Why I Left Google

A lot of people love a company X because it's "not Apple" or sometimes "not Facebook". I don't get that. It's doesn't make any sense to me. You like something; in this case a company, because it has/does/stands for/makes certain things. Why do people like X just because it's not, say, Apple. It only tells me you hate something and are picking their competitor because they are not Apple. Doesn't X has merits of it's own to be liked?

Personal case:

- I love Apple for OS X, iOS, iPhone (and somewhat the iPad)

- I love Google for search and Google Apps but not a big fan of Android (Maybe because I always had a Nexus One that didn't let me install more than a couple of apps because of internal storage, had a jittery UI, had to keep killing tasks to preserve battery, poor quality of apps and a not so awesome UX. If I had one of the newer Androids I may not be pissed at it.)

- I'm neutral on Facebook because I never share anything personal on it. I'm using it wrong. But that doesn't mean I love G+ or Orkut or MySpace.

- I like Microsoft for Office and their Exchange server.

Summary:

To me I seem to have a liking for companies because of their qualities. My question is if anyone knows studies or psychological explanation why people like companies because they are NOT some other company (aka competition of a company they dislike).

100% agree. Two small decisions that enrage me for some reason:

1. Stealing the "+" operator away from searches

2. Making Google+ a (semi) closed platform - when I see a link on HN and I click through and it wants me to login to my google+ account just to view the article, I rage inside.

I always want better search, and I've always been happy with google. But now (for many little things like the two above examples) I really want someone else to come along and bring me better search. I don't like google anymore.

Not enough people think about year 10. You know, that's when you're 10 years old as a company and you've got a lot of huge successes behind you. Kind of like teenagers when they realize that finding a job is suddenly not an 'optional' thing in their lives.

James' rant here reminded me of a similar rant I read (internally) at Sun on its 10 year anniversary. They had published a book all about Sun's first decade, and somehow excised the fact that Sun had built a workstation called the 386i. It emphasized the successes, and papered over the mistakes. The rant was about how Sun, who had kicked DEC in the nuts and had them retreating to the data center, was walking right into that same data center because Microsoft was starting to make PC's as useful as workstations. (there used to be a real distinction there.)

I remember thinking that somehow Sun had gone from bringing technology to the folks who could use it, to being all about being a more impressive Sun Microsystems. Sun's "Google+" moment was the day they announced they were going to merge System V and SunOS.

In my brief time at Google I was exposed to the folks who had become more about 'The Google' and less about doing cool stuff. I saw many of the same things James did, and I hear Marissa's 'call to arms' about Social and said to myself "If she can't say what it is, how can she expect the troops to achieve it?"

If you read the stuff about Mark and Facebook (and I have to believe that at least some of it is true.) the man is on a mission. And his mission was to make a new place in the universe that didn't exist before, he left it to others to figure out how to monetize it. Google did the same with search, make it real, then monetize.

But I think at some point the operating committee at Google looked at monetization of all the things Google has done and if you included search advertising the in the bar graph everything else looked like zero. And you ask yourself "We've got all these smart people doing all these projects and not a single one even comes CLOSE to the income that search advertising does? Give me one good reason I shouldn't just fire all of them?"

The sad thing is that I saw multimillion dollar a year businesses get tossed under the bus because they just didn't move the needle.

Ten years on, ask yourself, "What value do you bring to the table?" if you don't know, that is a big problem.

Facebook wasn't created for advertising so much as advertising was the logical way to profit from having that many people use your product.

Google certainly is motivated to compete with Facebook for that advertising revenue but their real motivation is just the user base which I'm sure they already have they just haven't been able to convert them to social users.