pork chops with quinoa. We didn't get this kind of chow in the Marine Corps, and I would have killed for it.
  - chii 13y ago
mililani 13y ago
When Google Voice and free calls stop being free, I'm completely jumping off Google's bandwagon: gmail, google voice, google search, etc...
wpietri 13y ago
One of the most salient facts to me is that Google was formed as a rebellion against the existing search companies and their business practices. I think "don't be evil" and "organizing the world's information" were entirely sincere, and I miss that spirit. Now I can't really distinguish them from any other company. As hegemons go, I guess they're still better than average. And they're way better than Microsoft. But Google's decline makes me wonder where they're going to bottom out.
ttunguz 13y ago
The main argument in the article is that as Google has gotten bigger, its profit motive has become more important to the company, which is negatively impacting new and old products. While Google may have to continue to generate more revenue growth from AdWords and AdSense and YouTube in order to keep the stock going up and generate more cash, the majority of Google products aren't at all impacted by profit motive. In fact, most of the product initiatives at Google sap profit. Android is a multi-billion dollar bet on mobile OS Calico is a billion dollar bet on extending life ChromeOS is a multi-billion dollar bet on laptop/TV ChromeBrowser is a hundred-million dollar bet on browsing Google Glass is a multi-billion dollar bet on next gen devices Self driving cars are a multi-billion dollar bet on, well, self driving cars. None of these, save perhaps Android, has any chance of driving material revenue to the business in the next five years. Most of the hardware bets Google makes are money losers because they routinely subsidize hardware. When I was there, I launched two product features that each cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars and were visible on the earnings-per-share number in the quarterly revenues we reported to Wall Street. The argument might stand on Google.com, where the number of ads has increased. But for the majority of products (Gmail, Drive, Spreadsheets, Docs, Keep, Maps, Calendar, Books, Finance, Music, etc), it's hard to justify a profit motive argument.
- slyv 13y ago
  I think people are seeing the products that Google has to maximize profit on (Youtube, AdSense, G+, etc...) and using those as the basis for the entire ecosystem that is Google. Google, as you pointed out, is much more than just the products that make money. I find it incredibly shortsighted to fault a company that tries to make money in order to pay for these great research projects. I really don't mind ads. Its a free service to use, I can live with some ads, I still get my search that I like, I still get the experience that I like, and I patronize the company that provides this without any dime out of my pocket. Plus, Google is using these funds to research these multi-billion dollar initiatives like self-driving cars that I couldn't fathom to undertake on my own.
shmerl 13y ago
> They founded the company with the motto "Don't Be Evil", and the unspoken question was, how long would this last? The answer, oddly enough, was "until Larry Page took over". This is probably very to the point. "Don't be evil" was Sergey Brin's push, and Larry Page doesn't seem to share it.
- nostrademons 13y ago
  "Don't be evil" was Amit Patel & Paul Buchheit's push. Sergey, according to them, is the arbiter of what is "evil". Separation of powers and all that.
dschiptsov 13y ago
It is not a decline, it is just "maturation" or even "over-ripeness". Speaking for a decline, it is rather a decline of interest in "internets" in general and especially social networks in particular. It is no longer a "shiny new thing". So, Google, as FB, are trying to squeeze everything what is left from G+ and its flagship Gmail, just because everything switches to mobile and a chat is a new email. That is why they are pushing Hangouts and FB pushes Messenger, which both wants to hijack your SMS app. But chat apps are too simple and it is not so easy to push ads here, because users will just switch to less annoying rival's service. So, let's say that it is a decline of browser-based "internets", and email as a default way of communication, not just Google or FB.
stretchwithme 13y ago
Oh, poor Sergei and Larry, duped into taking bad advice from Steve Jobs.
6ren 13y ago
Search engines have zero switching costs, so mainstream PR is a key competitive advantage for Google (not engineer PR). Their massive capital investment in server farms (esp. for google suggest) is another. 20% time was a long-term strategy to lead new technologies instead of being disrupted by them. Google+ is a short-term strategy to avoid being disrupted by facebook. Long-term self-interest is often close to "good" (so close it may be why it's good). oblig snark: Instead of turning evil, Google be like Sun - die, and be reanimated by evil piecemeal.
MichaelMoser123 13y ago
I am sick of all this Google bashing here on HN; that's what is bugging me, really. Come on, its a company, they don't owe you anything; They sell your data, yes, but it's still the best search engine, by far; to me it's a tool, and yes, they also use their customers as tools to sell adds, that's what the internet is all about - pushing adds. They could still do worse, they could push much more adds than they do now, but they don't; That's something that few people seem to notice.
buyx 13y ago
Google has always had a massive weakness: feedback. Feedback on products is atrocious -Google Now on my iPhone shows me a route home that would send me the wrong way up a freeway, and I don't know where to report it. Years ago, I ran into a serious issue with Google Desktop, and the bug was poorly documented. Their maps data in Johannesburg has some annoying data issues, and is rewriting the geography of the city, because it is relied on by third party sites. They do respond to some Maps reports, and other problems can be fixed in Map Maker, but some are too big. The common thread in these problems is that Google has very poor feedback mechanisms - a problem that has existed for years. Given their success in organising data, you'd think there would be a way for them to handle feedback efficiently, and in a standardised way across products. But feedback doesn't seem to be a priority. A few months ago, HN became an unofficial support board, with various tales of woe posted here, and then fixed by Googlers If they get their feedback and bug reporting right, I'd be willing to cut them some slack: as a company, they aren't particularly abusive. Wanting to clean up YouTube comments is commendable and overdue, and their search engine remains very useful. It's easy enough to lock down a Google+ profile if you want, and to tweak Gmail to be less annoying.
- curiousdannii 13y ago
  And their open source projects like Chrome do have public bug trackers, but in my experience I've either been ignored or treated with what I felt was contempt. The first is probably the same feedback problem as everywhere, the second is because the Chrome developers don't want the same kind of internet I do...
SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago
Article says "To me, they represented the antithesis of Microsoft" IMHO all they are is following a similar trajectory around 20 years later than Microsoft.
lollancf37 13y ago
LMAO
bambax 13y ago
Turns out adult supervision wasn't all bad. I remember some time ago, probably 2002-2003 (?) when Bill Gates said something along the lines of "every tech company goes through a period of love at the beginning, and then that love turns to resentment; Google is in the middle of their "love" period and Microsoft is way past it; but that will change". And, like a newly wed, I remember thinking: nah, that can't change. My love of Google will never fade. Yet here we are; today no company annoys me more than Google; every decision they make seems bad. Like most people I still use their products, but every time I do I wish I didn't, like when I was driving a Renault.
- 72deluxe 13y ago
  Haha driving a Renault Made me laugh, thanks!
  - squozzer 13y ago
    I think (s)he meant, "Praying to god it doesn't break down on me again" while driving.
hartator 13y ago
> waiting until an investor accidentally makes the world a better place in the process of trying to make as much money as possible What the what? I don't agree with the article. I feel the main issue with google is its laziness. No more legacy internet explorer support, imposing a bad google + whereas make it better...
d4nt 13y ago
Google, and tech companies in general, should not be trying to innovate despite the need to make money, they should be trying to innovate because of the need to make money. If Google have lost that culture of innovation because of a short term need for operational efficiency then it will hurt them in the long run. People have observed how Microsoft failed to capitalise early on the internet, the smartphone explosion and the tablet explosion because of a poor culture. While that effect takes many years to hurt the bottom line, it is real and it hurts. If Google go down the same road then that is them failing at plain old capitalism, not the death of some alternative utopian dream.
Tloewald 13y ago
I don't see Steve Jobs's "bad advice" having anything to do with maximizing profits but with maximizing excellence and surviving. Apple in the late 80s and early 90s was an unfocused beacon of creativity that led to the company nearly going under (PowerPC, OpenDoc, Taligent, Kaleida, Dylan, Newton, QuickDraw GX, AV macs with video conferencing when QuickTime barely worked, Copland). Was the advice bad? Quite possibly. But it was sincere and i don't think profit was the motive.
codelust 13y ago
Unsurprisingly, companies (especially ones that are growing) do change and those changes impact their relationship with their customers/consumers. Tech is no different on that front, where it is different is that, unlike your department store, tech is something that you carry with you almost all the time. Understandably, people do get upset by this a lot more than what a similar change at a department store would result in. I have been a fan of Google and have used a lot of its products over time. The company has been changing for a while now and a significant part of that change is that it is making the transition from being someone in the background (the advertising business), to someone who wants a front seat in everything digital. Consequently, its product line will also start to reflect that change. And one of the obvious outcomes of such a change is that a lot of us who have used Google's products extensively from the early days are no longer the primary target group for the company. Early adopters rarely form the mass market and it is the same in the case of Google. Products like Gmail were never front line products. These happened to exist by leveraging existing tech within the company. With Glass, Android etc., these products are now moving to the front lines for the company. I still use Gmail extensively, most of my video is consumed on Youtube, I still use search, Android and Drive (for online docs & Keep, not file sync). My main Google account does not have G+ on it and while things are not perfect, it is so far usable. I've rarely commented on YT, can't rate anything anymore on Play Store, but I can live with all that, at least for now. I fully expect the situation to worsen for people like me in the years to come on Google, but that is OK. It will eventually lead to newer products coming into the market and that is always a good thing. Email will be the first thing I will switch and I think that will happen before the second half of 2014 swings around. All said and done, I have been happy with Google being around -- they revolutionized search, made email an enabler than a pain (better storage & spam management) and every now and then I discover something awesome on YT that makes so grateful that it exists. It has given me much more than what it (and NSA ;-)) probably has taken from me. Irony in all of this is that all this while everyone has criticized Google for being an ill-organized one-trick-pony! Maybe the OTP was a better company after all, eh?
SilkRoadie 13y ago
I am not sure decline is the correct word. Google's choice of direction really bugs me. Scrapping the 20% developer time is fine. Cutting down projects to focus the company on a handful of products is cool. I never used Reader anyway. What is worrying is the way Google is becoming more and more creepy. They have so much information about you and with the increasing rollout of Google+ I feel more and more like I am being stalked. Even when I am not on Google sites their ad's follow me around. It used to be relevant ad's. That was ok. Now I visit the Alienware website and all I see are Alienware banners everywhere I go for the next week. Its freaky. Now Google+ wants to do away with your alias and force you to use your real identity. Why would you ever want to do that? For a while there was a warning "be careful what you put on Facebook, it could get you fired." Google are trying to make that "be careful what you put on the Internet." Perhaps some people will improve the quality of their comments.. I think a far better chance is that someone looking for me will find a 4 year old opinion or me playing devils advocate in an arguement and think I am a bigot, ill-imformed, stupid, whatever as a result.. The fact is that I want my email and my documents to be linked to me and my name. Anything else I would like to be attached to a throwaway name like the one I have on HN. Something I can abandon without worry that my opinions in 2013 will survive as "internet fact" for years to come.
- DanBC 13y ago
  > Now I visit the Alienware website and all I see are Alienware banners everywhere I go for the next week. Its freaky. You point out a really weird feature of targeted ads. Someone mentions something, I do a websearch for that thing and look at a couple of websites. And then, for weeks afterwards, I get that stuff in my ads. I'm very tolerant of ads (don't run an ad blocker, etc) but I wish there was some better way of guiding what ads I really don't like. An option box for "Please don't ever show me this ad again," with a few reasons would be great.
- elastoplast 13y ago
  20% time has not been scrapped. This is a recurrent rumour that pops up over and over again. It is not true. There have always been people who felt like they were unable to take it, or it was really 120% time or whatever. I've had a variety of 20% projects for years, and I've never worked 120%. You have to be able to manage your teams and managers expectations, and if you commit to a deadline and fall behind then you're obviously going to have to "bank" that time. If you are in a team or get yourself into a position where you're constantly committing to unrealistic deadlines that have no slack time in them, of course you'll feel like you can't take 20%. But that's not the companies fault. 20% is a great policy. I don't know what else the company could do to make it easier to take really: managers aren't allowed to deny it to you, and you're allowed to bank it up to a reasonable cap if you have to focus on a main project for a while. At that point it's really up to you and your own time management.
dudus 13y ago
The stock market thinks differently. GOOG is above 1,000 for a while now. Of course you may dismiss my point rapidly since the Market is more interested in Financial profit than any other thing. But the same thing can be said about Hacker News. What bothers HN readers/writers will not, necessarily, bother the average consumer, the same way what really boost the Stocks may don't matter to average HN reader. Despite the fact that HN hates the new Gmail Compose, and the new Youtube comment system these are still the most compelling offers in their fields for the average consumer. HN seems to have the urge to not only discuss their opinion but try to flush down everyone's throat and then generalize broadly. Google's Decline here could be better written as "Google Decline, among hacker news readers."
- wmeredith 13y ago
  The problem with Wall street is they're only focused on short term profits. Google creeping everyone the fuck out for a few years will eventually take a toll on the bottom lines even if it helps them this quarter. (I'm not just talking about devs either, everyone I know thinks they're a little creepy - from my grandma to my nieces.)
workbench 13y ago
Oh well it would be Steve Jobs fault wouldn't it… typical Google fanboy nonsense
joshuaellinger 13y ago
I keep thinking of Ben Horowitz's article about Peacetime verse Wartime CEO (http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/15/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/15/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo) Larry Page took over when Google went to war with Facebook. A lot of stuff gets sacrificed during wartime.
brubaker 13y ago
This sort of diatribe is pointless, wistfully remembering the old days through rose colored glasses. It is just a circlejerk for the author.
sidcool 13y ago
Not trying to be sadistic, but hasn't the backlash over Google+ integration into YouTube gone a bit far?
tixocloud 13y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong but I haven't read anything about maximizing profit that Steve Jobs supposedly mentioned to Larry Page. Steve Jobs mentioned about a stronger focus and a plan on figuring out what Google wants to be when it grows up. Ultimately it was Larry's choice that Google is who they are now. I'm not a big fan of Steve Jobs but I don't think it's fair to say that Steve gave bad advice - unless it's written in the book, in which case, I apologize.
untilHellbanned 13y ago
the WHHAAAmbulance needs to be called on these recent HackerNews anti-Google rants
ithkuil 13y ago
the funny thing is that Google itself played a huge role into making all of us raise the bar of what can be expected as a good behavior for a company. To get some open standards, get some open source stuff, get some free APIs, get some free services, get some interesting tools without costly subscriptions etc All the things we didn't get from microsoft. If you were a student from a poor country you were cut off all the good things because you didn't have msdn subscription (and then blame pirating...). I remember when I though "microsoft has to be stupid, they are walling off potential developers for their platform, if they only made stuff more developer friendly they would benefit greatly". I didn't mind that they were making money, I was concerned that they they got in the way, the didn't let you. Google is certainly repeating some of these mistakes, but generally feels more friendly to users and developers for its platforms. Other issues with Google about privacy etc, you cannot really compare it with a company that didn't recognize the value of "the internet" until too late. These are novel issues, and mixing profit with such sensible topics will certainly cause problems, whatever your business model is. The interesting things is that we demand that from Google, because we know it's possible to do better, and the irony is that Google itself (among others) made us raise the bar of that acceptance.
ollerac 13y ago
I still like Google.

411 points by blackhole 13y ago

Google was the antithesis of Microsoft as the author writes and is now doomed to become the same. It's a monopoly that has come to dictate its terms for maximum profit and resilience against competition. By becoming "evil", it is opening opportunities for a new antithesis of itself. Perhaps Twitter will take that spot, perhaps some entirely different company from the Far East? That's the way it goes ...

twelvechairs 13y ago
twitter are showing signs of going the same way. what it takes is someone prepared to take a low-prifit long-haul trust based approach rather than 'monetise now!'. this is a hard choice to make at the moment when its so easy to make money from investors who think they can both make big profits and keep users signing up.
- TylerE 13y ago
  e.g. Amazon
wrongc0ntinent 13y ago
Initially it was just the best at what it did, pretty much leaving all others behind. I didn't hate yahoo, but they got smoked. And remember the "AOL keyword"? I think we romanticize here a little bit, I don't remember Microsoft being the enemy early on, as disliked as they were.

yapcguy 13y ago

The rot was setting in long before Larry Page became CEO. For me, the first sign was GMail and their broken/perverted IMAP model.

stephenr 13y ago
I never understood why they didn't just expose their tags as imap keywords?
- saurik 13y ago
  I think the argument is that no existing client that a user would actually have on their PC supported flags in any meaningful way: they weren't stored efficiently, they weren't presented in a way the user could effectively see, and in many cases they were limited to a random subset of flags (in the case of some clients, like Thunderbird, you could have exactly five flags with the names flag1 through flag5). The support in some clients has become more reasonable, but it is still not really usable. Even at the protocol level it is only recently that there is any effective way where flags could be efficiently resynchronized between the client and the server, and AFAIK there still isn't a standard to let flags have remap able high-level Unicode names. Sure, it would be interesting to push client developers to start maybe considering flags to be an interesting thing to support sufficiently to let a user work with Gmail, but frankly wouldn't we expect Google, as users, to build something actually usable?

stephenr 13y ago

Steve jobs didn't say to maximise profits. He said make great products, rather than simply adequate products.

birken 13y ago

Here are 3 pertinent facts related to your post: 1) When I worked there, long before Larry Page was CEO, 20% time barely existed and Google cared a heck of a lot about making money. 2) The share price going up makes employees, former employees, and all sorts of non-"wall street investors" very happy. 3) Your hacker news about section links to your Google+ page

dewiz 13y ago
>> 3) Your hacker news about section links to your Google+ page ..where he published a link to the same article. I don't understand why you point this out, the user says he's using Google products, so what ?
nostrademons 13y ago
1) 20% time still exists. I used it to write an HTML parser [1] that's had some modest success, and I have coworkers that have 20%ed on robotics, quantum computation, elementary school education, Project Loon, Flu Trends, and a variety of other interesting things. Google Now came out of a 20% project. It is something that you have to take a lot of initiative on to pull off successfully, but the opportunity is still available. [1] https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser
- mathattack 13y ago
  Does 20% realistically come between 80 and 100%, 100 and 120, or 120 and 140%?
  - na85 13y ago
    What does that even mean? edit: Yes, let's downmod the guy who doesn't understand an obtusely-worded question. Well done.
    - reikonomusha 13y ago
      He's asking if the 20% time is exclusively: 1. genuinely 20% of one's full-time schedule; 2. 20% beyond one's full-time schedule; or 3. 20% beyond one's over-time schedule.

wrongc0ntinent 13y ago

Back when I was showing off my Google T-shirt, this is what they were (archive.org): https://web.archive.org/web/20001203022500/http://www.google.com https://web.archive.org/web/20001203022500/http://www.google... A lot more's changed than just a CEO.

onedev 13y ago
Have any cool stories to share?
jonathonf 13y ago
Tried and was disappointed I couldn't search the 2000-era web.
- nostrademons 13y ago
  One query works: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+in+1998 https://www.google.com/search?q=google+in+1998
- asveikau 13y ago
  The old school yahoo style categorization of links works. I was pretty surprised, I used google back then and didn't remember them having that...
- dyoo1979 13y ago
  In Google search, select the "Search tools". You can set a custom range, and that effectively allows you to search the index from the 20th century.

devindotcom 13y ago

Yeah, I had many of the same sentiments that I wrote up around the time the death of Reader was announced (http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/17/god-damn-it-google/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/17/god-damn-it-google/). I can't really look to them for inspiration any more, which is a greater loss than I would have admitted a year or two ago when I finally admitted Google was no longer Google. Oh well. Next!

IBM 13y ago

They are the new Microsoft but they're trying to avoid the same fate of companies like Yahoo and Microsoft; i.e viewed as stodgy old companies that aren't great places to work. The perception about Google needs to be "innovative" which is why there is lots of PR about their X Labs initiatives. But if you think about all of the high profile ones, they aren't really attractive businesses. Driverless cars? It's technology that all the major car companies have been working on for years and is close to market. This means they aren't going to create a business of licensing that tech to them. Are they going to get into the high capex business of car manufacturing? Google Fiber? Same story. Capex heavy business with lower margins than being an ad company. It also takes a lot of time to scale it up and roll it out to cities. Most of these things are for PR rather than real businesses that will be successful and change Google's revenue mix from 90%+ advertising to anything else. Even in their core business, Cost Per Clicks continue to trend down. This is a deterioration in pricing power largely being driven by the shift to computing on mobile devices. Their latest quarterly results were good because they are essentially "making it up in volume", but there is a limit to how much ad inventory you can squeeze out of all your properties to keep driving aggregate clicks up without pissing off users or trashing your products.

antonius 13y ago
"Companies like Yahoo and Microsoft; i.e viewed as stodgy old companies that aren't great places to work." For what reasons is Microsoft not a great place to work? I may be biased because my brother works there full-time and a friend is interning there but both of them very much enjoy it.
- IBM 13y ago
  My comment about them is how they're perceived in the industry, in reality they may be great places to work.
  - MAGZine 13y ago
    Other than stack-ranking thing/general office politics, I don't really have a negative preception of Microsoft. Is this a supposed-perception, or an actual perception? I don't know anything about Yahoo!, but my perceptions of them are still positive. If you have an awful work environment, people will just go elsewhere. especially if you're qualified to work at either company.

dictum 13y ago

> Now it's just another large company - only concerned about maximizing profit. > Google was a company that, for a time, I loved. To me, they represented the antithesis of Microsoft, a rebellion against a poisonous corporate culture dominated by profiteering that had no regard for its users. Maybe You're Just Not Their Target Demographic Anymore™ Google had better ideals, sure. But I'd say their current actions are actually making Google's products better for more people. Unfortunately, as their products improve for the majority of people, they become less accommodating[1] of early users and people who actually care about privacy, restraint in advertising, and domain-specific needs. However, OP doesn't provide specific examples of what Google did that made him worry, just a general discomfort with Google that's been voiced countless times since their IPO. I hate their general attitude about privacy, their gradual shoving of ads everywhere, and the usual we-are-open stuff used to divert questioning, but maybe it's time to admit that Google is just getting better at things that don't matter to you. [1]: It's a false choice, yes: they could keep honoring their initial principles and still grow and profit, but has any behemoth corporation ever done that?

lazyjones 13y ago
> But I'd say their current actions are actually making Google's products better for more people. Can you explain how forcing people to use their real names (or something that passes as such) is making Google's products better for more people? How about the inbox spam in Gmail, or the large ads they have been testing on Google itself apparently (http://www.seroundtable.com/google-adwords-huge-image-ad-17568.html http://www.seroundtable.com/google-adwords-huge-image-ad-175...) while they penalize large ads above the fold on indexed pages (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.at/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.at/2012/01/page-la...), or, like someone else pointed out here, killing Reader? Frankly, I may not be their target demographic either, but for most of the recent changes they got flak over I simply have to shake my head and wonder what they were thinking and how they could actually claim to make things better for anyone but themselves. Perhaps I'm too stupid to understand ...
- dictum 13y ago
  Maybe I'm just jaded and never really saw Google as a a nice company with good intentions, but I just can't be sad about Google's new directions. My suggestion to everyone who's worried about Google: other companies would be really happy to service your needs. There are other companies offering e-mail services, ad services, internet search (the one thing there's no absolute replacement for yet[1], but with your patronage, a new competitor could get there), internet messaging, website analytics, maps, mobile operating systems... and new companies could appear in these areas. > Can you explain how forcing people to use their real names (or something that passes as such) is making Google's products better for more people? I dislike their new real names policy, but: human faces. Humans are drawn to other humans' faces. That's why they're pushing to use Google+ photos on ads. Also, people are drawn to names of people they know. That's why they nudged website owners to associate their domains with their personal Google+ accounts. They're essentially trying to make their services more like a social network so people discover YouTube videos while browsing YouTube, not Twitter or Facebook, for instance. A simpler explanation: Google is trying to remain relevant and grow even more using the same magic that made Facebook big: your friends. [1]: In my experience, DDG is good at searches related to programming, mediocre at searches related to non-tech stuff, and terrible at searches in languages other than English. It's getting better, though.

guybrushT 13y ago

Reports of Google's decline are greatly exaggerated :) G+ is annoying, but these days no large company can make all their users happy, with all their products/features/changes, all the time. The so-called erosion of 'Don't be evil' has just become more apparent now, but as long as I have known google, they always made money from ads - and ads are fundamentally evil (IMHO). Search, maps, email etc are quite nice and I use those everyday. Fast, reliable, solid products - vastly improved since I first used them (many years ago). Where is the decline?

Someone 13y ago
Ads are _fundamentally_ evil? What mechanism do you propose for bringing new products to the attention of customers, then? Or are new products and/or customers also fundamentally evil, IYHO?
- kbenson 13y ago
  I wouldn't say they are fundamentally evil, but I think as the field of advertising has advanced along with psychology, there's some troubling current and possible future uses we should be wary of. At this point I think having a wary stance towards advertising is not only acceptable, it's prudent.
- dingaling 13y ago
  Most ads are designed to resonate on an emotional level, rather than being purely informative. It's the sophistication of their design in order to pierce our emotional 'firewall' that makes them 'evil'; they're basically exploits against the human mind.
  - izolate 13y ago
    Such poetic diction. I agree completely.
- pit 13y ago
  Word of mouth.
- 13y ago

dpmehta02 13y ago

This article would have been much more persuasive had it specified the actual decisions made by Google that illustrate exactly how that company has "lost its way" (i.e., chosen profit over solving important problems).

jdreaver 13y ago

> Larry Page worshiped Steve Jobs, who gave him a bunch of bad advice centered around maximizing profit. What is so bad about maximizing profit? If you make a profit, it means people are willingly giving you money for the service you provide. You make more profit when people feel they benefit more from your service. People can complain about Google until the end of time, but as long as the cash keeps flowing then Google is getting the signal that everything they are doing is in the interest of the consumer. Now, I don't know if the "decline" of Google, as asserted by the OP, has actually affected their bottom line, because I'm not on the board at Google. I just think it's silly to throw around the word "profit" as if it's some sort of evil goal. Profit is the foundation of a monetary-based economy, and therefore modern human civilization. There is no signal available that is as efficient as profit as a proxy for the wants of the consumer, and how to most efficiently allocate scarce resources.

pbhjpbhj 13y ago
>You make more profit when people feel they benefit more from your service. // That's clearly not the only way to make more profit. If for example one has entrenched users and cuts the level of service markedly, or increases the cost, then profit increases. There is no need for anyone to benefit more other than the shareholders. You can also improve a service without charging more. Again profit and benefit will not be directly correlated. For me Google's search has been doing down-hill for a year or so, to my recollection. I've been using them for about 15 years. It's my primary point of contact despite using webmaster tools and a couple of other offerings. Usually I try alternate SE about once every year to see if I can find something that works better for me. I just changed my primary SE to duckduckgo. Being so used to Google's interface it's proving hard but not impossible (as it was a last year for me); still not sure I'll settle on it but continually convinced Google isn't working any more.
- jdreaver 13y ago
  Excellent point. I was implicitly assuming that your costs were unchanged, but of course there are more ways to make a profit than more revenue.
- 13y ago

RexRollman 13y ago

I don't think Google is "evil" but I do think it really all comes down to how Google makes their money. They are not like Microsoft or Apple, who actually sells things to end users. I suspect we will see the same thing with Twitter too, as they seek to monetize their service.

znowi 13y ago

I loved the early Google. A lot. But it's dead now. What's left is just the name and a dusty plaque in the corner that reads: don't be evil. It will still attract smart people, but they will be of other kind to match the new company culture. The kind that joins Microsoft and Oracle. Those who follow the protocol, happy in their bubble, with the prime goal of maximization of profit. At all costs.

gilgoomesh 13y ago

The paragraph involving Steve Jobs is a misquote at best or a completely wrong at worst. If you read the article that paragraph links, it doesn't mention "maximizing profit" or money at all. I think this paragraphs reflects badly on the entire article – it makes the article appear to be a struggle to create a connect-the-dots conspiracy behind Google's actions (evil Steve Jobs told Larry Page to be evil and now Google is evil). Steve Jobs told Larry Page to gave a strong focus on key products. You could certainly argue that Google are too strongly focussed on AdWords and Google+ but that's not the point that McClure argues.

dmak 13y ago
After reading the Steve Jobs book, the biggest emphasis was focus on making a great product. He was never in it for the money; He was making $1 a year at one point.
- Fomite 13y ago
  $1 a year and a massive pile of stock. That's a big show of faith in your abilities and your company, but that's hardly "Never in it for the money".
  - Amadou 13y ago
    That's a big show of faith in your abilities and your company It's a tax dodge if the company's share price is at least level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-dollar_salary#Instances_of_alternative_compensation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-dollar_salary#Instances_of...
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    He really was not in it for the money though. He genuinely believed that if you make fantastic products, the rest (including money) falls into place.
- teddyroo 13y ago
  Jobs made way more money off Pixar than Apple

SloughFeg 13y ago

I stopped reading at "I'm not female, so I don't have to worry about getting thousands of rape threats every month". Inserting unsubstantiated claims for shock value into an argument just detracts from any other points he is trying to make.

kordless 13y ago
I read the damn thing three times and can't find a point to any of it. What I see is a bunch of rambling doom and gloom statements: "and then it all came tumbling down". What exactly has tumbled here? The fact they jacked with the YouTube comment system?
- ehmish 13y ago
  XMPP Syndication, (And with that interoperability), an increase of invasiveness of their ads (for those without adblock), the death of Google Reader, there's plenty more if you read up.
ehmish 13y ago
I disagree, It seems women get more rape threats than men, hence privacy would have a higher concern for them. As I've never had a rape threat directed at me, I'm far more relaxed about my privacy than I can imagine someone who has had a rape threat directed at them would be.
wpietri 13y ago
That hardly needs substantiation if you pay even modest attention to the experience of outspoken women on the Internet. Just off the top of my head: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/internet/2012/06/dear-internet-why-you-cant-have-anything-nice http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/internet/2012/06/dear-inte... http://www.clutchmagonline.com/2013/03/adria-richards-receives-rape-threats-and-loses-her-job-for-reporting-sexual-harassment/ http://www.clutchmagonline.com/2013/03/adria-richards-receiv... http://www.cosmopolitan.com/advice/work-money/lindy-west-bullied-for-having-an-opinion-on-rape http://www.cosmopolitan.com/advice/work-money/lindy-west-bul...
workbench 13y ago

auggierose 13y ago

I admire the guys who can pull off something great with just 20%. I could not do that. When I have something that excites me, it soon grabs 100% of me.

michaelochurch 13y ago
20% time is the idea that it's OK to put "only" 32 hours (or, in practice, 25-30) on your assigned project, but there is certainly not an 8-hour maximum on the side project. If you want a promotion, you'll have to put in more time than 25-32 hpw; but you won't get in trouble at that effort level. Of course, this is true in most companies-- a 25-hour effort on your assigned work is not low enough to get you fired, almost anywhere; it means that you're not outrunning the bear but you're outrunning someone-- but the difference is that you don't have to hide side projects. That makes a pretty substantial difference. It's a good idea, not because the number means anything, but because it means that (under most managers, although there are exceptions) you don't have to deny or hide working on other things ("skunk works") that might prove useful. You can talk about them openly. In companies without 20%T projects, people still do those types of projects, but are afraid to share their work, which means those projects go nowhere. Google doesn't seem to have that problem. If you build a demo and share it, that's encouraged. Google is still better than many companies (yes, I'll say it; it is, if you land in the right place, a great place to work) but an incredible amount depends on your manager. The biggest moral failing of Google probably is how easily a manager can become a SPOF for your career. That's not different from most companies, but any firm that wants to call itself progressive ought to solve that problem. You'd think it would be a first order of business.
- auggierose 13y ago
  Still, a certain mental makeup is necessary to be able to switch between projects like that. When I work on a project that interests me, I go to bed thinking about it, and in the morning I want to continue where I left it. Often I'll see things clearer after such a sleep break, and then I cannot just switch to another project instead of trying out an idea I had.
  - 13y ago

untilHellbanned 13y ago

"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" -Mark Twain/Google

mangala 13y ago

Here Here!

amaks 13y ago

Steve Jobs' advice was not (only) to maximize profits, but to consolidate the products, reduce the number of products "because Google was all over the place". That's from the Steve Jobs autobiography by Walter Isaacson. So far, it looks like Larry Page took Steve Jobs advice to his heart and executes precisely on that vision: all products get integrated together (including through the Google+), innovation rate is still high and growing, company is super successful in post PC world.

matthewmacleod 13y ago

What's with the sudden outpouring of Google-hate of late? I totally get that Google is changing, and has been doing so for a while. But I don't see that as "evil," and I'm struggling to see why anybody would. Google around maybe five or six years ago was a wasteland of shoddy, broken, unintegrated products, many with half-assed, confusing interfaces. That's been tightened up - many of their products are now substantially better; there's a coherent account and profile system in place; the weak products have been culled. Their focus is a lot better. I'm probably using Google resources less than I used to - GMail's interface pisses me off, the new Maps layout is infuriating, and search is broadly speaking totally broken for me in places. I'm also acutely aware that Google's audience has changed - it's no longer tech-savvy early adopters, but almost everybody who has an Internet connection. Unfortunately, the interests of the minority groups of users are going to fall by the wayside as the business evolves. To some extent, that's great - it opens up gaps in the market where other products can get a look-in. If Google's search sucks, I'm sure a competitor will pop up. Same with Gmail, or Docs, or Hangouts… etc. There are unsurprisingly some areas in which Google's record is not 100% clean - they stopped supporting RSS, removed XMPP federation, require profile verification (apparently) - but in most cases, I can certainly see how the business or technical case for these could legitimately be made. These are not evil actions - they're just ones that you (and I) don't agree with. Fair enough - we're under no obligation to use Google's services. In the meantime, they continue to develop a huge diversity of open-source software and protocols, and I hear it's still a great place to work. I guess at the end of the day you could be right - Google has declined from your perspective. But I doubt that's true from the perspective of their wider user base.

kruipen 13y ago
http://rbt.asia/g/thread/S38087806#p38088073 http://rbt.asia/g/thread/S38087806#p38088073
Zoomla 13y ago
it looks like you answered your own question (at least partially): "GMail's [new] interface pisses me off, the new Maps layout is infuriating" ... but there is many other reasons to dislike Google's choices... I still miss the - and + operator when using Google search for example (this change happened when they started to push Google+)

mempko 13y ago

Only reason to be disappointed is if you expected something else out of capitalists....

Brakenshire 13y ago
It's not so much about capitalism, I suspect, as about becoming a public company, with a mindset which inevitably becomes centred around quarterly returns.
wpietri 13y ago
I expected them to retain some of their academic ethos. My problem isn't that I expected too much out of capitalists; I just expected them not to become pure capitalists. And here by "capitalist" I mean the current American zeitgeist's version of that term, mainly as defined by MBAs. I think there are other versions of capitalism that are much more interesting.
Grue3 13y ago
Capitalism isn't usually known for delivering subpar products. "Maximizing profits" has resulted in some incredibly functional and effective websites in the past. Google thinks stuffing them with ads and making users give away their personal data will bring them maximum profit? Well, antagonizing customers is usually not the best business strategy.

michaelochurch 13y ago

This is not worth getting "bugged" about. I say this as one who made that exact mistake. It's really traumatic to see those who are supposed to be leading fail, but it's an ahistorical truth not worth getting emotional about. I don't care to speak about Google, but more generally, here's something everyone needs to know. Regarding the way we assess companies, it's probably the truest thing in the world. Here it is: reputation is positively correlated with past moral decency and negatively correlated with future* moral decency.* That might seem strange, but keep in mind that organizations change and, within 5 years, it will be a different set of people. Doing the right thing begets a good reputation (such as that held by Microsoft in 1997, Google in 2013, Silicon Valley until recently) but that reputation also admits complacency. If the same people were in charge, they'd possibly continue doing the right thing. But a new set of people inherit that favorable standing and use it as an excuse to get away with bad behavior. This is as old as dirt. It's why there is a centuries-old hatred of inherited wealth and position in all modernized cultures. The same applies to "Silicon Valley". It's easy to look at its fall from grace with hatred and disgust; but the fact is that the people now on top are 50 years separated from the ones who built it; so why, exactly, is it a surprise that the ones on top now are so shitty? It shouldn't be. They inherited the reputations of their forebears (which is why they have favorable tax laws, a "cool" image not shared by more traditional companies, and their pick of top young talent) but not the values. Preventing this kind of moral decay requires growing slowly: very slowly. Look at Valve, weighing in around 330 people after 17 years. If they'd had VCs breathing down their necks to reach 2000 people at 5 years, there's no way they could have maintained that open allocation culture. If something grows organically and sanely, then there is a chance for there to be enough stability that reputation carries a positive signal (because past good behavior is a likely sign of the future) but if it grows at a venture-capital pace, reputation almost always predicts low moral decency in the future (especially since that reputation is usually bought from the tech press, not established organically over years).

yuhong 13y ago
On Google, I hope you have read this: http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-its-a-game-of-thrones-in-mountain-view-2013-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/sex-and-politics-at-google-it...

vuck 13y ago

I really wish people would shut up about Google's "ideals". They're a company, not a messiah. Companies operate on a midpoint between what they want to do and what they need to do, and Google (like every company) has slid towards their "evil" neccessities over time. Don't like it? That's fine, neither do I. But stop preaching about a morality that was never there.

brosco45 13y ago

Yeah, I noticed Google interviewers are no longer showing enthusiasm during the interview, it's a very worrying sign.

dchichkov 13y ago
Shouldn't be a problem. Just start a rumor that you like interviewees that are showing their enthusiasm a lot. They would start showing it.
gdulli 13y ago
It took a while for me to be able to articulate it, but that was what bothered me about my interview. The recruiter was all positivity, but the first real person who interviewed me seemed like he hated his job. It was the biggest turn-off.
drewhk 13y ago
Same here. On one screening the guy actually said "it is not like how you imagine it to be". And it did not sound as an encouragement.

kailuowang 13y ago

I agree that Google is becoming a lot more intrusive towards her end users and the incentive behind it is probably profit. But at lease for software developers, from my experience, we as a group benefit from Google MORE than 5 years ago. Chrome AngularJS Go Selenium Webdriver dart Even Google Hangout with screen share helped our distributed team a lot. 5 years ago, what did Google offer? GWT? And, of course, the search engine, we developers probably use it more than many other groups users. I hardly heard anyone use alternative search engine for day-to-day software development related search. All these are of zero cost to us.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
zobzu 13y ago
arguably half the stuff you listed would be seen as useless or even bad from another point of view. heck 5years ago at least google results weren't a bunch of advertisements and i'm not talking of the first 5 "sponsored results". That alone, was a huge bonus to humanity in general. Nothing less.

timr 13y ago

If you ask me, one of Google's biggest strategic successes was their ability to convince an entire generation of engineers that they were something other than a company. The way many (otherwise intelligent) people talk about it, you'd think it was a religion. What you're seeing here is not the shattering of a dream, but of an illusion -- Google hasn't been a scrappy, idealistic startup for many years. It's a fine company, but it's a big company -- a collection of tens of thousands of people, all motivated by different hopes and dreams. No institution of that size behaves consistently, let alone consistently benevolently. In other words: stop setting up false idols, and your reality won't be shattered when they disappoint you.

1qaz2wsx3edc 13y ago
You mean it isn't? http://www.thechurchofgoogle.org/ http://www.thechurchofgoogle.org/
- pantalaimon 13y ago
  > Facebook social plugin HERETICS
alaskamiller 13y ago
While eating my second dinner plate of something delicious on the campus I looked around and saw how many children and families were around. The company provides, so much, for you, for your family. You wouldn't to ever lose what you have now gotten used to, for yourself, for your family. So now you become a company man. What's good for the company must be good for you. What's good about knowing more people, how they think, how they behave, what they want, must be good for the company, which turn must be good for you, good for your family. It's just a series of intricate goodness being passed around from group to group, people to people. No one inherently is evil, but the system can end up be directed towards evil inevitably. Either way, it just was damn good pork chops with quinoa. We didn't get this kind of chow in the Marine Corps, and I would have killed for it.
- chii 13y ago

mililani 13y ago

When Google Voice and free calls stop being free, I'm completely jumping off Google's bandwagon: gmail, google voice, google search, etc...

wpietri 13y ago

One of the most salient facts to me is that Google was formed as a rebellion against the existing search companies and their business practices. I think "don't be evil" and "organizing the world's information" were entirely sincere, and I miss that spirit. Now I can't really distinguish them from any other company. As hegemons go, I guess they're still better than average. And they're way better than Microsoft. But Google's decline makes me wonder where they're going to bottom out.

ttunguz 13y ago

The main argument in the article is that as Google has gotten bigger, its profit motive has become more important to the company, which is negatively impacting new and old products. While Google may have to continue to generate more revenue growth from AdWords and AdSense and YouTube in order to keep the stock going up and generate more cash, the majority of Google products aren't at all impacted by profit motive. In fact, most of the product initiatives at Google sap profit. Android is a multi-billion dollar bet on mobile OS Calico is a billion dollar bet on extending life ChromeOS is a multi-billion dollar bet on laptop/TV ChromeBrowser is a hundred-million dollar bet on browsing Google Glass is a multi-billion dollar bet on next gen devices Self driving cars are a multi-billion dollar bet on, well, self driving cars. None of these, save perhaps Android, has any chance of driving material revenue to the business in the next five years. Most of the hardware bets Google makes are money losers because they routinely subsidize hardware. When I was there, I launched two product features that each cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars and were visible on the earnings-per-share number in the quarterly revenues we reported to Wall Street. The argument might stand on Google.com, where the number of ads has increased. But for the majority of products (Gmail, Drive, Spreadsheets, Docs, Keep, Maps, Calendar, Books, Finance, Music, etc), it's hard to justify a profit motive argument.

slyv 13y ago
I think people are seeing the products that Google has to maximize profit on (Youtube, AdSense, G+, etc...) and using those as the basis for the entire ecosystem that is Google. Google, as you pointed out, is much more than just the products that make money. I find it incredibly shortsighted to fault a company that tries to make money in order to pay for these great research projects. I really don't mind ads. Its a free service to use, I can live with some ads, I still get my search that I like, I still get the experience that I like, and I patronize the company that provides this without any dime out of my pocket. Plus, Google is using these funds to research these multi-billion dollar initiatives like self-driving cars that I couldn't fathom to undertake on my own.

shmerl 13y ago

> They founded the company with the motto "Don't Be Evil", and the unspoken question was, how long would this last? The answer, oddly enough, was "until Larry Page took over". This is probably very to the point. "Don't be evil" was Sergey Brin's push, and Larry Page doesn't seem to share it.

nostrademons 13y ago
"Don't be evil" was Amit Patel & Paul Buchheit's push. Sergey, according to them, is the arbiter of what is "evil". Separation of powers and all that.

dschiptsov 13y ago

It is not a decline, it is just "maturation" or even "over-ripeness". Speaking for a decline, it is rather a decline of interest in "internets" in general and especially social networks in particular. It is no longer a "shiny new thing". So, Google, as FB, are trying to squeeze everything what is left from G+ and its flagship Gmail, just because everything switches to mobile and a chat is a new email. That is why they are pushing Hangouts and FB pushes Messenger, which both wants to hijack your SMS app. But chat apps are too simple and it is not so easy to push ads here, because users will just switch to less annoying rival's service. So, let's say that it is a decline of browser-based "internets", and email as a default way of communication, not just Google or FB.

stretchwithme 13y ago

Oh, poor Sergei and Larry, duped into taking bad advice from Steve Jobs.

6ren 13y ago

Search engines have zero switching costs, so mainstream PR is a key competitive advantage for Google (not engineer PR). Their massive capital investment in server farms (esp. for google suggest) is another. 20% time was a long-term strategy to lead new technologies instead of being disrupted by them. Google+ is a short-term strategy to avoid being disrupted by facebook. Long-term self-interest is often close to "good" (so close it may be why it's good). oblig snark: Instead of turning evil, Google be like Sun - die, and be reanimated by evil piecemeal.

MichaelMoser123 13y ago

I am sick of all this Google bashing here on HN; that's what is bugging me, really. Come on, its a company, they don't owe you anything; They sell your data, yes, but it's still the best search engine, by far; to me it's a tool, and yes, they also use their customers as tools to sell adds, that's what the internet is all about - pushing adds. They could still do worse, they could push much more adds than they do now, but they don't; That's something that few people seem to notice.

buyx 13y ago

Google has always had a massive weakness: feedback. Feedback on products is atrocious -Google Now on my iPhone shows me a route home that would send me the wrong way up a freeway, and I don't know where to report it. Years ago, I ran into a serious issue with Google Desktop, and the bug was poorly documented. Their maps data in Johannesburg has some annoying data issues, and is rewriting the geography of the city, because it is relied on by third party sites. They do respond to some Maps reports, and other problems can be fixed in Map Maker, but some are too big. The common thread in these problems is that Google has very poor feedback mechanisms - a problem that has existed for years. Given their success in organising data, you'd think there would be a way for them to handle feedback efficiently, and in a standardised way across products. But feedback doesn't seem to be a priority. A few months ago, HN became an unofficial support board, with various tales of woe posted here, and then fixed by Googlers If they get their feedback and bug reporting right, I'd be willing to cut them some slack: as a company, they aren't particularly abusive. Wanting to clean up YouTube comments is commendable and overdue, and their search engine remains very useful. It's easy enough to lock down a Google+ profile if you want, and to tweak Gmail to be less annoying.

curiousdannii 13y ago
And their open source projects like Chrome do have public bug trackers, but in my experience I've either been ignored or treated with what I felt was contempt. The first is probably the same feedback problem as everywhere, the second is because the Chrome developers don't want the same kind of internet I do...

SideburnsOfDoom 13y ago

Article says "To me, they represented the antithesis of Microsoft" IMHO all they are is following a similar trajectory around 20 years later than Microsoft.

lollancf37 13y ago

LMAO

bambax 13y ago

Turns out adult supervision wasn't all bad. I remember some time ago, probably 2002-2003 (?) when Bill Gates said something along the lines of "every tech company goes through a period of love at the beginning, and then that love turns to resentment; Google is in the middle of their "love" period and Microsoft is way past it; but that will change". And, like a newly wed, I remember thinking: nah, that can't change. My love of Google will never fade. Yet here we are; today no company annoys me more than Google; every decision they make seems bad. Like most people I still use their products, but every time I do I wish I didn't, like when I was driving a Renault.

72deluxe 13y ago
Haha driving a Renault Made me laugh, thanks!
- squozzer 13y ago
  I think (s)he meant, "Praying to god it doesn't break down on me again" while driving.

hartator 13y ago

> waiting until an investor accidentally makes the world a better place in the process of trying to make as much money as possible What the what? I don't agree with the article. I feel the main issue with google is its laziness. No more legacy internet explorer support, imposing a bad google + whereas make it better...

d4nt 13y ago

Google, and tech companies in general, should not be trying to innovate despite the need to make money, they should be trying to innovate because of the need to make money. If Google have lost that culture of innovation because of a short term need for operational efficiency then it will hurt them in the long run. People have observed how Microsoft failed to capitalise early on the internet, the smartphone explosion and the tablet explosion because of a poor culture. While that effect takes many years to hurt the bottom line, it is real and it hurts. If Google go down the same road then that is them failing at plain old capitalism, not the death of some alternative utopian dream.

Tloewald 13y ago

I don't see Steve Jobs's "bad advice" having anything to do with maximizing profits but with maximizing excellence and surviving. Apple in the late 80s and early 90s was an unfocused beacon of creativity that led to the company nearly going under (PowerPC, OpenDoc, Taligent, Kaleida, Dylan, Newton, QuickDraw GX, AV macs with video conferencing when QuickTime barely worked, Copland). Was the advice bad? Quite possibly. But it was sincere and i don't think profit was the motive.

codelust 13y ago

Unsurprisingly, companies (especially ones that are growing) do change and those changes impact their relationship with their customers/consumers. Tech is no different on that front, where it is different is that, unlike your department store, tech is something that you carry with you almost all the time. Understandably, people do get upset by this a lot more than what a similar change at a department store would result in. I have been a fan of Google and have used a lot of its products over time. The company has been changing for a while now and a significant part of that change is that it is making the transition from being someone in the background (the advertising business), to someone who wants a front seat in everything digital. Consequently, its product line will also start to reflect that change. And one of the obvious outcomes of such a change is that a lot of us who have used Google's products extensively from the early days are no longer the primary target group for the company. Early adopters rarely form the mass market and it is the same in the case of Google. Products like Gmail were never front line products. These happened to exist by leveraging existing tech within the company. With Glass, Android etc., these products are now moving to the front lines for the company. I still use Gmail extensively, most of my video is consumed on Youtube, I still use search, Android and Drive (for online docs & Keep, not file sync). My main Google account does not have G+ on it and while things are not perfect, it is so far usable. I've rarely commented on YT, can't rate anything anymore on Play Store, but I can live with all that, at least for now. I fully expect the situation to worsen for people like me in the years to come on Google, but that is OK. It will eventually lead to newer products coming into the market and that is always a good thing. Email will be the first thing I will switch and I think that will happen before the second half of 2014 swings around. All said and done, I have been happy with Google being around -- they revolutionized search, made email an enabler than a pain (better storage & spam management) and every now and then I discover something awesome on YT that makes so grateful that it exists. It has given me much more than what it (and NSA ;-)) probably has taken from me. Irony in all of this is that all this while everyone has criticized Google for being an ill-organized one-trick-pony! Maybe the OTP was a better company after all, eh?

SilkRoadie 13y ago

I am not sure decline is the correct word. Google's choice of direction really bugs me. Scrapping the 20% developer time is fine. Cutting down projects to focus the company on a handful of products is cool. I never used Reader anyway. What is worrying is the way Google is becoming more and more creepy. They have so much information about you and with the increasing rollout of Google+ I feel more and more like I am being stalked. Even when I am not on Google sites their ad's follow me around. It used to be relevant ad's. That was ok. Now I visit the Alienware website and all I see are Alienware banners everywhere I go for the next week. Its freaky. Now Google+ wants to do away with your alias and force you to use your real identity. Why would you ever want to do that? For a while there was a warning "be careful what you put on Facebook, it could get you fired." Google are trying to make that "be careful what you put on the Internet." Perhaps some people will improve the quality of their comments.. I think a far better chance is that someone looking for me will find a 4 year old opinion or me playing devils advocate in an arguement and think I am a bigot, ill-imformed, stupid, whatever as a result.. The fact is that I want my email and my documents to be linked to me and my name. Anything else I would like to be attached to a throwaway name like the one I have on HN. Something I can abandon without worry that my opinions in 2013 will survive as "internet fact" for years to come.

DanBC 13y ago
> Now I visit the Alienware website and all I see are Alienware banners everywhere I go for the next week. Its freaky. You point out a really weird feature of targeted ads. Someone mentions something, I do a websearch for that thing and look at a couple of websites. And then, for weeks afterwards, I get that stuff in my ads. I'm very tolerant of ads (don't run an ad blocker, etc) but I wish there was some better way of guiding what ads I really don't like. An option box for "Please don't ever show me this ad again," with a few reasons would be great.
elastoplast 13y ago
20% time has not been scrapped. This is a recurrent rumour that pops up over and over again. It is not true. There have always been people who felt like they were unable to take it, or it was really 120% time or whatever. I've had a variety of 20% projects for years, and I've never worked 120%. You have to be able to manage your teams and managers expectations, and if you commit to a deadline and fall behind then you're obviously going to have to "bank" that time. If you are in a team or get yourself into a position where you're constantly committing to unrealistic deadlines that have no slack time in them, of course you'll feel like you can't take 20%. But that's not the companies fault. 20% is a great policy. I don't know what else the company could do to make it easier to take really: managers aren't allowed to deny it to you, and you're allowed to bank it up to a reasonable cap if you have to focus on a main project for a while. At that point it's really up to you and your own time management.

dudus 13y ago

The stock market thinks differently. GOOG is above 1,000 for a while now. Of course you may dismiss my point rapidly since the Market is more interested in Financial profit than any other thing. But the same thing can be said about Hacker News. What bothers HN readers/writers will not, necessarily, bother the average consumer, the same way what really boost the Stocks may don't matter to average HN reader. Despite the fact that HN hates the new Gmail Compose, and the new Youtube comment system these are still the most compelling offers in their fields for the average consumer. HN seems to have the urge to not only discuss their opinion but try to flush down everyone's throat and then generalize broadly. Google's Decline here could be better written as "Google Decline, among hacker news readers."

wmeredith 13y ago
The problem with Wall street is they're only focused on short term profits. Google creeping everyone the fuck out for a few years will eventually take a toll on the bottom lines even if it helps them this quarter. (I'm not just talking about devs either, everyone I know thinks they're a little creepy - from my grandma to my nieces.)

workbench 13y ago

Oh well it would be Steve Jobs fault wouldn't it… typical Google fanboy nonsense

joshuaellinger 13y ago

I keep thinking of Ben Horowitz's article about Peacetime verse Wartime CEO (http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/15/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/15/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo) Larry Page took over when Google went to war with Facebook. A lot of stuff gets sacrificed during wartime.

brubaker 13y ago

This sort of diatribe is pointless, wistfully remembering the old days through rose colored glasses. It is just a circlejerk for the author.

sidcool 13y ago

Not trying to be sadistic, but hasn't the backlash over Google+ integration into YouTube gone a bit far?

tixocloud 13y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but I haven't read anything about maximizing profit that Steve Jobs supposedly mentioned to Larry Page. Steve Jobs mentioned about a stronger focus and a plan on figuring out what Google wants to be when it grows up. Ultimately it was Larry's choice that Google is who they are now. I'm not a big fan of Steve Jobs but I don't think it's fair to say that Steve gave bad advice - unless it's written in the book, in which case, I apologize.

untilHellbanned 13y ago

the WHHAAAmbulance needs to be called on these recent HackerNews anti-Google rants

ithkuil 13y ago

the funny thing is that Google itself played a huge role into making all of us raise the bar of what can be expected as a good behavior for a company. To get some open standards, get some open source stuff, get some free APIs, get some free services, get some interesting tools without costly subscriptions etc All the things we didn't get from microsoft. If you were a student from a poor country you were cut off all the good things because you didn't have msdn subscription (and then blame pirating...). I remember when I though "microsoft has to be stupid, they are walling off potential developers for their platform, if they only made stuff more developer friendly they would benefit greatly". I didn't mind that they were making money, I was concerned that they they got in the way, the didn't let you. Google is certainly repeating some of these mistakes, but generally feels more friendly to users and developers for its platforms. Other issues with Google about privacy etc, you cannot really compare it with a company that didn't recognize the value of "the internet" until too late. These are novel issues, and mixing profit with such sensible topics will certainly cause problems, whatever your business model is. The interesting things is that we demand that from Google, because we know it's possible to do better, and the irony is that Google itself (among others) made us raise the bar of that acceptance.

ollerac 13y ago

I still like Google.