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Why I Left Google

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Re: Why I Left Google

#91

Post by jfager »

jmduke wrote: post #47
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…

> 2. Building a product in a category that is already owned by another brand without positioning themselves opposite it. > This is classic... Burger King will never take over Mcdonalds market share because they are trying to convince people that they are better. Since the category is owned already, they need to claim, "We are different" For what it's worth, Apple's Jon Ive completely disagrees with you: http://www.th…

The entrenched winner in the late 90s right before Apple's resurgence was Wintel - cheap and everywhere. What does Apple do to compete? The name of the campaign was literally what the parent comment says a company needs to do - "Think Different" - backed by a line of products that were completely different than Windows: colorful vs beige, whole-stack vs licensed out to third-party manufacturers, premium vs commodity.

Now that Apple's winning, of course they want to try to convince you that different is bad, because different is the threat to their business. They don't want someone coming along and doing to them what they did to Microsoft and Dell.

Re: Why I Left Google

#93

Post by mikeryan »

taylorbuley wrote: post #2

> 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…

Its not just independents, we're working with one of the largest US companies and they don't want to license (and by license I mean happy to pay for) google maps (for a traffic app) because the Goog can't guarantee that the maps will remain ad free.

Re: Why I Left Google

#94

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #78
jmduke wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

[deleted]

Re: Why I Left Google

#95

Post by joering2 »

vibrunazo wrote: post #71
rickmb wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Not because they were looking for new ways to spam people with ads

I think you are wrong. I don't think Google "spam[s] people with ads". I found myself and most friends to like Google because they have been exact opposite what was before, such as Altavista: one huge Las Vegas Board, where you were forced to see ads totally irrelevant (spam).

Most GOOG revenue comes from the front page search engine. You search for something. Therefore, you ask to be "spammed".

Re: Why I Left Google

#96

Post by Steko »

iamgilesbowkett wrote: post #80
Steko wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

That's interesting but I'm not sure what your asking of us to solve your inability to filter the things you don't want to see. Site would cease to exist if everything one user wasn't interested in was removed.

Your filters will always turn up some things you want to just like they'll always filter some things you wish they wouldn't. You'll have to live with that degraded experience the rest of us have and not click on those things. Bellyaching about unsolvable problems is just lowering the sites signal to noise ratio unnecessarily.

Re: Why I Left Google

#98

Post by laconian »

mistermann wrote: post #63
georgemcbay wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the responses seem a bit harsh. Also as someone who never worked at Google but has been a pretty big Google "fanboy" (of the search, Google Apps, Android, etc) his waning enthusiasm for the brand as an employee seems to have taken a very similar dip to my waning enthusiasm for them as a user, though due to personal investment his dip was probably faster and deeper than my own. I've loved Google in the past pr…

> trading in their old fans for the hope of new fans that probably aren't interested anyway. 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…

If you're enraged over relocating a "+" prefix to a double quoted word, then you might not want to use a post-2005 version of Microsoft Office...

Re: Why I Left Google

#99

Post by nirvdrum »

timr wrote: post #90
georgemcbay wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the responses seem a bit harsh. Also as someone who never worked at Google but has been a pretty big Google "fanboy" (of the search, Google Apps, Android, etc) his waning enthusiasm for the brand as an employee seems to have taken a very similar dip to my waning enthusiasm for them as a user, though due to personal investment his dip was probably faster and deeper than my own. I've loved Google in the past pr…

"I've loved Google in the past precisely because they weren't Apple and they weren't Facebook." I absolutely do not understand this frame of mind. Why not just like a company for its products, rather than liking them because they're "not" some other company? Life is too short to get caught up in the identity politics of corporations. Google is a business, not your buddy.

For me it's nice that one company doesn't know/own everything about me. When you put all your eggs in one basket and then the company turns, getting out can suck. And sometimes I route for the other guy to prevent a total monopoly or to spur innovation.

Re: Why I Left Google

#100

Post by pragmatic »

timr wrote: post #90
georgemcbay wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree the responses seem a bit harsh. Also as someone who never worked at Google but has been a pretty big Google "fanboy" (of the search, Google Apps, Android, etc) his waning enthusiasm for the brand as an employee seems to have taken a very similar dip to my waning enthusiasm for them as a user, though due to personal investment his dip was probably faster and deeper than my own. I've loved Google in the past pr…

"I've loved Google in the past precisely because they weren't Apple and they weren't Facebook." I absolutely do not understand this frame of mind. Why not just like a company for its products, rather than liking them because they're "not" some other company? Life is too short to get caught up in the identity politics of corporations. Google is a business, not your buddy.

Trust.

If you invest time/money in something, you want to have a good feeling about it. I want to know I'm not going to get screwed down the road.

I think of if like a relationship with person. Do you want to be friends/lovers with a thief/liar/cheater?

Reputation matters.

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