17 ms·

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 "ev

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+)
- flebron 13y ago
  - still exists, and + is now "". That is, "foo" forces foo to appear exactly, just as +foo did.
  - ywyrd 13y ago
    They don't work. "Verbatim", which claims to be what "" used to be, does not work either. Nothing to be done about it.
Kequc 13y ago
People don't like change. People like what they had. People hate that Google is deciding to move forward. Now forcing the changes on their user base so that Google doesn't have an unlimited number of different things to maintain.
- wpietri 13y ago
  I think it's more than a dislike of change. It's not clear to me that Google is moving forward. I might characterize it more as "upward" in the sense that they're solidifying their dominant position. Moving forward is precisely what I fear them losing. Of course, it's easy to move forward when you're new and have nothing to lose. Moving forward is much harder when you're the dominant player, because moving forward puts you at risk.
  - Kequc 13y ago
    I feel that I've been waiting for them to do something with youtube for a long time. Making it and Google plus the same thing is probably the right move. Youtube in general needs a lot of renovation. The structure of Google plus suits content aggregation really well, it was designed for it. So I think it's a really good fit and I can't really wait for the transition to be finished. My hesitation used to be something along the lines of I don't want Youtube users on Google plus. But I've come to remember, since it has started. I still have complete control over who shows up in my streams.
    - alandarev 13y ago
      Indeed, why not enforce people use social network if they want to watch a video?
- skriticos2 13y ago
  I always wondered why this is. I know people hate change and it baffles me (I long for progressive change). I understand that having a basic stable framework is a nice thing to have, but rejecting change outright is somewhat backward IMO. Then again I was always a fan of SciFi thinking about where we'll be in the future, so I'm probably a weird oddball person. I'm probably overlooking something here, like re-learning changing stuff is not preferable for many and tech is only tool and not lifestyle.
rdtsc 13y ago
It's an avalanche effect. Once someone posts about Google, others start thinking and posting, and so on. Or maybe you can think of it like pinball machine, the ball goes in, and then just keeps bouncing around until eventually it dies down. We have those often about languages, databases, operating system and so on. Sometime we see the opposite technology pop up. Like say one writes about "Why MySQL is awesome" then expect "Why MongoDB is the real deal" to appear on the front page.
na85 13y ago
>What's with the sudden outpouring of Google-hate of late? It's because Google is now an established corporation and has run out of "startup cred." Now that they've become a stable, profitable, publicly-traded member of the corporate scene, they're the antithesis of the HipsterNews crowd who want to keep making webapps with no marketabilitiy over and over again. The Bay Area startup crowd are the definition of hipsters. Once something becomes big and mainstream, they're obligated to hate it because hipsters define themselves as "anti-x" where x is { corporation | government | society | whatever }. Their only identity is as "not employees of a Big Software Company" and as a result, lately the culture on HN has been consumed by a seemingly neverending series of mediocre posts about startups and the absolutely horrible culture that surrounds them.
- mhurron 13y ago
  > It's because Google is now an established corporation and has run out of "startup cred." Now that they've become a stable, profitable, publicly-traded member of the corporate scene, they're the antithesis of the HipsterNews crowd who want to keep making webapps with no marketabilitiy over and over again. Yes it has absolutely nothing to do with their recent and current actions. Everyone is just a startup hipster here. Meh, I was hating on G+ before it was cool. No G+, no Facebook, no MySpace. You ain't got nothing on me.
  - na85 13y ago
    >Everyone is just a startup hipster here. I recognize that my comment contained hyperbole but you know what? That "4chan does HN" thread was spot-on in many places.
    - mhurron 13y ago
      Oh it sure was, but that doesn't change the fact that Google has earned this backlash. Apple was an established company way before Google was, HN doesn't hate it.
      - na85 13y ago
dorfsmay 13y ago
Going away from standard and becoming incompatible. They are becoming very much like Microsoft that way. VOIP had a chance to become as ubiquitous and convenient as email, but the drop of xmpp fot voice and video took us back 10 years.... Same with replacing rss by g+. Google exists because of standards such as http and html, but they are slowly moving away from all standards in the name of locking users.
- jmillikin 13y ago
  > VOIP had a chance to become as ubiquitous and convenient > as email, but the drop of xmpp fot voice and video took > us back 10 years. XMPP had its chance, and failed to deliver. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC is the modern standard-to-be for VOIP, and the original implementation was created by Google.
  - dorfsmay 13y ago
    Thanks for the link, this is informative. BUT: - unless I read this wrong, this protocol does not describe how the initial call is initiated, just how the video and audio is negotiated and transferred over the web. - there is no way to federate with google hangout or other WebRTC services, is there? This is the issue. hHangout is an amazing piece of software, but they give it to us for free to force us to register and use google accounts. btw, I don't think xmpp failed, what failed is to settle on good standards for voice and video (every time a standard emerged, somebody came up with a better one that was closed source which broke inter-compatibility) and really good clients (only skype and google voice could echo cancellation properly). xmpp, and SIP for that matter, are really about establishing the connection, they don't really care how the rest of the communication is done. What you are saying is like saying email failed because different people interpret html slightly differently.
    - jmillikin 13y ago
      > unless I read this wrong, this protocol does not > describe how the initial call is initiated, just how the > video and audio is negotiated and transferred over the web. Correct. The underlying application is responsible for initiating calls, using a protocol such as SIP. > there is no way to federate with google hangout or > other WebRTC services, is there? That's up to the service. Hangouts doesn't permit federation, but there should be no technical barriers to launching a federated video-chat service.
rhizome 13y ago
I totally get that Google is changing They aren't changing, they have changed. And, "unintegrated" is not necessarily a bad thing.
hindsightbias 13y ago
> Google-hate of late It's just gotten hip of late. The lack of faith institutions is accelerating, almost as if by design.
- kybernetikos 13y ago
  Please do not include google in statements about 'lack of faith in institutions'. When people bemoan the declining faith in institutions, they're generally talking about the legal system, the legislative system, journalists. Institutions that are supposed to represent disparate social groups with at least part of their mission to make the society and the world generally a better place. Profit driven corporations are not that. Less faith in corporations would probably have very few disbenefits. Less faith in the legal system leads to people taking 'justice' into their own hands. Less faith in the political system leads to people becoming disengaged, threatening the legitimacy of government. “The profit-driven corporate person, in other words, acts just like a natural person with Antisocial Personality Disorder, commonly called a sociopath or psychopath. ” http://www.ladybud.com/2013/08/19/corporate-persons-are-diagnosably-sociopathic/ http://www.ladybud.com/2013/08/19/corporate-persons-are-diag...
  - hindsightbias 13y ago
    Nope. This website is filled with people who bemoan their loss in faith the teh google. They've supplanted their hopes and dreams in government with corporations, and some are now disappointed. > Less faith Disappointed, even though they have been indoctrinated into an ideology that "Government is [always] the problem" > The profit-driven corporate person, in other words... The profit-driven person.
dredmorbius 13y ago
As a guy who inspired two top-level stories yesterday, a few speculations. For myself, the company I once turned to to provide me useful things, save me time, respect my privacy (and certainly not pester me for personal information or publicly link my activity across entirely independent activities and sites), and get out of the way of doing things, is now proving me increasingly useless, wasting my time, disrespecting my privacy (including pestering me for personal information and publicly linking my activity across entirely independent activities and sites), and getting in the way of my doing things. The company's interests are no longer clearly aligned with mine. I'm not convinced the company's evil (though I'm also not convinced it's not), but it's certainly lost a certain element of the soul it exhibited when I first encountered it in the late 1990s, and it seems to me that the culture has been broken. I've speculated on why this is, and cannot know for sure. I suspect a large part of it is riding the advertising tiger (see: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070708081303AAkhGND http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070708081303AA... "He who rides the tiger is afraid to dismount"), I fear that it may be cooperating, or forced to cooperate, with intelligence and surveillance operations, and it may well be that a sense of entitlement, exceptionalism, and hubris has taken hold (Vic Gundotra's 2005 blog post against Microsoft's endorsement of a gay marriage proposal in Washington State makes for interesting reading: http://web.archive.org/web/20051119214319/http://vicgundotra.com/RespondingToScoble.aspx http://web.archive.org/web/20051119214319/http://vicgundotra...) Google five or six years ago was still fundamentally Search. Gmail was relatively new, and it was tossing a bunch of research projects "over the wall", some of which were actually pretty neat. Somewhat disorganized, yes, but ... interesting. Most significantly: not coercive. Which, if I think about it, is the biggest change I've seen. There's a certain lifecycle to tech companies, going from promising upstarts to early pioneers to useful workhorses. And then, too often, it's a decline into an unorganized mess, forced integration among scattered products and tools, and an increasing use of entrenched market power to coerce the response that they can no longer inspire. Microsoft and IBM certainly fit this mold, as does Oracle. I'd consider Apple a curious exception despite my other criticisms of the company. The single factor that's changed the most for me is that when I see Google's name on some product or tool, my first though now is "nice, but where can I find similar functionality elsewhere?" And at the same time, the company does seem to be fighting, if slightly belatedly, for increased protections from surveillance and personal data disclosure. Largely on account that it realizes its business model is directly in the crosshairs of such practices. So, when I came home yesterday to find two G+ posts (both strongly critical of Google) directly inspiring top-of-the-list HN articles, and a third "how to delete your G+ profile" item filling out the top 3, it was pretty surreal. I wonder (and speculated earlier on HN) that there might well be some gaming of the incoming queue, Google certainly has its enemies, and Microsoft's waged a dirty-tricks campaign against the company for years. Apple, Oracle, and Facebook are hardly fast friends. But a lot of what I see written seems pretty organic, and I'm well aware of friends, some who've worked at Google, who are also increasingly disenchanted by the company and its direction. pg would know his queue and voting dynamics. That's all I've got.
davidgerard 13y ago
The watershed moment was a couple of years ago, when they introduced G+ and pushed hard on the Real Names policy for it. They alienated a shitload of techies, and all those early adopters' friends, and blew thirteen years' accumulated good will in about two months. This was the point at which G+ would never, ever compete head-on with Facebook as an actual social network. What's happening now is they just did another burst of that and alienated a much wider crowd of people. More people are seeing the mask crack.
alextingle 13y ago
Look, this isn't a new issue. Lots and lots of us have been getting increasingly dissatisfied with Google for years. But each problem is isolated and hasn't made much of a ripple in the wider world... Is it a big deal to me that Google messed up their automated AdSense "publisher" interaction script, and cut off my income for a few weeks? Why yes, yes it is... but that doesn't mean that anyone else cares about that. Even if Google's generally poor supplier relations affects a lot of people (and it does), there's never enough of them for it to affect Google, the brand. Same goes for any number of other Google problems. Did the "nym wars" cause lots of disaffection amongst Google users? Yes, but again not enough. Did adding lots of pointless JavaScript to search results pages piss off a lot of people? How about the fact that search results are much less specific/useful than they used to be? Unilateral changes to the privacy policy? Or Google Reader? Code Search? Etcetera, etcetera... Google have created a huge amount of simmering resentment over the last few years. So, once an issue like this starts to get some traction, there are a lot of people ready to wait in line to put the boot in.
josephlord 13y ago
People aren't frogs and while the temperature of the water has been rising slowly increasing numbers of people are noticing. When I was at the BBC in the early 2000's they experimented with Digital TV and gradually reduced the bitrate of the broadcasts until the numbers of complaints grew. The interesting thing was when the bitrates were returned to their original levels the complaints didn't stop as the viewers had been educated in compression artefacts. I think that the gradual drift in user unfriendliness (privacy, increasing search ads, reader, G+'s pushiness into other areas etc.) is causing pushing various people to their limits of what can be allowed to pass without comment or action. It will be interesting if Google pulls back whether the complaints and departures (if they are actually happening yet - many people seem very tied to Gmail) actually slow or stop.
- lyagusha 13y ago
  >>tied to Gmail Use GMVault once, and at least the archive of old emails is no longer an issue.
bgruber 13y ago
> Google around maybe five or six years ago was a wasteland of shoddy, broken, unintegrated products, many with half-assed, confusing interfaces. But: > GMail's interface pisses me off, the new Maps layout is infuriating, and search is broadly speaking totally broken for me in places. But it's all well integrated, and there's focus, and isn't that what counts?

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+)

flebron 13y ago
- still exists, and + is now "". That is, "foo" forces foo to appear exactly, just as +foo did.
- ywyrd 13y ago
  They don't work. "Verbatim", which claims to be what "" used to be, does not work either. Nothing to be done about it.

Kequc 13y ago

People don't like change. People like what they had. People hate that Google is deciding to move forward. Now forcing the changes on their user base so that Google doesn't have an unlimited number of different things to maintain.

wpietri 13y ago
I think it's more than a dislike of change. It's not clear to me that Google is moving forward. I might characterize it more as "upward" in the sense that they're solidifying their dominant position. Moving forward is precisely what I fear them losing. Of course, it's easy to move forward when you're new and have nothing to lose. Moving forward is much harder when you're the dominant player, because moving forward puts you at risk.
- Kequc 13y ago
  I feel that I've been waiting for them to do something with youtube for a long time. Making it and Google plus the same thing is probably the right move. Youtube in general needs a lot of renovation. The structure of Google plus suits content aggregation really well, it was designed for it. So I think it's a really good fit and I can't really wait for the transition to be finished. My hesitation used to be something along the lines of I don't want Youtube users on Google plus. But I've come to remember, since it has started. I still have complete control over who shows up in my streams.
  - alandarev 13y ago
    Indeed, why not enforce people use social network if they want to watch a video?
skriticos2 13y ago
I always wondered why this is. I know people hate change and it baffles me (I long for progressive change). I understand that having a basic stable framework is a nice thing to have, but rejecting change outright is somewhat backward IMO. Then again I was always a fan of SciFi thinking about where we'll be in the future, so I'm probably a weird oddball person. I'm probably overlooking something here, like re-learning changing stuff is not preferable for many and tech is only tool and not lifestyle.

rdtsc 13y ago

It's an avalanche effect. Once someone posts about Google, others start thinking and posting, and so on. Or maybe you can think of it like pinball machine, the ball goes in, and then just keeps bouncing around until eventually it dies down. We have those often about languages, databases, operating system and so on. Sometime we see the opposite technology pop up. Like say one writes about "Why MySQL is awesome" then expect "Why MongoDB is the real deal" to appear on the front page.

na85 13y ago

>What's with the sudden outpouring of Google-hate of late? It's because Google is now an established corporation and has run out of "startup cred." Now that they've become a stable, profitable, publicly-traded member of the corporate scene, they're the antithesis of the HipsterNews crowd who want to keep making webapps with no marketabilitiy over and over again. The Bay Area startup crowd are the definition of hipsters. Once something becomes big and mainstream, they're obligated to hate it because hipsters define themselves as "anti-x" where x is { corporation | government | society | whatever }. Their only identity is as "not employees of a Big Software Company" and as a result, lately the culture on HN has been consumed by a seemingly neverending series of mediocre posts about startups and the absolutely horrible culture that surrounds them.

mhurron 13y ago
> It's because Google is now an established corporation and has run out of "startup cred." Now that they've become a stable, profitable, publicly-traded member of the corporate scene, they're the antithesis of the HipsterNews crowd who want to keep making webapps with no marketabilitiy over and over again. Yes it has absolutely nothing to do with their recent and current actions. Everyone is just a startup hipster here. Meh, I was hating on G+ before it was cool. No G+, no Facebook, no MySpace. You ain't got nothing on me.
- na85 13y ago
  >Everyone is just a startup hipster here. I recognize that my comment contained hyperbole but you know what? That "4chan does HN" thread was spot-on in many places.
  - mhurron 13y ago
    Oh it sure was, but that doesn't change the fact that Google has earned this backlash. Apple was an established company way before Google was, HN doesn't hate it.
    - na85 13y ago

dorfsmay 13y ago

Going away from standard and becoming incompatible. They are becoming very much like Microsoft that way. VOIP had a chance to become as ubiquitous and convenient as email, but the drop of xmpp fot voice and video took us back 10 years.... Same with replacing rss by g+. Google exists because of standards such as http and html, but they are slowly moving away from all standards in the name of locking users.

jmillikin 13y ago
> VOIP had a chance to become as ubiquitous and convenient > as email, but the drop of xmpp fot voice and video took > us back 10 years. XMPP had its chance, and failed to deliver. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC is the modern standard-to-be for VOIP, and the original implementation was created by Google.
- dorfsmay 13y ago
  Thanks for the link, this is informative. BUT: - unless I read this wrong, this protocol does not describe how the initial call is initiated, just how the video and audio is negotiated and transferred over the web. - there is no way to federate with google hangout or other WebRTC services, is there? This is the issue. hHangout is an amazing piece of software, but they give it to us for free to force us to register and use google accounts. btw, I don't think xmpp failed, what failed is to settle on good standards for voice and video (every time a standard emerged, somebody came up with a better one that was closed source which broke inter-compatibility) and really good clients (only skype and google voice could echo cancellation properly). xmpp, and SIP for that matter, are really about establishing the connection, they don't really care how the rest of the communication is done. What you are saying is like saying email failed because different people interpret html slightly differently.
  - jmillikin 13y ago
    > unless I read this wrong, this protocol does not > describe how the initial call is initiated, just how the > video and audio is negotiated and transferred over the web. Correct. The underlying application is responsible for initiating calls, using a protocol such as SIP. > there is no way to federate with google hangout or > other WebRTC services, is there? That's up to the service. Hangouts doesn't permit federation, but there should be no technical barriers to launching a federated video-chat service.

rhizome 13y ago

I totally get that Google is changing They aren't changing, they have changed. And, "unintegrated" is not necessarily a bad thing.

hindsightbias 13y ago

> Google-hate of late It's just gotten hip of late. The lack of faith institutions is accelerating, almost as if by design.

kybernetikos 13y ago
Please do not include google in statements about 'lack of faith in institutions'. When people bemoan the declining faith in institutions, they're generally talking about the legal system, the legislative system, journalists. Institutions that are supposed to represent disparate social groups with at least part of their mission to make the society and the world generally a better place. Profit driven corporations are not that. Less faith in corporations would probably have very few disbenefits. Less faith in the legal system leads to people taking 'justice' into their own hands. Less faith in the political system leads to people becoming disengaged, threatening the legitimacy of government. “The profit-driven corporate person, in other words, acts just like a natural person with Antisocial Personality Disorder, commonly called a sociopath or psychopath. ” http://www.ladybud.com/2013/08/19/corporate-persons-are-diagnosably-sociopathic/ http://www.ladybud.com/2013/08/19/corporate-persons-are-diag...
- hindsightbias 13y ago
  Nope. This website is filled with people who bemoan their loss in faith the teh google. They've supplanted their hopes and dreams in government with corporations, and some are now disappointed. > Less faith Disappointed, even though they have been indoctrinated into an ideology that "Government is [always] the problem" > The profit-driven corporate person, in other words... The profit-driven person.

dredmorbius 13y ago

As a guy who inspired two top-level stories yesterday, a few speculations. For myself, the company I once turned to to provide me useful things, save me time, respect my privacy (and certainly not pester me for personal information or publicly link my activity across entirely independent activities and sites), and get out of the way of doing things, is now proving me increasingly useless, wasting my time, disrespecting my privacy (including pestering me for personal information and publicly linking my activity across entirely independent activities and sites), and getting in the way of my doing things. The company's interests are no longer clearly aligned with mine. I'm not convinced the company's evil (though I'm also not convinced it's not), but it's certainly lost a certain element of the soul it exhibited when I first encountered it in the late 1990s, and it seems to me that the culture has been broken. I've speculated on why this is, and cannot know for sure. I suspect a large part of it is riding the advertising tiger (see: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070708081303AAkhGND http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070708081303AA... "He who rides the tiger is afraid to dismount"), I fear that it may be cooperating, or forced to cooperate, with intelligence and surveillance operations, and it may well be that a sense of entitlement, exceptionalism, and hubris has taken hold (Vic Gundotra's 2005 blog post against Microsoft's endorsement of a gay marriage proposal in Washington State makes for interesting reading: http://web.archive.org/web/20051119214319/http://vicgundotra.com/RespondingToScoble.aspx http://web.archive.org/web/20051119214319/http://vicgundotra...) Google five or six years ago was still fundamentally Search. Gmail was relatively new, and it was tossing a bunch of research projects "over the wall", some of which were actually pretty neat. Somewhat disorganized, yes, but ... interesting. Most significantly: not coercive. Which, if I think about it, is the biggest change I've seen. There's a certain lifecycle to tech companies, going from promising upstarts to early pioneers to useful workhorses. And then, too often, it's a decline into an unorganized mess, forced integration among scattered products and tools, and an increasing use of entrenched market power to coerce the response that they can no longer inspire. Microsoft and IBM certainly fit this mold, as does Oracle. I'd consider Apple a curious exception despite my other criticisms of the company. The single factor that's changed the most for me is that when I see Google's name on some product or tool, my first though now is "nice, but where can I find similar functionality elsewhere?" And at the same time, the company does seem to be fighting, if slightly belatedly, for increased protections from surveillance and personal data disclosure. Largely on account that it realizes its business model is directly in the crosshairs of such practices. So, when I came home yesterday to find two G+ posts (both strongly critical of Google) directly inspiring top-of-the-list HN articles, and a third "how to delete your G+ profile" item filling out the top 3, it was pretty surreal. I wonder (and speculated earlier on HN) that there might well be some gaming of the incoming queue, Google certainly has its enemies, and Microsoft's waged a dirty-tricks campaign against the company for years. Apple, Oracle, and Facebook are hardly fast friends. But a lot of what I see written seems pretty organic, and I'm well aware of friends, some who've worked at Google, who are also increasingly disenchanted by the company and its direction. pg would know his queue and voting dynamics. That's all I've got.

davidgerard 13y ago

The watershed moment was a couple of years ago, when they introduced G+ and pushed hard on the Real Names policy for it. They alienated a shitload of techies, and all those early adopters' friends, and blew thirteen years' accumulated good will in about two months. This was the point at which G+ would never, ever compete head-on with Facebook as an actual social network. What's happening now is they just did another burst of that and alienated a much wider crowd of people. More people are seeing the mask crack.

alextingle 13y ago

Look, this isn't a new issue. Lots and lots of us have been getting increasingly dissatisfied with Google for years. But each problem is isolated and hasn't made much of a ripple in the wider world... Is it a big deal to me that Google messed up their automated AdSense "publisher" interaction script, and cut off my income for a few weeks? Why yes, yes it is... but that doesn't mean that anyone else cares about that. Even if Google's generally poor supplier relations affects a lot of people (and it does), there's never enough of them for it to affect Google, the brand. Same goes for any number of other Google problems. Did the "nym wars" cause lots of disaffection amongst Google users? Yes, but again not enough. Did adding lots of pointless JavaScript to search results pages piss off a lot of people? How about the fact that search results are much less specific/useful than they used to be? Unilateral changes to the privacy policy? Or Google Reader? Code Search? Etcetera, etcetera... Google have created a huge amount of simmering resentment over the last few years. So, once an issue like this starts to get some traction, there are a lot of people ready to wait in line to put the boot in.

josephlord 13y ago

People aren't frogs and while the temperature of the water has been rising slowly increasing numbers of people are noticing. When I was at the BBC in the early 2000's they experimented with Digital TV and gradually reduced the bitrate of the broadcasts until the numbers of complaints grew. The interesting thing was when the bitrates were returned to their original levels the complaints didn't stop as the viewers had been educated in compression artefacts. I think that the gradual drift in user unfriendliness (privacy, increasing search ads, reader, G+'s pushiness into other areas etc.) is causing pushing various people to their limits of what can be allowed to pass without comment or action. It will be interesting if Google pulls back whether the complaints and departures (if they are actually happening yet - many people seem very tied to Gmail) actually slow or stop.

lyagusha 13y ago
>>tied to Gmail Use GMVault once, and at least the archive of old emails is no longer an issue.

bgruber 13y ago

> Google around maybe five or six years ago was a wasteland of shoddy, broken, unintegrated products, many with half-assed, confusing interfaces. But: > GMail's interface pisses me off, the new Maps layout is infuriating, and search is broadly speaking totally broken for me in places. But it's all well integrated, and there's focus, and isn't that what counts?