Mourning Google

Search was a product designed by two engineers. Maps from 2005 was a very sleek product, but at the time there were no competitors on the web, and now Maps is so ubiquitous, and requires such an insane data investment, that we'll probably never know the ideal Maps design, because every competitor out there is still catching up. Their primary advantage was the money they threw at mapping data and the ability for them to give it out for free.

Gmail was not actually a particularly elegant product design, it offered an escape from spam and manually managing your mailbox storage. Back then, if you used a free email experience, you were bombarded with banner ads, had 100MB of storage, and 99% of that was eaten by the spam sent directly to your inbox. Features are not product design.

Chrome might be a good exception, though. I still get the sense that it was primarily driven by inspired engineers. The reason for Chrome's success is probably not it's innovative design (it was it's performance), but it certainly was an incredible advance.

Google never stole? That’s a memory hole if I’ve ever seen one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Googl....

> Google, in 2010, was the coolest place in the world to work.

No. We were losing all our staff to Facebook and embarking on Google Plus, giving ourselves bonuses for 'success' in social. The last major successful google products had already stopped being produced (last one was android, which deliberately siloed itself off from the rest of the company). Wave team negotiated a huge bonus with no success criteria and then left the company. We threw serverless away because the App Engine team didn’t feel like doing their jobs. It was fucked by then too. Maybe everyone else just didn’t know it.

Alternate perspective as a longtime googler, ex-googler, mostly-happy user and shareholder. Please hear me out.

As user, I'm pretty ok with Google.

Websearch is sputtering sure but that's normal after a challenge like chatgpt. I tried Bing again and came back after a day.

Google seems ok on privacy: in 2024, you don't see hackers exfiltrate Google data, employees abuse privileges, etc. It's cute to think you have any real privacy while carrying a cellphone. You don't see Google doing business with a company like Cambridge Analytica. They disclose their sub processors, and it's a small list.

Services like Gmail/gsuite are awesome for productivity and while they lag in shiny features, the teams are adding features quickly enough. Calendar added scheduling and it works. Gmeet works well enough. Gmail and gmaps remain the gold standards. I recently tried Zoho and it was packed with features but not materials more than Google. Office365 still isn't cloud native and nobody shares online links to office docs, calendar, etc. My wife and I created our holiday card as a Google slide show and 100+ friends replied how much they loved it. Google photos is amazing btw and while there's a few usability gaps at scale, they've continued to close them. The printed photo books are easy to create, very reasonably priced and people love them.

The infrastructure apps kinda just work. Contacts mostly solved scaling, dedup, etc and the integration is awesome. Drive and storage just work. Etc.

Google takes overall Internet security a lot more seriously than its peers and continues to innovate. I trust them a lot more than Apple with their constant stream of zero-day, zero-click iMessage holes. And of course more than Microsoft. Google Oauth won on merit: you can still login with Facebook, LinkedIn, GitHub etc but Google is far more popular.

Google contributes more to open source than anybody and especially Apple and Microsoft. Chromium and Android alone blow everyone else out of the water.

Google Cloud remains the easiest to use among the big 3 by a wide margin and it's a joy to use. Take Compute Engine: you spec an instance by its class and capabilities vs reading an AWS eye chart and giving up and going to vantage.sh. when you spin up an instance it already comes with your ssh credentials, no fussing with pem files. The console UI is pretty simple, especially for the number of features.

As employee, Google remains an awesome place to build your career and less scary than other large companies like Microsoft (stack ranking), Oracle (cutting the bottom x%), etc. You could be born in a small village, prove your talent and completely change the lives of your extended family. I know many ex-googlers and can't think of any that regret the choice. As ex-googler, the xoogler.co community is among the strongest alumni groups. There's even a well funded startup trying to provide community management for other organizations (and I'm a #proudinvestor).

As a shareholder, I'm doing fine and when things look bad, I remember that Microsoft looked bad in 1995 when threatened by anti-trust and the Internet. Meanwhile, vGoogle owns Waymo, which seems to be doing self driving right and has zero competitors and not for lack of trying. The value of Waymo alone justifies a big jump in Google's stock price.

Ok enough, have at it. I'm ready. :-)

Yeah there is nothing that doesn't work fine on FF.

Sometimes I find that Dev tools works a bit better on chrome, so I use that for a while. But not consistently.