Google's Decline Really Bugs Me
blackhole12.blogspot.com
blackhole12.blogspot.com
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.
HERETICS
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
Calling it Hell detracts from the pragmatism of bread and circuses -- we are quite happy to compromise logic, ethics, and even our own personal feelings.
Or, more interestingly, artificially creating public approval through diversion, distraction, and the satisfaction of immediate and shallow desires.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
--Upton Sinclair
In the Army, I lived the most barebones kind of lifestyle and did a job that often put my family through hell but was buoyed by the feeling that I was part of the most noble of professions. In this industry, I've provided incredible privilege, comfort, and stability for my family but have always felt that this industry principally serves those who are a part of it.
So kinda like the Army as well? (i.e. Military-Industrial complex)
Did chat roulette enhance humanity? Was all the software thats been developed to enable spying and subjugation enhancing humanity?
Say what you want about the military industrial complex, but lets not forget that should any of our countries be invaded, we will be very grateful that those guns pointing at the invaders.
Can it be that the military is both the problem and its own solution?
There's a better reason to believe that terrorism is directed at us more because of our history and continuing practice of direct support for both repressive regimes that are unpopular with large segments of their own* population in the Middle East and Central Asia than because of our military specifically (though, particulary post-9/11, our use of the military has played directly into the same animosity.)
(* or, in the case of Israel specifically, a population that they simultaneously claim is not their own and disclaim interest in governing, but nevertheless seek to control every aspect of.)
> Can it be that the military is both the problem and its own solution?
Its a secondary aspect (as discussed above) of the problem, as well as a treatment for the symptoms that doesn't actually solve anything.
Sure, we need to have a military for defensive purposes. But the US doesn't maintain military spending at a level that rivals the rest of the world combined for anything resembling "defensive" purposes, it does so to maintain global hegemony and the ability to dictate policy in a wide range of domains to countries all over the world.
That's not to say it didn't come out of a legitimate, even defensive, place -- much of it was necessary, though one may certainly debate particular aspects, during the Cold War to counterbalance the attempts led by the Soviet Union to export Stalinism. But with that enemy defeated, the military-industrial complex is now more about serving domestic commercial interests -- both those that have are part of the military industrial complex and dependent on military spending directly, and those that through more traditional lobbying seek to have preferred policies imposed both domestically and globally.
Incidentally, in Russia it's largely the same outcome: WWII survivors adored, post-WWII veterans scorned.
It's interesting how forced conscription and a global threat causes a civilian population to revere its then-military.
Additionally, the justness of military conflicts these days is far more questionable than in the past. Doesn't this make it reasonable to be more critical of the military as a whole?
However, given a choice I'd prefer that the scale remain tipped towards praise instead of neglect or ignorance.
It's true, not all Soldiers serve altruistically, but they serve nonetheless. It's fine to question the intent of our government, military, and its officers, but try to remember that for the most part, Soldiers are forced to follow orders or face jail time, and they are constantly reminded of this.
The recruitment pitch is vastly different from the reality. I remember many Tuesdays where we'd spend the day sweeping the motor pool, wondering if we really deserved the praise bestowed upon us. Rest assured, most Soldiers wrestle with this at some point during their career.
Er, what?
Why would we trust any institution acting so obviously violent and so completely unaccountable?
She told me this and i'll never forget it: "hate the war, hate the government, but never, ever hate the soldier." Just don't do it. It's disrespectful to the sacrifice so many make, every day.
Not to mention in the world we live in the USA, most of the people in the military are from poor families, simply because they have no other choice and the army gets them an education.
We will always have an army, would you rather it be through conscription or volunteer?
As an 18 year old man I would have said "volunteer" no question. As someone who had a nephew volunteer, my mind is now completely changed and am 100% for conscription.
Egalitarian conscription means mothers across the country have a major stake in any decision to go to war -- even if their kid has not (yet) been drafted. You can bet your ass they will make it known they don't want their sons and daughters to be killed in some far off land fighting some rich man's war. It also means that congress itself will have children in the line of fire (unlike today where it is on the order of about 10 out of 535) giving them a lot more personal accountability for choosing to send other people's kids to face death.
I'm from a country with conscription. The major difference it makes is that the military treats soldiers like shit, because a new fresh batch of soldiers will always arrive, no matter what. In the extreme cases, your son will be found dead with three gunshot wounds and the military decides he committed suicide. In the more benign cases, you end up digging ditches with a shovel in winter, because soldiers are cheaper than machines.
The conscription program there definitely has problems both with the treatment of the average Joe (Kim?) and the ways for the privileged to avoid risk. There will never be a perfect system (c.f. Bush essentially going AWOL when he was in the service here). But I think the circumstances are different enough - you guys already have 100% conscription, that's a big cultural difference from spinning up a draft.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec0XKhAHR5I
Some folks are born to wave the flag, Ooh, they're red, white and blue. And when the band plays "Hail to the chief", Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord,
It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no senator's son, son. It ain't me, it ain't me; I ain't no fortunate one, no, Yeah!
Some folks are born silver spoon in hand, Lord, don't they help themselves, oh. But when the taxman comes to the door, Lord, the house looks like a rummage sale, yes,
It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no millionaire's son, no. It ain't me, it ain't me; I ain't no fortunate one, no.
Some folks inherit star spangled eyes, Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord, And when you ask them, "How much should we give?" Ooh, they only answer More! more! more! yoh,
It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no military son, son. It ain't me, it ain't me; I ain't no fortunate one, one. It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no fortunate one, no no no, It ain't me, it ain't me, I ain't no fortunate son, no no no,
Given the steady decline in the number of congressional kids in the military since the draft was suspended it seems pretty clear that the situation has only gotten worse since vietnam. Don't confuse imperfection with failure.
I hardly believe that the group of people who benefit from software is smaller than the group of people on this side of your barrel.
Ah, the infamous golden cage
At times like this I'm so glad I didn't join Google. And by join I mean I wasn't approved in their dysfunctional interview system.
Because if the cage has the area of Earth, then it might as well not exist at all.
And if it's not gold at all, then you don't have any remorse trying to leave it behind (which is what "golden cage" conveys).
Of course I didn't like not being accepted (that was in 2007 btw).
But based on what now is showing and the opinion of people that have worked there (and the jobs I had afterwards) I see that it didn't matter much in the end, and I believe that even though having Google in your CV is something that's good, not entering allowed me to pursue a lot of other things.
And the opinion that the Google selection process (not only theirs) is dysfunctional is widely shared.
I was then told by the recruiter that "it would be unfortunate" if I had to abandon the recruiting process because I'd gotten another job offer. I said, "unfortunate for whom? Certainly not for me."
The last straw was when I found out that you don't get to meet your manager before you accept the job, or do know exactly what you'd be doing; and that was a deal killer. Your manager IS your job or certainly your happiness in it. I walked away, and have never been happier about that decision.
You say that, yet they consistently field top talent in the industry. The fact is that all hiring is dysfunctional and imperfect in some way. Google's is less so than most everyone else's.
I think that at the end of the day, people don't like being rejected. That's understandable, but it's going to add some biased memes into the public consciousness that you have to mentally discount to a degree. I focus on the results they have.
You mention work. As you say, Google does not just want their employees' time. They want their complete identification with the company. In a way, they want their souls.
As for business, Google is a company whose business model is tricking people into sharing as much private information with the company, and then using this information for profit.
One of the most interesting things about Google is their "don't be evil" motto. I want to write a complete literary interpretation of it some other time, but here are the highlights. Obviously, it's a short and catchy motto that is not intended to be taken too seriously, but that does not preclude literary interpretation.
First, let's consider the motto as a whole. It could be a motto for anyone, but how come it's Google's and not mine (or yours)? The reason is that they accept the premise that corporations do often turn out to be "evil" (whatever that means). This is analogous to the reason physicians swear to "do no harm"; they swear it because doctors can easily do harm.
Now let's take the motto apart and analyze it word by word. First, the word "evil". The word assumes such a thing exists and can be recognizable. Second, the word "be". It implies that evil is something you are, not something you do. Lastly, the word "don't". It assumes that you can choose not to "be" "evil", and implies that those who "are" "evil" are so because they chose to be that way.
If a motto can guide a corporation, and if this motto guides Google, we can see why they've become so monstrously terrifying. Evil is not always easily recognizable. Often, it's in the eyes of the beholder. Second, evil is rarely something you are, and almost always something you do. Third, "evil" creeps up on you, and is often the result of the best intentions. People other than James Bond villains don't choose to be evil. Similarly you can't simply choose not to be. To abstain from "evil" you must be vigilant. You must constantly analyze your actions and their consequences separately from your intentions, and listen to other viewpoints.
Going back to dystopias, well known ones, like Orwell's 1984, insist that the masses love their oppressors rather than fear them. This is a crucial point that is largely overlooked when people discuss the NSA surveillance scandal. It is crucial because true power, absolute oppression, cannot exist if its wielder is generally considered suspect.
When I read 1984 many years ago I couldn't understand that. Do people not notice that they're being manipulated and exploited? Can they actually enjoy being exploited? Now we have the answer.
[0]http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2009/04/goog...
David Krane, a senior spokesperson for Google, told SVW: "I never liked it. I always felt that it would come back to bite us in some way, that we would end up building concentration camps, or something even worse. The universe seems to love irony, why leave ourselves wide open?"
Well, the universe does love irony, but concentration camps are unnecessary in this day and age. Knowledge is power, and building a company whose purpose it is to collect and use as much personal information as possible is bad enough.
https://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/ (point 6)
Presumably the written bit is "but that's not to say we won't anyway".
As I worked with more milennials I think I've stumbled across something, and Google (consciously?) tapped into it, brilliantly. The children of the baby boomers, so eager to use social networking, or live in communes in the city (see yesterday's SF Gate) are so willing to believe in this shell of an idea passed down from their parents. They are much more social and communal than us in generation X. They're often morally adrift (religious worship is declining), financially adrift (the economy), and grew up with tales of free love. They're delicately raised to have great self esteem, but often crumble in the face of adversity or criticism. They're a brittle group, it seems. So the social nature (if my friends do it, it's ok) makes them so eager to buy into this.
I can't say it's a new concept. I remember showing up to work at big mega tech corp at 8 am (after a 1 hour commute) and being told "nice of you to show up today." I routinely worked 12 hours a day and we were never allowed to work from home. There it was forced on us, but how ever so much nicer to just gently slide into being a company man with free food, etc. Sort of like the Matrix.
That said, daycare is an important perk, I cannot deny Google the kudos it deserves for caring for parents who work for them. More companies should do this.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-there-a-...
From grammarist:
The adjective immoral means contrary to established moral principles. Immoral actions are corrupt, unethical, sinful, or just wrong. Amoral means (1) neither moral nor immoral, or (2) lacking moral sensibility. So while immoral and amoral might share a little common ground, there is a clear distinction: immoral things are bad, and amoral things are either neutral from a moral perspective or simply removed from moral considerations.
I had a look at my own OED, and it agrees with your definition. It's still not an accurate depiction of the morals of anyone I know.
I more think about it this way--and hey, if I chose the wrong word, do correct me.
When we are changing the world with our technology we don't really stop to think about all the people who will be put out of work by it. We don't as a community really care much about the impact of our companies on our communities (giving to local arts organizations and volunteer efforts in SF are not rising concurrently with population or wealth).
To be fair, this thinking isn't limited to milennials, it's just that as children they were more likely to have been raised without the early foundation of morals which are usually taught by religion.
I do not in any way mean to imply religion is necessary for morals, just statistically that's how most people get them. I also don't mean to imply milennials are criminals, just that well, it doesn't occur to them to think sometimes about the impact of their choices; or if they do, they don't care. Hell, maybe I was that way in my 20s and I've conveniently forgotten it...so maybe it's a function of youth.
The brittleness though? absolutely. Most of them are deeply insecure, fundamentally needing a lot of praise. I don't mind , because that's the kind of leader/manager I like to be; but adversity is hard for them to deal with.
I sometimes think one's attitude toward all this is dependent on when one arrives in the area; for myself having arrived during the bust of 2002 I feel perpetually like "winter is coming." for those for who it has always been prosperous springtime, it's hard to realize how important it is to squirrel away money, karma, connections, etc.
Random musings. YMMV.
My feeling is that, today as a hundred years ago, the bulk of moral education comes from watching and interacting with other humans. Parents, teachers, friends, and neighbors hurting you, helping you, being hurt by you, being helped by you, and discussing all of the above.
If one wanted to, one could argue the baby boomers were pretty amoral and self-oriented; leading to millennials seeing and adopting that.
1) Didn't fall on its sword to spite the federal government. 2) Wanted to unify the identity systems across its products.
Are you serious?
The third party doctrine is something out of dystopian fiction. Congress and SCOTUS's behavior regarding national security is very 1984. But Google? Really?
How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html
In short, neither scientists/mathematicians/engineers nor historians/literary critics are stupid (well, most of them aren't). If this is your starting point, then if before dismissing the other discipline you realize that it's being studied by smart people who know what they're doing, and give yourself time to understand the premise, you might actually learn something. The writer of that article simply does not have the tools necessary to determine whether a "reading" is bogus or not, because he does not know what "non-bogus" or "true" is in the framework he has tried to explore.
Having said that, there was very little deconstruction in my interpretation of "don't be evil". In fact, I think it's a pretty straightforward interpretation once you've decided to interpret the motto seriously. It is a literary failure on my part to interpret it so unimaginatively, but it's only meant as a starting point.
I remember when Android 2.3 was released and at one of the Google dev conferences, a Google engineer answering a question about why "X feature doesn't exist in stock Anroid" answered that Google thought that was too confusing for the lay user and that one could look to the custom ROM community for adding that feature later. It was something that no large company would ever do it seemed to me, That's the first thing that comes to mind whenever I read something of this nature about Google. I'm sure I could pull up others. But that's the one that comes to mind.
But yeah, that was a more open Google undeniably. Before Larry Page took over. Maybe there were a few oases of ideality hiding the vast curtain of reality. But it gave them a soul and connected people to the company. But that's maybe gone now.
He gave a speech recently where he actually pondered why people wouldn't want to have their health care data public, so it could be shared to advance medical research.
From that I could tell that he's completely out of touch with ordinary people. He simply has no idea that people might be scared of losing their job or being discriminated against because of an illness.
Reminds me of his former girlfriend/date Marissa Mayer, who built a nursery next to her office while telling Yahoo employees they should no longer work from home.
There's something deeper here - Larry Page is thinking in terms of "big data" - "wouldn't it be nice if we could run all kinds of multivariate analyses on everything about everyone?" - but it's fundamentally impossible to do that while preserving anonymity. The same information that might reveal interesting correlations is vulnerable to correlation attacks. Say you wanted to know how nutrition affected immune system response. You'd look at things like height, weight, diet, frequency of minor illness, and rough location (city level, to control illness rate against those around you). To be of any use, the "anonymized" database is going to have to have all those variables correlated per person, which means if I know you're 6'1", eat a lot of bananas, live in Silicon Valley and had a cold last year, I can potentially look you up and find out other things about you.
It's worth remembering that whenever a high-level Googler talks about the social/medical potential of large-scale data analysis like that, that it is inherently hostile to privacy.
Look back to how we handled HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. Enormous amounts of fear (understandable) and utter disgust-filled loathing (not so much). There were politicians calling for AIDS sufferers to be rounded up and put in quarantine camps but refusing to engage in public health initiatives because they thought that warning people to use condoms and engage in safe sex would "promote" homosexuality.
Up until 2010 in Britain, it was legal for a dentist to refuse to take an HIV+ patient even though the professional association for dentists had told dentists that it was safe to use the same procedures around sterilisation and safety. It also made no sense as it just led to people lying about their HIV status to dentists in order to get access to health services.
I know people who have faced discrimination in work over chronic mental health conditions that they are being treated for. People who have held down other jobs perfectly well, who take less sick leave than people without any health conditions. There is still significant social stigma around mental health conditions: nobody considers you morally suspicious if you have, say, eczema or hay fever, but if you have depression or schizophrenia, some will consider you too "risky" to employ etc.
So, yes, "please make all your medical records public" sounds nice. I've spoken to friends who, thanks to people like Schmidt and others breathlessly promoting this kind of thing at TED talks, think that anyone who wishes to actually exercise their medical privacy to be "irrational". And that medical privacy is a silly idea that we wouldn't choose to have now and that we only have for historical reasons. That the bright sparks of Silicon Valley can't see the importance of medical privacy is really concerning—it shows they've failed to look at the history of discrimination and fear-mongering against people with particular health conditions. Or, worse, it shows they've thought about it and don't give a shit about protecting people from mistreatment by both the state and by other individuals based on their health conditions.
I'd say that it is Google that is setting up false idols with bullshit mantras like "Do no evil."
Interesting. Would you statement hold if I replace Google with Apple, and engineers with consumers?
Googlers annoy me endlessly because everyone knows the mission and everyone thinks they're on the same mission. Even if their job is indirectly related or even if what they're doing is potentially evil.
They all believe they are changing the world. It's what they tell their aging hippie parents when they visit, it's what they brainwash the legions of school children that visit, it's what they insist to the political leaders when they visit.
Every Googler thinks they're there to serve humanity and it's pompous.
When I was at Apple the goal was helping the user. You made a better thing so someone can use it better. You made something that your mom could use. You tried harder so that a baby can pick it up and it just works.
Most people didn't care about Steve. Hell, he walked around the cafeteria, grabbed his cookie, but no one really cares. Just yet another eccentric old dude walking around in a place full of eccentric old dudes in skirts and high heels.
What I hated about Apple though was that we loved users so much it became a problem. We suffered from the battered-wives syndrome. Where we tolerated and accepted everything. It became to be a love-hate relationship where on one hand we appreciated users but on the other there was such a disdain for them as well.
Every Apple person thinks they're different because they make things work in a world where things don't work because people are too stupid to make it work. It's equally as pompous as Google.
Hell the whole of Silicon Valley is really pompous, geeks just do a really good job hiding it when the attention wasn't on this place.
I'm a Londoner; I'm pompous about out-of-towners. Out-of-towners are pompous about Londoners.
Disdain makes the world go round.
I see this general pomposity among my fellow techies all the time. Some think that business people are stupid, some think humanities are unnecessary, some argue that users are all noobs etc...
Perhaps it's pride in work/abilities gone too far. Perhaps we overvalue ourselves...
My experience has been that it is simply a lack of perspective due to ignorance. It is very tempting to be dismissive of what other people do when you only understand what they do at a very simple level.
To me there are at least two bits of the industry - the bit where that either because of the work or because of the culture those working in it might convince themselves that they're changing the world, and the bit where people largely write CRUD database apps that save a few people, usually working for corporations, a bit of time.
Far more people work in the second camp and in my experience most of them really aren't that pompous at all.
That is one side of the problem. The other side is, many many people (especially engineers) undervalue themselves, think that they aren't worth much etc. It is super hard to precisely know what our value is, and act/live in such a way that it is neither arrogant/proud/pompous nor doormat/depressed.
May be we should stop measuring value/worth through sheer abilities, achievements and things owned?
Well, I find this hard to believe, given what I've read about their relationship/feelings towards Jobs from lots of other ex-Apple employees. Makes me hard to believe the claim that you even worked there in the first place.
I mean, "Just yet another eccentric old dude", really?
The difference was that, that PARTICULAR "eccentric old dude" had started the company you worked on in the first place, had ressurected it from bankraptcy just some years ago, has turned it into the most profitable company on earth, had outmost control over it's products and directions, was named "person of the year" several times, had a worldwide cult following, and micromanaged often the software and hardware Apple pushed out -- to the point that people talked about his "Reality Distortion Field".
walking around in a place full of eccentric old dudes in skirts and high heels.
Huh? Was Apple full of transvenstites?
I'm still convinced that the major disaffected group are people who used Reader :)
I have friends at Google, they love it and have suggested I put in my CV. (No chance. I don't have a degree and my algorithmic insight is terrible.) But, ehh. An advertising agency with lovely working conditions and smart people to be around, and it's not like I wanted to see my kid anyway. OH WAIT.
Now we have two great mapping services on that platform to choose from.
Why not? Google started around 20 years later, that's the main difference. In a different environment, google focused more on internet software and grew faster than MS did a few decades ago, but the path from scrappy startup grabbing an untapped niche, to corporate monopoly is a predictable one.
They are small, have lots of money, there is no bureaucracy and there are no managers getting in their way of achieving great things.
Microsoft has 95K+ employees and has by and large turned into IBM. Google has 45K+ employees and is rapidly transforming into the next Microsoft.
> A lot of fast growing start ups are terrible places to work, because of the very virtue of what they are.
The size of a company has a little to do with its culture. Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft all employ over 80,000 people, but have very different cultures.
I have seen some start-ups which have awful cultures, with terrible morale problems. It is really not the size of / number of employees at a company that defines its culture, but the mindset of the people in charge.
Yet in the process of "making my opinion about a corp being evil or not" I enjoy measuring the amount and the quality of free software they release. For software corp, I think this is a good parameter.
By this metric it is easy to understand that putting too much hopes into Google is wrong. They release a lot of code, but that code is usually only "a path" for the user to their core products (which they do not release).
I encourage you rediscover those corps instead where people work hard to keep their "don't be evil" going, despite not marketing it that much.
Let me add something, maybe I'm not good enough for Google, but I'm employed by Red Hat and I enjoy what we do at Red Hat. And I could name a lot of others, in this context, doing great things.
Now it seems like Google is shifting to a more short term vision. They have begun leveraging their market power rather than relying on product quality to gain market share. In doing so they are starting to sacrifice their reputation. For big company this is an attractive approach over the short term. A reputation for high quality can be expensive to maintain, and products can become very long term risky investments. It's more profitable in the short term to create the illusion of quality while using tactics that hamper the competition or restrict consumer choices. However, that leads to stagnation and eventually the company becomes obsolete.
You might see start ups as being idealistic, and Google's previous behaviour as being benevolent. However, start ups aren't charities and Google made a boat load of money. It's not really about morality. It's more that big companies have incentives to follow particular short term strategies that ultimately stifle innovation and prevent technological progress. A big company with long term vision forces its competitors to innovate to keep up and helps change the technological landscape in a way that start ups are not able to.
If you look at the leading companies across many industries, one thing that jumps out is that the corporate identity is primary in the employees lives. Generally these companies also prefer molding employees straight out of school. This is true for P&G, Accenture, McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. Look at the leadership - most have been there their entire careers.
I am not saying this is good or bad, but I am saying that it's an attribute of many leading companies.
Full disclosure: I am not a Google employee, nor have I ever been.
Who wants to fund a documentary?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've been an early adopter of most of the products google has made available. They're consistently ahead of the curve with only a few exceptions. Youtube is technologically ahead of the curve, talking about the bandwidth and processing that goes on within that service is mind numbing. But other than what they've managed to accomplish on a technical scale with the service, everything else has been lacking. First and foremost I would say that unifying sign in with the rest of Google's products is a no brainer. But people have even been fighting that on Youtube.
Google+ is their identity service, first and foremost so all accounts are being moved there. If you don't want to use the social aspects of it you don't have to. I'd suggest you do because it's really convenient.
They are investing a lot of money into context awareness. They already know who you are. What you search for, what you like, what you want to know. They know your name phone number and birth date. Putting this identity service into play just brings all of that up to the surface and gives you some control.
If Google wanted to be evil at this point they wouldn't need to give you Google+ to do it.
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.
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.
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.
I recognize that my comment contained hyperbole but you know what? That "4chan does HN" thread was spot-on in many places.
Apple was an established company way before Google was, HN doesn't hate it.
> 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.
- 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.
> 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?
They aren't changing, they have changed.
And, "unintegrated" is not necessarily a bad thing.
It's just gotten hip of late. The lack of faith institutions is accelerating, almost as if by design.
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-diag...
> 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.
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=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...)
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.
I think your comment about "not coercive" is insightful. The biggest change I've seen over time here is that at the start, people never talked about what users should or should not do. They were treated as people who would use our products, or not, and that was A-OK.
The subtle trend that underlies a lot of this recent outpouring of dismay is that these days, this view has changed. It's not about chasing profit (it's still extremely rare at Google to see anything approaching a budget). It's not about being evil. It's that these days users are increasingly treated as if they were sheep that need to be herded around.
This trend is evidence in many different ways. The big push for Google+ comes from Larry's fear of Facebook. He got really scared a few years ago that Facebook was going to "win" in any area they competed in, simply through being social, regardless of how good their actual product was. Photos was taken as the canonical example: Facebook Photos was inferior in almost every way to PicasaWeb but it won handily in terms of market share because it was social (or so the theory goes). Messaging seemed similar, surveys showed the younger generation didn't use email anymore, it was all on Facebook. So at the time it was thought that Facebook were going to take on every one of Google's core products and win, simply through having the social graph. So that fear drove the massive investment in Google+ and the desire to win at any cost.
Of course this strategy has not worked, as was predictable. Google+ is an excellent social network, but people already had one and didn't care to change. Also, the threat from Facebook has never really seemed to materialise in the huge way Larry thought it would.
Unfortunately this fear drove a long series of mental rationalisations. People would use Google+, employees were told, because it would be good for them. They might not realise it now, but Google+ would make everything better, and that's why it's so important that they all sign up. Real Names might be unpopular to start with, but then people would realise the benefits and they'd all be happy.
The same thinking has driven a bunch of other problems. That damn red alerting bell that Google+ users all get? It can't be switched off, rationale: "if we allow users to switch it off because it's too noisy, after we fix that they won't switch it back on and then they'd end up in a worse state. It's really better for people in the long term that there be no way to disable it".
Unfortunately Larry is so committed to this fear-driven social strategy that he can't mentally accept that a large population of users is never going to be excited about or use Google+. For him, if Google+ loses, Google itself will become entirely irrelevant a short time later. It's literally an existential crisis. This places Vic in a very powerful position where he's able to get whatever he wants, and pushback from the lower ranks is ignored in order to seem to be making progress with this "better for the users" social integration.
I guess YouTube comments are a good recent example of this. Presumably someone at the bottom of the YouTube org understood that removing character limits and allowing links would immediately cause floods of spam, but the "social is better" meme is now so unmoveable amongst management that these sorts of practical considerations (which would once have been the dominant factor in decision making) get tossed aside.
I don't know if Google will change, but unless Larry wakes up and realises Facebook isn't going to kill his business, I think it will continue down the current path for a long time yet.
Apple is a company that famously suggests and pushes people into how it thinks things should be done.
From what you are saying, Larry seems to have heard that advice (which when I first read it I took to be about focus, not profit) and heard "push your users down a particular path".
Moving from a "free to do it your way" model to a "best if you do it our way" model is undoubtably going to cause a lot of grief to long-time Google users. In a similar vein that explains the upset about "moving" stuff from AOSP to Play Services.
The growing up of google felt like story line of Starwar.
Judi night grew up and felt the power of the dark side. :-)
Also remind me of another line: If you're young and you're not a Democrat, you don't have a heart. If you're old and you're a Republican, you don't have a brain.
Google has "mature" now. :-)
Or is it? Actually I agree with you. But I also believed Microsoft was exaggerating his fears of Netscape. Now I don't know what to think.
Maybe it's better to err on the side of paranoia after all.
Microsoft is still in the same position as it was pre-Netscape. It still effectively owns the OS and office software markets. It just wasn't entirely able to take over a couple of new markets.
That failure was pretty bad: MS is no longer seen as a "hot new thing", or a producer of hot new things. But in terms of doing damage to Microsoft, nothing from outside MS has done anything, as far as I can see. (Antitrust lawsuits notwithstanding.)
And much in the same way: you can't really defeat a technology. As we now see with Microsoft, very slowly, responding to the threat by providing its own offerings, despite the considerable revenue threat this creates for the company. As with other fallen tech giants, it's turning increasingly to patent revenues and other forms of extractive revenue rather than productive activities.
This is the upshot and downside of companies with ambitions that are essentially limitless:
When you treat EVERYTHING as an opportunity, you inevitably come to see EVERYTHING as a potential threat.
Thanks. That's one of the biggest changes I've seen. Your comments are interesting (of course, no way to know if you are who you claim to be, though, similarly for myself).
Larry's fear of Facebook.
I've written multiple times on G+ why Google should be focused on Amazon, not FB. Social is ultimately ephemeral. The evaporative cooling effect always kicks in. Given G+'s lack of effective filtering, sooner there than elsewhere. I've posted far too often to Shimrit Ben-Yair (G+'s product manager) on aspects of this.
The other trend I see is self-hosting / distributed services becoming viable. See FreedomBox as an example. A few years off yet, but it'll be a game-changer.
That damn red alerting bell
One of the first things that lead me to segregate my G+ activities from "everything else I do on the Web". I've actually removed the bell via user-side CSS (repeatedly, thanks to repeated CSS class-name changes) from other Google properties. I ultimately found it was easier to 1) not use them when logged in (so: in another browser/session), or 2) use other services (DDG, OpenStreetMaps, FixYT.com / Vimeo, etc.).
if Google+ loses, Google itself will become entirely irrelevant a short time later.
He's wrong. However if he keeps cramming G+ down peoples' throats, he'll keep encouraging exploration of other servcies. Particularly among the more technically literate and thought leaders.
I don't know if Google will change, but unless Larry wakes up and realises Facebook isn't going to kill his business, I think it will continue down the current path for a long time yet.
Sad. In particular, even FB doesn't suffer disadvantage that it's sucking so much else of my information online (mail, video, search), though FB itself is pretty invasive (NB: I don't have a personal Facebook account).
As others have noted, the fear-driven strategy is highly reminiscent of Microsoft, and is among the factors which killed Microsoft's brand among end-users (the OEMs and business partners loved them so long as the money kept flowing).
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.
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.
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.
Use GMVault once, and at least the archive of old emails is no longer an issue.
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?
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.
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.
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.
This would be more how their perceived by hobbiests and people who work at startups. For people who want to work at large companies or are willing to work at established companies it doesn't seem true.
Personally, I've only heard negatives about working at MS from people who have been there for a while, new employees are happy and excited to be there.
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
..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 ?
edit: Yes, let's downmod the guy who doesn't understand an obtusely-worded question. Well done.
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.
Despite Google not really stack ranking, it's kind of like inflation. If you work 40 hours a week and 20% of the time, you work on your 20% project, you look 20% worse than the average 40 hour a week worker that doesn't use their 20% time.
Then once everybody is unblocked, your time is yours. On a well-functioning team you still need to pick things up on your own initiative (eg. fix bugs, volunteer to take on new features), but in general you can do just enough to show activity, and don't need to worry about always being the best on the team. So that's your chance to do 20% work, or play with other technologies, or investigate other areas of Google.
Another tricky bit is making time for professional development and advancement, and the way to do this is to take advantage of the 6 month review cycle. Make sure you can demonstrate tangible accomplishments in the 1-2 months leading up to a review, then spend a couple months assimilating the big picture and learning the skills you need to get known as an expert on the team, and then use your newfound knowledge to improve the effectiveness of the team.
What people look for come perf time is "Does this person make my job easier, or harder?" As long as the answer for them is "easier", you'll get good reviews. That doesn't necessarily mean working flat out all the time, it means being mindful of the people around you and what they're hoping to accomplish and then making sure your actions are a help and not a hindrance.
There was even a Dilbert strip about it a couple years ago: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-12-19/
I have friends that do things like teach Lego Mindstorms to 5th graders though, and that by definition is bounded to 20% of your actual time and won't overfill the workday.
Someone can use Google+ and love Google+ and empathize with others who might not feel the same way. Regardless, it's entirely irrelevant. He doesn't mention Google+ once in the post.
Sure it does, but when some of the profit increases are made by deliberately decreasing contrast of the background of the ads and avoiding borders to increase ad clicks, especially from old people who are unable to see contrast [0][1], that's when it crosses the line into "decline" of the user experience. They(along with other search engines) got smacked by the FTC [2], it's an interesting read.
That plus shoving Google+ down the throat of people and making them literally cry [3] (yes I mean literally) in an effort to compete with Facebook at any cost leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and reminds me of how Microsoft got it's M$ moniker.
[0] http://ppcblog.com/fbf0fa-now-you-see-it
[1] http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/01/31/is-google-intentional...
[2] http://www.ftc.gov/os/2013/06/130625searchenginegenerallette...
Distributing more software is how they earn more money. The $ reveals what you think of Microsoft, and going by that, one would have to assume you think Microsoft's goal was to optimize profit. Optimizing profit would require distributing more copies of their software.
I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to say about the profit motive either. Distribution doesn't necessarily means profit nor driven by profit.
They could have tossed Windows on to blank CDs and threw it out of helicopters if they want but it serves no purpose when they were making fat margins licensing Windows to Dell.
I wouldn't be surprised. And its not just 20% projects, I'd be surprised if any smart person would like to do hacknights, hackdays, weekend projects for the company.
Such initiatives have always been the execs/VP's of way of saying 'Please someone do my homework'. If you have a leader who is clueless about the direction the person wants to go or projects the person wants to chase. The easiest way is to call for such initiatives, choose a mediocre project from it(You don't want great projects to make the programmers more famous than the managers). Once such a project is chosen, you will be kept busy forced to hit the deadline working 100 hr weeks. While the VP will be pushing his days sleeping on the job.
What happens at the end of the year? Best case- You will get a passing mention at some event. Mediocre case- A congratulation email from a team. Worst case- Punished for making some mistakes.
At the same time the VP/manager/Director will likely get promoted, receive a fat bonus or raise for 'developing a culture that fosters innovation'.
If you are good enough to work on a great side project, do it at your home. And for yourself.
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.
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...
> 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?
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-175...) while they penalize large ads above the fold on indexed pages (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 ...
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.
The magic is gone, and that's a special kind of disappointment.
* During an interview aired on December 3, 2009, on the CNBC documentary "Inside the Mind of Google," Schmidt was asked, "People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they be?" He replied: "I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that information could be made available to the authorities."
* At the Techonomy conference on August 4, 2010, Schmidt expressed that technology is good. And he said that the only way to manage the challenges is "much greater transparency and no anonymity." Schmidt also stated that in an era of asymmetric threats, "true anonymity is too dangerous."
* In 2005 Google blacklisted CNET reporters from talking to Google employees for one year, until July 2006, after CNET published personal information on Schmidt, including his politician donations, hobbies, salary, and neighborhood, that had been obtained through Google searches.
* In 2010 in an interview with the WSJ Schmidt stated that he thinks teenagers should be entitled to change their names upon reaching adulthood in order to separate themselves from the Google record of their youthful indiscretions.
* In 2010 he also stated that "people aren't ready for the technology revolution that's going to happen to them" and that absolute privacy would prove too-unsafe in the future
"Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one. ... Therefore, we have implemented a corporate structure that is designed to protect Google's ability to innovate and retain its most distinctive characteristics. ... The main effect of this structure is likely to leave our team, especially Sergey and me, with increasingly significant control over the company's decisions and fate. ... We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served-as shareholders and in all other ways-by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains."
-- http://investor.google.com/corporate/2004/ipo-founders-lette...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In your example, profit and benefit would in fact be directly correlated.
If you improve your service, without charging more, then more customers will want your product accordingly, and you will earn more profit all things being equal. In fact, this is one the most basic of all methods of earning more profit from an existing service or product: give customers a better service or product without raising prices, increasing the value proposition of your offering.
I can speak firsthand to seeing what happens when a company tries to maximize profit -- actually two companies.
One was a life insurance company with about 1,300 employees; another a tech company with around 500. The life insurance company was bought out by a large conglomerate and then a "management consulting / efficiency" company was brought in to "help". What really happened was the consulting company decided who was going to get laid off and who wasn't. While there was some dead weight in the company, many of the people laid off were not the dead weight - not sure how they really decided, but the outcome was not good from a personnel standpoint - it might have been from a profit standpoint initially. After that, morale was destroyed as well as the management culture becoming poisonous. Example: IT director charging departments for new computers and then keeping them for his area and giving the other departments his old ones. Basically it became a dog-eat-dog company that was eventually purchased by AIG - and most of us can remember what happened to that company.
The other company was a software and consulting company that was run by one of the founders until he decided to step back from the day to day operations (after he made a boatload of money) and have his accountant friend run the company. Prior to this, the company was one of the best to work for in the area. Its consultants were considered top-notch and the benefits were incredible. Since the accountant took over, morale is horrible and benefits are way down. I could go into detail, but you can find examples of bad cost cutting and morale busting decisions all over the internet - it seemed like this company did a lot of them.
The point is, maximizing profit often comes at the expense of the people who work for the company; and isn't good in the long run for the people or the company.
Now, those terrible managers might have thought that they were maximizing profits, but like you said, they eventually failed.
If the insurance company laid off productive workers that significantly contributed to their ability to earn a profit, then what you describe is the opposite of maximizing profit for the long haul. What it sounds like, is the insurance company got swallowed up by a vampire looking to suck the life out of it for a short term gain.
Fantastic point. Forking over money (or not) to a company is how we as consumers signal companies what we want. It is far, far more potent than firing out a tweet or posting on HN.
So if you truly hate what Google is doing, I sure hope that you aren't using Gmail, Android, Adwords, Hangouts, etc, etc. Otherwise your complaining here sends a small signal in the negative, but your actions send a bigger signal affirming Google's actions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot more's changed than just a CEO.
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.
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.
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.
Made me laugh, thanks!
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.
Don't like it? That's fine, neither do I. But stop preaching about a morality that was never there.
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."
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.
I also have a tendency to want to just load a whole problem into my head, Think Real Hard, and then write down the solution as quickly as I can. It's a great strategy, when it works. The problem is that it doesn't scale - it sets a limit on the complexity of problems you can attack directly, and it prevents you from working on more than one problem at once.
So what I've found, as I work on more complex problems, is that I really need to adopt all those tactics that back in college I thought were reserved for "lesser" minds. Things like breaking down a problem into chunks and then writing down all the intermediate steps. Adopting a bug database, spreadsheet, or task management software. Thinking about the external impact of a change, and communicating it to other parties. Showing off intermediate demos, and breaking the problem down into a form where intermediate demos are possible. Asking for help from other people.
These are absolutely essential if you want to work on anything that takes more than a month, but the nice side effect is that you then get the ability to work on multiple projects for free. All the problem state is externalized, so if you need to work on something else, you can just drop it, switch contexts, and read your own documents or bug queue to figure out where to pick it up.
Or let's put it another way: I don't multitask / switch contexts.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I suspect we will see the same thing with Twitter too, as they seek to monetize their service.
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.
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.
Larry Page took over when Google went to war with Facebook. A lot of stuff gets sacrificed during wartime.
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...
IMHO all they are is following a similar trajectory around 20 years later than Microsoft.
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).
Isn't the opposite true?
We can certainly point to famous examples of heirs/heiresses behaving badly, but that seems largely the exception rather than the rule-- by and large, the terms nouveau riche and "new money" carry a negative connotation, while "old money" is associated with taste and sophistication (though certainly also snobbery).
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/internet/2012/06/dear-inte...
http://www.clutchmagonline.com/2013/03/adria-richards-receiv...
http://www.cosmopolitan.com/advice/work-money/lindy-west-bul...