Google was the antithesis of Microsoft as the author writes and is now doomed to become the same. It's a monopoly that has come to dictate its terms for maximum profit and resilience against competition. By becoming "evil", it is opening opportunities for a new antithesis of itself. Perhaps Twitter will take that spot, perhaps some entirely different company from the Far East? That's the way it goes ...
twitter are showing signs of going the same way. what it takes is someone prepared to take a low-prifit long-haul trust based approach rather than 'monetise now!'. this is a hard choice to make at the moment when its so easy to make money from investors who think they can both make big profits and keep users signing up.
Initially it was just the best at what it did, pretty much leaving all others behind. I didn't hate yahoo, but they got smoked. And remember the "AOL keyword"? I think we romanticize here a little bit, I don't remember Microsoft being the enemy early on, as disliked as they were.
I think the argument is that no existing client that a user would actually have on their PC supported flags in any meaningful way: they weren't stored efficiently, they weren't presented in a way the user could effectively see, and in many cases they were limited to a random subset of flags (in the case of some clients, like Thunderbird, you could have exactly five flags with the names flag1 through flag5). The support in some clients has become more reasonable, but it is still not really usable. Even at the protocol level it is only recently that there is any effective way where flags could be efficiently resynchronized between the client and the server, and AFAIK there still isn't a standard to let flags have remap able high-level Unicode names. Sure, it would be interesting to push client developers to start maybe considering flags to be an interesting thing to support sufficiently to let a user work with Gmail, but frankly wouldn't we expect Google, as users, to build something actually usable?
1) 20% time still exists. I used it to write an HTML parser [1] that's had some modest success, and I have coworkers that have 20%ed on robotics, quantum computation, elementary school education, Project Loon, Flu Trends, and a variety of other interesting things. Google Now came out of a 20% project. It is something that you have to take a lot of initiative on to pull off successfully, but the opportunity is still available.
It means that for a long time people have called it 120% time because most of the people who still 'used' their 20% time were working 120% the amount of people that didn't use their 20% time.
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.
100 and 120, at least in my brief experience. Coworkers start expecting 100% output from you, which means you are going to get a lesser review for putting out 80%. That they don't let you do 20% in the first 6 months there is what makes it so hard to start it back up.
This is hackable if you're strategic about it. The trick is to always make sure your coworkers are unblocked. If someone needs a code review, do it before your regular work. If someone's waiting on an e-mail response from you, send it first. If someone needs your CL to be in before they can proceed, make sure you get it in.
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.
Depends on what you're using it for. For Gumbo I found that it was more like 50-120%, i.e. for a good portion of time I was spending something like 50% of my work time plus nights & weekends on my 20% project. I was lucky to have a supportive manager, where after I showed him what I was hoping to do and some feedback from coworkers that believed it was very necessary, let me spend some of my regular time on it.
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.
>3) Your hacker news about section links to your Google+ page
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.
>The share price going up makes employees, former employees, and all sorts of non-"wall street investors" very happy.
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.
Micro$oft leveraged their market dominance to stifle competition. Google leverages their market dominance to... get more people to create more data with real names.
Microsoft leveraged their market dominance to distribute more copies of Windows and Office, not to stifle competition. Your statement makes it sound like you don't understand the profit motive.
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.
Maybe you're older or maybe you know something more than me but Micro$oft I remember already won the Windows and Office game. It was Borg Gates by my time. They then used that market dominance to handicap, break, or deny entries by anyone else into the platform. They also used it to make Internet Explorer a thing.
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.
Yeah, I had many of the same sentiments that I wrote up around the time the death of Reader was announced (http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/17/god-damn-it-google/). I can't really look to them for inspiration any more, which is a greater loss than I would have admitted a year or two ago when I finally admitted Google was no longer Google. Oh well. Next!
They are the new Microsoft but they're trying to avoid the same fate of companies like Yahoo and Microsoft; i.e viewed as stodgy old companies that aren't great places to work. The perception about Google needs to be "innovative" which is why there is lots of PR about their X Labs initiatives. But if you think about all of the high profile ones, they aren't really attractive businesses.
Driverless cars? It's technology that all the major car companies have been working on for years and is close to market. This means they aren't going to create a business of licensing that tech to them. Are they going to get into the high capex business of car manufacturing?
Google Fiber? Same story. Capex heavy business with lower margins than being an ad company. It also takes a lot of time to scale it up and roll it out to cities.
Most of these things are for PR rather than real businesses that will be successful and change Google's revenue mix from 90%+ advertising to anything else. Even in their core business, Cost Per Clicks continue to trend down. This is a deterioration in pricing power largely being driven by the shift to computing on mobile devices. Their latest quarterly results were good because they are essentially "making it up in volume", but there is a limit to how much ad inventory you can squeeze out of all your properties to keep driving aggregate clicks up without pissing off users or trashing your products.
"Companies like Yahoo and Microsoft; i.e viewed as stodgy old companies that aren't great places to work."
For what reasons is Microsoft not a great place to work? I may be biased because my brother works there full-time and a friend is interning there but both of them very much enjoy it.
Other than stack-ranking thing/general office politics, I don't really have a negative preception of Microsoft. Is this a supposed-perception, or an actual perception?
I don't know anything about Yahoo!, but my perceptions of them are still positive. If you have an awful work environment, people will just go elsewhere. especially if you're qualified to work at either company.
I think they were referring to the 1990s when MS was a lot worse than the Google of today. MS did a lot of unethical attacks against competitors during that period (my favorite is the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco).
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.
Exactly. Microsoft is still a great place to work. If anything IBM might be a boring place to work given that they're pretty much an IT company now. And Microsoft is definitely a league above Yahoo. Still has great people and where else in the world can you choose to work on quantum computation, the kernel, distributed systems, programming languages, machine learning, search, NLP, browsers, databases, CRM, BI, Computer vision, hardware..within the same company? There's a reason Google, Facebook et al have setup offices in the Kirkland/Seattle area.
If rumors are correct, their emerging business model has very much to do with projects like Glass, driverless cars, and google fiber. In fact, anything that makes commercial activity more efficient using a Google designed interface is going to help them in the near future.
> Now it's just another large company - only concerned about maximizing profit.
> Google was a company that, for a time, I loved. To me, they represented the antithesis of Microsoft, a rebellion against a poisonous corporate culture dominated by profiteering that had no regard for its users.
Maybe You're Just Not Their Target Demographic Anymore™
Google had better ideals, sure. But I'd say their current actions are actually making Google's products better for more people. Unfortunately, as their products improve for the majority of people, they become less accommodating[1] of early users and people who actually care about privacy, restraint in advertising, and domain-specific needs.
However, OP doesn't provide specific examples of what Google did that made him worry, just a general discomfort with Google that's been voiced countless times since their IPO.
I hate their general attitude about privacy, their gradual shoving of ads everywhere, and the usual we-are-open stuff used to divert questioning, but maybe it's time to admit that Google is just getting better at things that don't matter to you.
[1]: It's a false choice, yes: they could keep honoring their initial principles and still grow and profit, but has any behemoth corporation ever done that?
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 ...
Maybe I'm just jaded and never really saw Google as a a nice company with good intentions, but I just can't be sad about Google's new directions.
My suggestion to everyone who's worried about Google: other companies would be really happy to service your needs. There are other companies offering e-mail services, ad services, internet search (the one thing there's no absolute replacement for yet[1], but with your patronage, a new competitor could get there), internet messaging, website analytics, maps, mobile operating systems... and new companies could appear in these areas.
> Can you explain how forcing people to use their real names (or something that passes as such) is making Google's products better for more people?
I dislike their new real names policy, but: human faces. Humans are drawn to other humans' faces. That's why they're pushing to use Google+ photos on ads. Also, people are drawn to names of people they know. That's why they nudged website owners to associate their domains with their personal Google+ accounts. They're essentially trying to make their services more like a social network so people discover YouTube videos while browsing YouTube, not Twitter or Facebook, for instance.
A simpler explanation: Google is trying to remain relevant and grow even more using the same magic that made Facebook big: your friends.
[1]: In my experience, DDG is good at searches related to programming, mediocre at searches related to non-tech stuff, and terrible at searches in languages other than English. It's getting better, though.
I think what it boils down to is that Google, for its users, used to be all about giving the Internet neat things. But now they're all "more wood behind fewer arrows" and shutting down things (Google Reader, real estate search, whatever) and are little more than an advertising company.
The magic is gone, and that's a special kind of disappointment.
Don't forget Eric Schmidt's crazy thoughts on privacy:
* 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
Don't forget, as CEO of a public company, one of his primary responsibilities (probably THE primary responsibility in fact) is to maximize shareholder value. A public company can't just do whatever the founders want anymore, or operate like a charity.
Sure, in some sense Larry has a responsibility to maximize shareholder value. But he has significantly more freedom than many CEOs do in how to approach that goal.
"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."
Reports of Google's decline are greatly exaggerated :) G+ is annoying, but these days no large company can make all their users happy, with all their products/features/changes, all the time. The so-called erosion of 'Don't be evil' has just become more apparent now, but as long as I have known google, they always made money from ads - and ads are fundamentally evil (IMHO).
Search, maps, email etc are quite nice and I use those everyday. Fast, reliable, solid products - vastly improved since I first used them (many years ago). Where is the decline?
Ads are _fundamentally_ evil? What mechanism do you propose for bringing new products to the attention of customers, then? Or are new products and/or customers also fundamentally evil, IYHO?
I wouldn't say they are fundamentally evil, but I think as the field of advertising has advanced along with psychology, there's some troubling current and possible future uses we should be wary of. At this point I think having a wary stance towards advertising is not only acceptable, it's prudent.
Most ads are designed to resonate on an emotional level, rather than being purely informative.
It's the sophistication of their design in order to pierce our emotional 'firewall' that makes them 'evil'; they're basically exploits against the human mind.
I would say HN brought a couple of new products to my mind... and I doubt here are any ads hidden ;). Instead they do, what is incredible powerful with their voting-system. And they don't cheat on their readers. That is great. At least to me.
This article would have been much more persuasive had it specified the actual decisions made by Google that illustrate exactly how that company has "lost its way" (i.e., chosen profit over solving important problems).
> Larry Page worshiped Steve Jobs, who gave him a bunch of bad advice centered around maximizing profit.
What is so bad about maximizing profit? If you make a profit, it means people are willingly giving you money for the service you provide. You make more profit when people feel they benefit more from your service. People can complain about Google until the end of time, but as long as the cash keeps flowing then Google is getting the signal that everything they are doing is in the interest of the consumer.
Now, I don't know if the "decline" of Google, as asserted by the OP, has actually affected their bottom line, because I'm not on the board at Google. I just think it's silly to throw around the word "profit" as if it's some sort of evil goal. Profit is the foundation of a monetary-based economy, and therefore modern human civilization. There is no signal available that is as efficient as profit as a proxy for the wants of the consumer, and how to most efficiently allocate scarce resources.
>You make more profit when people feel they benefit more from your service. //
That's clearly not the only way to make more profit. If for example one has entrenched users and cuts the level of service markedly, or increases the cost, then profit increases. There is no need for anyone to benefit more other than the shareholders.
You can also improve a service without charging more. Again profit and benefit will not be directly correlated.
For me Google's search has been doing down-hill for a year or so, to my recollection. I've been using them for about 15 years. It's my primary point of contact despite using webmaster tools and a couple of other offerings.
Usually I try alternate SE about once every year to see if I can find something that works better for me. I just changed my primary SE to duckduckgo. Being so used to Google's interface it's proving hard but not impossible (as it was a last year for me); still not sure I'll settle on it but continually convinced Google isn't working any more.
"You can also improve a service without charging more. Again profit and benefit will not be directly correlated."
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.
In the phrase "profit and benefit" it is implicit that the benefit is per customer. In your addendum it is profit and customer base that is correlated. As you imply, increased benefit (per customer) is also likely to lead to more customers, but not necessarily.
First off, I'm can't speak to Google's "maximizing profit" or what is wrong with Google doing it. I don't know anything about Google outside of what I read on the internet.
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.
You're talking about short-term, temporary gains. There are two types of maximizing of profit: long term, and short term. The strategies required to execute them are polar opposites.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't think Google is "evil" but I do think it really all comes down to how Google makes their money. They are not like Microsoft or Apple, who actually sells things to end users.
I suspect we will see the same thing with Twitter too, as they seek to monetize their service.
I stopped reading at "I'm not female, so I don't have to worry about getting thousands of rape threats every month". Inserting unsubstantiated claims for shock value into an argument just detracts from any other points he is trying to make.
I read the damn thing three times and can't find a point to any of it. What I see is a bunch of rambling doom and gloom statements: "and then it all came tumbling down". What exactly has tumbled here? The fact they jacked with the YouTube comment system?
XMPP Syndication, (And with that interoperability), an increase of invasiveness of their ads (for those without adblock), the death of Google Reader, there's plenty more if you read up.
I disagree, It seems women get more rape threats than men, hence privacy would have a higher concern for them. As I've never had a rape threat directed at me, I'm far more relaxed about my privacy than I can imagine someone who has had a rape threat directed at them would be.
I admire the guys who can pull off something great with just 20%. I could not do that. When I have something that excites me, it soon grabs 100% of me.
20% time is the idea that it's OK to put "only" 32 hours (or, in practice, 25-30) on your assigned project, but there is certainly not an 8-hour maximum on the side project.
If you want a promotion, you'll have to put in more time than 25-32 hpw; but you won't get in trouble at that effort level. Of course, this is true in most companies-- a 25-hour effort on your assigned work is not low enough to get you fired, almost anywhere; it means that you're not outrunning the bear but you're outrunning someone-- but the difference is that you don't have to hide side projects. That makes a pretty substantial difference.
It's a good idea, not because the number means anything, but because it means that (under most managers, although there are exceptions) you don't have to deny or hide working on other things ("skunk works") that might prove useful. You can talk about them openly. In companies without 20%T projects, people still do those types of projects, but are afraid to share their work, which means those projects go nowhere. Google doesn't seem to have that problem. If you build a demo and share it, that's encouraged.
Google is still better than many companies (yes, I'll say it; it is, if you land in the right place, a great place to work) but an incredible amount depends on your manager. The biggest moral failing of Google probably is how easily a manager can become a SPOF for your career. That's not different from most companies, but any firm that wants to call itself progressive ought to solve that problem. You'd think it would be a first order of business.
Still, a certain mental makeup is necessary to be able to switch between projects like that. When I work on a project that interests me, I go to bed thinking about it, and in the morning I want to continue where I left it. Often I'll see things clearer after such a sleep break, and then I cannot just switch to another project instead of trying out an idea I had.
This is a learnable skill, and one that is IMHO very worth learning.
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.
I agree that all of these measures help greatly, in particular with bigger problems. Nevertheless, I found that in the end, even when you've broken up a problem into chunks, keeping your focus on these connected chunks for an uninterrupted extended time period is invaluable. Often your realise that you should reorganise the chunk division etc. Of course you also benefit from breaks of looking at the problem, but these breaks tend to occur naturally for me, and are very different from a forced break of having to tend to another project.
Or let's put it another way: I don't multitask / switch contexts.
Steve Jobs' advice was not (only) to maximize profits, but to consolidate the products, reduce the number of products "because Google was all over the place". That's from the Steve Jobs autobiography by Walter Isaacson. So far, it looks like Larry Page took Steve Jobs advice to his heart and executes precisely on that vision: all products get integrated together (including through the Google+), innovation rate is still high and growing, company is super successful in post PC world.
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.
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+)
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think that's the case. Google is a relatively young company and its entire success grew out of smart people recognising good quality products and embracing change. It happens that Google is now changing in a way that ultimately will hurt (and is hurting) users. The smart connected early adopters that previously loved Google can see what is going on and they don't like it.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
> 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 is the modern standard-to-be for VOIP, and the original implementation was created by Google.
- 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.
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.
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. ”
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...
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=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.
I work at Google, have done for about 7 years now. This is my first comment at HN.
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.
If we assume that Larry and his execs are fairly smart, then what is their rationale for pushing G+? I think they figured that G+ is just like FB, so no one would have a problem with it. All that social data can only improve Google's services. And G+ blunts any advantage that FB has. All good things. The downside is that people (particularly devs) hate when their existing services change. Also, G+ has never offered a compelling reason to switch, and few people are going to manage 2 identical social networking accounts. Google will have to build/buy something great, as they did with Maps & Mail, to attract users to G+. Otherwise, it's Buzz and Orkut all over again.
Interesting, given that the original article makes the point about Steve Jobs' advice.
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.
Strangely, if Facebook decided to do a web search product, they could put a serious dent in the engine that powers Google. However to date it isn't something they are interested in.
I would question whether it is a matter of their not being interested in it vs. Their being interested in it but not having a compelling search product... yet
"But I also believed Microsoft was exaggerating his fears of Netscape."
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.)
You got a point (I upvoted you). But Netscape is not in the same position as it was pre-Microsoft. We can't know what would have happened, had Netscape survived.
Given that Microsoft's primary threat right now is from SAAS / PAAS and browser-based, OS-independent tools, I'd say Microsoft's fear of Netscape was well-founded. Its error was in thinking that it could dispatch that threat by killing off the competitor. To borrow an overused metaphor, the problem wasn't Al Qaeda, but terrorism. It wasn't the specific competitor, but the technology and development model it represented.
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.
Wasn't this "fear- driven strategy" of aggressive paranoia (I hate to use the word here because it has a strongly negative connotation when such paranoia may be entirely warranted) a hallmark of the aggressive and tech expansionist culture of... Microsoft?
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.
I think your comment about "not coercive" is insightful.
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).
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.
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.
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.
It's not so much about capitalism, I suspect, as about becoming a public company, with a mindset which inevitably becomes centred around quarterly returns.
I expected them to retain some of their academic ethos. My problem isn't that I expected too much out of capitalists; I just expected them not to become pure capitalists.
And here by "capitalist" I mean the current American zeitgeist's version of that term, mainly as defined by MBAs. I think there are other versions of capitalism that are much more interesting.
Capitalism isn't usually known for delivering subpar products. "Maximizing profits" has resulted in some incredibly functional and effective websites in the past. Google thinks stuffing them with ads and making users give away their personal data will bring them maximum profit? Well, antagonizing customers is usually not the best business strategy.
I loved the early Google. A lot. But it's dead now. What's left is just the name and a dusty plaque in the corner that reads: don't be evil.
It will still attract smart people, but they will be of other kind to match the new company culture. The kind that joins Microsoft and Oracle. Those who follow the protocol, happy in their bubble, with the prime goal of maximization of profit. At all costs.
The paragraph involving Steve Jobs is a misquote at best or a completely wrong at worst. If you read the article that paragraph links, it doesn't mention "maximizing profit" or money at all.
I think this paragraphs reflects badly on the entire article – it makes the article appear to be a struggle to create a connect-the-dots conspiracy behind Google's actions (evil Steve Jobs told Larry Page to be evil and now Google is evil).
Steve Jobs told Larry Page to gave a strong focus on key products. You could certainly argue that Google are too strongly focussed on AdWords and Google+ but that's not the point that McClure argues.
After reading the Steve Jobs book, the biggest emphasis was focus on making a great product. He was never in it for the money; He was making $1 a year at one point.
This is not worth getting "bugged" about. I say this as one who made that exact mistake. It's really traumatic to see those who are supposed to be leading fail, but it's an ahistorical truth not worth getting emotional about.
I don't care to speak about Google, but more generally, here's something everyone needs to know. Regarding the way we assess companies, it's probably the truest thing in the world. Here it is: reputation is positively correlated with past moral decency and negatively correlated with future* moral decency.*
That might seem strange, but keep in mind that organizations change and, within 5 years, it will be a different set of people. Doing the right thing begets a good reputation (such as that held by Microsoft in 1997, Google in 2013, Silicon Valley until recently) but that reputation also admits complacency. If the same people were in charge, they'd possibly continue doing the right thing. But a new set of people inherit that favorable standing and use it as an excuse to get away with bad behavior. This is as old as dirt. It's why there is a centuries-old hatred of inherited wealth and position in all modernized cultures.
The same applies to "Silicon Valley". It's easy to look at its fall from grace with hatred and disgust; but the fact is that the people now on top are 50 years separated from the ones who built it; so why, exactly, is it a surprise that the ones on top now are so shitty? It shouldn't be. They inherited the reputations of their forebears (which is why they have favorable tax laws, a "cool" image not shared by more traditional companies, and their pick of top young talent) but not the values.
Preventing this kind of moral decay requires growing slowly: very slowly. Look at Valve, weighing in around 330 people after 17 years. If they'd had VCs breathing down their necks to reach 2000 people at 5 years, there's no way they could have maintained that open allocation culture.
If something grows organically and sanely, then there is a chance for there to be enough stability that reputation carries a positive signal (because past good behavior is a likely sign of the future) but if it grows at a venture-capital pace, reputation almost always predicts low moral decency in the future (especially since that reputation is usually bought from the tech press, not established organically over years).
>It's why there is a centuries-old hatred of inherited wealth and position in all modernized cultures.
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).
I really wish people would shut up about Google's "ideals". They're a company, not a messiah. Companies operate on a midpoint between what they want to do and what they need to do, and Google (like every company) has slid towards their "evil" neccessities over time.
Don't like it? That's fine, neither do I. But stop preaching about a morality that was never there.
It took a while for me to be able to articulate it, but that was what bothered me about my interview. The recruiter was all positivity, but the first real person who interviewed me seemed like he hated his job. It was the biggest turn-off.
I agree that Google is becoming a lot more intrusive towards her end users and the incentive behind it is probably profit. But at lease for software developers, from my experience, we as a group benefit from Google MORE than 5 years ago.
Chrome
AngularJS
Go
Selenium Webdriver
dart
Even Google Hangout with screen share helped our distributed team a lot.
5 years ago, what did Google offer? GWT?
And, of course, the search engine, we developers probably use it more than many other groups users. I hardly heard anyone use alternative search engine for day-to-day software development related search.
arguably half the stuff you listed would be seen as useless or even bad from another point of view.
heck 5years ago at least google results weren't a bunch of advertisements and i'm not talking of the first 5 "sponsored results". That alone, was a huge bonus to humanity in general. Nothing less.
289 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] thread1) 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 ?
[1] https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser
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...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs
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.
A lot more's changed than just a CEO.
https://www.google.com/search?q=google+in+1998
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
I suspect we will see the same thing with Twitter too, as they seek to monetize their service.
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...
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.
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.
- 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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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).
Don't like it? That's fine, neither do I. But stop preaching about a morality that was never there.
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.