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Why I Left Google

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Re: Why I Left Google

#71

Post by vibrunazo »

rickmb wrote: post #55
paul wrote: post #50

I also miss the old Google. I think it's a mistake to blame this on ads though. I don't believe that the G+ crusade is being driving by advertising (though I'm sure it looks that way to people who assume that everything is about ads).

Really? Please enlighten me, what is Google+ (or Facebook for that matter) about if it isn't about advertising? Because as far as I know, every service that isn't about being so great people would pay for it is about advertising and nothing else.

It always seemed to me that social is the evolution of search. And google knows this very well. Social signals are very important for finding what you're looking for. The idea of g+ was always to implement something like the new "google + your world" on a larger scale on all google products. If they didn't do this, they would fall behind to the competition. They felt forced to.

Erick Schmidt once said something like "we only want facebook to open their data so people can search for it, failing that, we'll find other ways to get it". It was clear from that day, that they were building a facebook competitor. Not because they were looking for new ways to spam people with ads (that's an overly simplistic generalization). But because they found it important to keep their existing business relevant. Independent of which monetization they were using. Even if google search was a paid premium, they would need social anyway. It's clearly not "about the ads".

Re: Why I Left Google

#72

Post by cromwellian »

Why does he even bother bringing Wave into this? As a Googler he should know that Wave was never meant to be a social network. It didn't even have the subscribe of 'friends', it was an attempt to create a new kind of Email.

He worked at Google but didn't realize that all that innovation, be it GMail, Android, Chrome, Search, Maps, Google Car, etc was paid for by ads?

Re: Why I Left Google

#73

Post by whiletruefork »

The author states that in his time at Google he realizes it was always a company funded by ads, but that he did not have to personally feel the need for Ads in all products. That's a fair point. Where I lost him is his connection of Google+ with Ads.

I disagree that G+ is an Ads play. It's a play for staying relevant on the internet. When you think about it, Facebook is a closed system. They want CNN to post articles into the CNN FB stream. They want people to read those articles on the CNN page (yes, this currently links to outside FB... that will change). They want to do this so that you never have to leave FB, and in fact if you look at the user behavior of 13-17 year olds you will see disturbing trends that this is the case.

Facebook is a danger to a free and open internet by becoming the de-facto internet. I concede that this is a stretch, but it is within their power to do so and from my understanding is how their strategy is lined up.

TL;DR: G+ is only about Ads in the way that Google needs users to serve Ads to and there is a threat that all users of the internet only go to Facebook and nowhere else.

Re: Why I Left Google

#74

Post by malnourish »

davemel37 wrote: post #33

I think Google+ 's mistake, like the author, has to do with a changing doctrine, but i think it has more to do with a branding issue than an innovation or technology issue. (it could be both, but i would argue perception comes before reality when it comes to success) I think "Google+ is a dud," has less to do with whether social is broken, but rather with human perception and branding. Much the way Google owned the c…

This is a fantastic post on what branding is and how to position oneself. There's probably more to it, and I am not fully versed in such a field, but I am now far more interested in the aspect and history of branding than I was before.

Thank you.

Re: Why I Left Google

#75

Post by nextparadigms »

CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #56

As a Microsoft employee, I wish this hadn't been posted to a Microsoft-branded website. Other than that, I thought it was an interesting perspective and I loved the money quote: "I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.”"

But "the people" were on Myspace, Hi5, Friendster and other social networks before Facebook - hundreds of millions of them. So clearly it's something about the product, too.

Re: Why I Left Google

#76

Post by jf »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #67

Ouch. 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,…

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

Is there a reason you shouldn't be asking yourself that after every year you spent at a company?

Re: Why I Left Google

#77

Post by hughw »

antirez wrote: post #41

IMHO what's sad is that Google+ is not better than Facebook for average people. Better is, for them, more warm, where you may express more about you in a simpler way, and so forth. Google+ is clearly designed by people not exactly in touch (mentally speaking) with the average person using Facebook, that's why nobody of the non tech guys want to switch to it. p.s. IMHO Google is going to lose in the email space soon a…

G+ is Facebook for Asperger's.

Re: Why I Left Google

#78

Post by [deleted] »

jmduke wrote: post #48
iamgilesbowkett wrote: post #42

I think it's problematic to find this kind of story on Hacker News. The biggest problem I have with it is that it's very difficult to write an automated filter which rejects stories for being excessively corporate and insufficiently entrepreneurial, at least within the limits of my current skills. I can understand why people debate the strategies of very large corporations, it's kind of like discussing football teams…

From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

[deleted]

Re: Why I Left Google

#79

Post by cromwellian »

talentdeficit wrote: post #58
talmand wrote: post #24

Is it me or does several of his complaints about the overly-aggressive targeted marketing apply to Facebook as well? He must really hate Facebook then. Personally, I think all this targeted stuff is not as good as stated by the people selling it. I can understand that he felt the need to leave because something changed for him and his attitude towards his employer. But I seem to remember the big statement someone mad…

for the most part, facebook can only target you when you're on facebook. google now targets you across their properties some of which have significant lock in. it's not as easy to escape google being creepy as it is to escape facebook being creepy.

Facebook can target you across any site that has a Facebook Connect or Like button, and eventually they will turn those Like Buttons and Comment plugins into display ads.

Re: Why I Left Google

#80

Post by iamgilesbowkett »

Steko wrote: post #49
iamgilesbowkett wrote: post #42

I think it's problematic to find this kind of story on Hacker News. The biggest problem I have with it is that it's very difficult to write an automated filter which rejects stories for being excessively corporate and insufficiently entrepreneurial, at least within the limits of my current skills. I can understand why people debate the strategies of very large corporations, it's kind of like discussing football teams…

No aggregation site is going to please everyone all the time. Don't click on the stuff that doesn't interest you, problem solved.

I have an automated filter site at http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/ -- "don't click on what doesn't interest you" is way inferior to "don't see what doesn't interest you."
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