Why I Left Google

> App Engine fees were raised. APIs that had been free for years were deprecated or provided for a fee.

From where I'm sitting Google has been pretty rough on independent developers recently.

I think their lack of caring (or understanding?) indy devs is best summed up by the Google+ API. Read-only is understandable as they get off their feet, but you can't even get a user's profile stream (you can only fetch profiles one by one).

Now that the Buzz API is shut down I have yet to find a way to "share" anything programmatically on Google. How can you be social without a share API?

Google's Focus On Beating Facebook Is Wrecking The Company, Says This Former Engineer. Google's Focus On Beating Apple will seal the company's fate. Google's Motorola acquisition is going to be a disaster for Google.

Between attack ads and blog posts it seems like Google is all that Microsoft have to discuss lately. Not sure if Google is flattered by this obsession.

Wonder why the author chose not to post on his personal blog, a Microsoft employee bashing Google on an official Microsoft blog rings hollow, specially with the use of the same generic talking points.

And using engineers as PR people isn’t the most sepathetic thing either.

Valid reasons to quit Google, but then he joins Microsoft?

My impression is that Microsoft is actually very diversified and focused on technology. There was an article a while back about where the various large companies (Google, Apple and Microsoft) make their money; Microsoft had the most diversity by far.

Microsoft is also not afraid to fail or try random things, which makes it much like the "old Google" in this blog post.