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Google's Decline Really Bugs Me

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Re: Google's Decline Really Bugs Me

#21

Post by wrongc0ntinent »

lazyjones wrote: post #2

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 ...

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.

Re: Google's Decline Really Bugs Me

#22

Post by RexRollman »

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.

Re: Google's Decline Really Bugs Me

#23

Post by nostrademons »

birken wrote: post #6

Here are 3 pertinent facts related to your post: 1) 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

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.

[1] https://github.com/google/gumbo-parser

Re: Google's Decline Really Bugs Me

#24

Post by IBM »

antonius wrote: post #16
IBM wrote: post #10

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 technolo…

"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.

My comment about them is how they're perceived in the industry, in reality they may be great places to work.

Re: Google's Decline Really Bugs Me

#25

Post by Someone »

guybrushT wrote: post #14

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…

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?

Re: Google's Decline Really Bugs Me

#26

Post by nostrademons »

jonathonf wrote: post #12
wrongc0ntinent wrote: post #7

Back when I was showing off my Google T-shirt, this is what they were (archive.org): https://web.archive.org/web/20001203022500/http://www.google... A lot more's changed than just a CEO.

Tried and was disappointed I couldn't search the 2000-era web.

One query works:

https://www.google.com/search?q=google+in+1998

Re: Google's Decline Really Bugs Me

#27

Post by Permit »

birken wrote: post #6

Here are 3 pertinent facts related to your post: 1) 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

>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.

Re: Google's Decline Really Bugs Me

#28

Post by SloughFeg »

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.

Re: Google's Decline Really Bugs Me

#29

Post by dictum »

lazyjones wrote: post #15
dictum wrote: post #13

> 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 a…

> But I'd say their current actions are actually making Google's products better for more people. 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…

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.

Re: Google's Decline Really Bugs Me

#30

Post by saurik »

stephenr wrote: post #5
yapcguy wrote: post #3

The rot was setting in long before Larry Page became CEO. For me, the first sign was GMail and their broken/perverted IMAP model.

I never understood why they didn't just expose their tags as imap keywords?

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?
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