This is from March of last year, BTW, and has been discussed numerous other times on HN.
(Ironically, there have been so many other articles titled "Why I left Google" on HN that I can't actually find this one in the archives. But it's there :)
> The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.
I'd basically written that off a year ago as unfair, maybe someone with "everything used to be better" bias. Seeing it again in right after the Reader shutdown, it shifted my thinking a bit.
I know this hasn't really snuck up on many other people, there've been other great product deaths, and Google sells a lot of ads, but seeing this again, it just nudged me to consciously reevaluate it all...
Depends solely on the focus. If the focus is 'push limits of human knowledge', then Google is going to be fine. If the focus is 'Increase marketshare in industries [X] by [Y%]', then it is too short-sighted and sooner or later, will catch up.
More than 97% of Google's revenues have always come from advertising (give or take a few percentage points). This goes back to the pre-IPO days. It's all well and good to say that Google is about "pushing the limits of human knowledge," but when you're a public company with a responsibility to generate return on capital, you need to protect and grow the golden goose.
Now, it's perfectly valid -- maybe even necessary -- to look at Google's situation and declare it highly vulnerable. Any company that relies to such a singular extent on one product is in a precarious situation, because any fundamental disruption of that one product's market will sink the entire ship. Historically, Google had attempted to future-proof itself by functioning like an AdWords-subsidized R&D lab: using its massive and easy profits to pay for all sorts of cool, out-there, innovative technologies. But over the years, none of these technologies was proving itself commercially viable in a meaningful way. So Google could be forgiven for shifting to address the threat of social in general, and Facebook in particular, to its core advertising business.
To put it another way: when Google had no meaningful competitors, it could afford to play around with its money. When a serious competitor finally emerged, Google decided to put the toys away and focus.
It's easy to apply 20/20 hindsight and say that Google+ was never going to be the answer. But that wasn't always obvious. In fact, I remember when Google+ was first running its invite-only beta, and the HN community was singing its praises. And to this day, social integration with search seems like a good idea. Google may (or may not) be too late to own social search, but it wasn't fundamentally wrong about realizing that social was a paradigm-shift in web behavior, and not simply a passing fad.
Now, I can't speak to the author's complaints about the company culture. I have never worked at Google. If, as the author says, the company has stifled its atmosphere of innovation and creativity, that is a damned shame. (But I'd like to see more evidence to support this theory). The idea of forward-thinking R&D (20% time, etc.) seems like it should still be a core part of Google's culture -- especially for the sake of fostering a highly productive and innovative environment.
But it seems too easy to look back at Google+ and say that Google had fundamentally lost its way. From the standpoint of Google in 2010-11, Facebook was the first serious, potentially existential threat the company had ever faced. In a way, it would have been irresponsible for Google not to have put a lot of eggs in the social basket.
I disagree. I worked at Google for a year in 2010, around the time of the first reorgs around social. They were decimating teams like Calendar, Sites, and other products with millions of users that were stagnating, as far as they were concerned, and building a team 200-strong to take on "social" -- whatever that means. We joked that no one at Google knew what it meant. We felt Google was deeply clueless about the nature of social networking products. The restructuring was very top-down and heavy-handed, and it was apparently just the beginning.
In fact, if you're looking for hindsight vs reality, I don't think Google and Facebook really were competitors -- until Google decided to build a copy of Facebook's product. So what if both sites were monetized with ads, whoop-dee-doo. The overlap in their product functionality and expertise was basically zero. There's a very abstract connection that comes out of Google's central dogma: We are how people find things on the Internet. We are how they discover links. We're their homepage. What if Facebook takes all of that away? We have to eat their lunch.
Google acted out of some combination of fear, insecurity, and pressure from Wall Street, along with some grandiose thinking about their role in the universe and the threat of Facebook. I believe the changes inside Google are significant, and also not inevitable or "what anyone would have done at the time." We'll see how the effects play out.
"In fact, if you're looking for hindsight vs reality, I don't think Google and Facebook really were competitors -- until Google decided to build a copy of Facebook's product."
Respectfully, I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Google saw Facebook as a potential identity platform and de facto backend for the entire web. It might have been paranoid in its assumptions of just how much of Google's lunch Facebook could have eaten -- but the move into social was very much a defensive move, not an offensive one. They weren't trying to eat Facebook's lunch; they were trying not to get theirs eaten.
It's (still) not a stretch to think that advertisers would transfer dollars on a zero-sum basis from AdSense to a Facebook-credentialed web. As for AdWords? That's a harder lunch for Facebook to steal, but it's not inconceivable.
"Google acted out of some combination of fear, insecurity..."
Smart companies should be afraid and insecure, to some degree, about potential competition. I highly recommend Andy Grove's excellent book "Only the Paranoid Survive."
"...pressure from Wall Street..."
Just the opposite. Wall Street wanted Google to keep milking the cash cow and trying to expand its market share overseas -- which is a pretty typical Wall Street-pleasing playbook. Wall Street likes steady expansion of existing markets; Wall Street hates big bets in unproven products or markets.
Google saw Facebook as a potential identity platform and de facto backend for the entire web. It might have been paranoid in its assumptions of just how much of Google's lunch Facebook could have eaten -- but the move into social was very much a defensive move, not an offensive one.
I realize this is what Google felt, and what also seems to be accepted wisdom in the Valley, but I just don't get the logic that leads to cloning Facebook.
I do sometimes forget the whole thing about how the "advertisers (not the users) are the customer," so maybe I was wrong that they weren't competitive from that point of view.
Are we approaching a world where Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft each have their own phone, tablet, set-top box, search engine, email service, maps service, login, and "universal identity" for the web? Why does every tech company past a certain size need one of all of these things to be "competitive"?
"...pressure from Wall Street..."
Google execs were always in search of the "next billion-dollar product," so their stock would keep going up, so their employees' options would go up. It's a direct consequence of the mindset that company health equals X% growth that if you are taking over the planet in one category, you have to take over the planet in another category before long or be declared a failing company. Companies like Google try to shape the numbers as best they can to tell the story Wall Street wants to hear, but it's difficult and in the long run leads to extreme contortions.
The only way Google can get a bigger slice of "social" is if they invent and build something so subtle, so out-of-the-way, so unobtrusive... that people don't realize they are using it.
Instead, they've been very forceful with their attempts to bring people in (Google+ is a great example), and that's clearly not working. It's bad enough that people scrutinize their every move (evil, too much data, etc), but to make matters worse, Google then starts acting like a used car salesman.
> The only way Google can get a bigger slice of "social" is if they invent and build something so subtle, so out-of-the-way, so unobtrusive... that people don't realize they are using it.
ironically, you just described their first and main product.
Perhaps it's not so easy to do the same with social.
(Not saying that forcing people to convert is not a good move)
Companies that focus on the thing that makes them money eventually start losing money. You have to focus on the next thing to make you money, not the current one. I'm willing to cut google some slack here though, with the self-driving cars and google glass. Innovation at google isn't dead, it's just not in web app form anymore.
Agreed, and I didn't say that they should have kept focusing on one thing. Rather, I said that they suddenly found themselves having to defend that one thing, for the first time in their history. And they thought that diversifying into social was the best way to do so. So much so that they doubled down on it and tried to make a concerted, unified strategy around it.
Totally agree that a company should never be in that situation to begin with (hence, my comments about the vulnerability of depending for 97+% of revenues on a single product). But they made a bet on social to be their "next thing" and, in retrospect, many smart people probably would have made the same bet. The bet didn't pay off, per se, but that may have been a function of lateness to market more than a function of strategic unsoundness. (And let's give them at least some credit: Google+ had a unique thesis about social w/r/t groups, and it came to market with a differentiating factor from Facebook. It was not simply the me-too product everyone retrospectively labels it as).
I'm not writing an apology for Google's strategy; I'm just saying that hindsight is 20/20 in this case, and we shouldn't lose sight of that.
As a tangent, it's not really true that "a public company [has] a responsibility to generate return on capital". See, e.g., Stout's _The Shareholder Value Myth_, or this shorter thing: http://crookedtimber.org/2008/07/25/what-obligation-maximise... esp. the remark about the Dodge v. Ford case.
ironically, i did not mean for this to go through as I was trying to locate the discussion on it.. obviously the url regex ain't working for this corner-case.
neither am I.. you can provably do a check on my prior submits.. and hopefully that shows the type of topics .. I was honestly trying to locate the darn discussion on the blog.. :-).
The repost-detector has a bug that causes old posts to not conflict. Some view this as a feature to allow a new discussion after a good period of time.
The issues around "Why I left A_PUBLIC_COMPANY" are really important. The question go beyond Google(s), it forces us to think if there are alternatives to growing or being public without doing a deal with the "devil". I don't think so, the definition of a public company implies that.
Can private companies with less capital win this game and stay relevant in the long term?
I was reading about Ford Thunderbird recently - the car that "created the market niche", was a huge success, rose Ford brand to a new level etc., and oops, the project was closed by board and reopened only after huge fight by Henry Ford II.
So he leaves Google because of steps they are taking to protect and enhance their revenue stream, and joins Microsoft? As a former Microsoftie, all I can say is that is like going from the kettle to the fire and doesn't make sense.
After reading this (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/05/25/google...) I think his preference is mostly cultural. I never worked at Google, but I was born, raised and work in tech in the Bay Area. Microsoft culture rubbed me the wrong way when I was there. It seemed more what I imagine to be an organized and orderly Northern European governance under the cloudy, rainy skies. California Bay Area culture is more sunny and free libertarian with a dash of anarchy thrown in. You may discount my general characterization, but these things matter and people definitely have a preference.
The way these things read... I wonder if people are getting paid an extra bonus to have PR write up a "why I left the other guy" post and put their name on it as way to just bundle up a bunch of FUD in one place.
I'm not a big fan of either Google or Microsoft, so I don't really care about what they say. It's just that these "why I quit" letters have become boilerplate PR pieces that don't really offer anything new or interesting.
I look at it as a more public exit interview. I don't doubt that his expressed concerns were part of why he did leave (I also don't doubt that there are other factors)), and by making those concerns public there's a chance that more people may see it and try to rectify the problems.
Yeah, but in the entire history of people quitting and writing "letters to the editor", has any manager ever actually read it and thought anything other than "whatever, dude wasn't on board, glad he left"?
Do you really think Sergey Brin or Larry Page or Eric Schmidt are going to read this and think "oh man, we better change what we're doing".
Nope.
People who are fans of MS are going to read it and say "yeah, see, I told you google is evil. Even his 15 year old daughter had a poignant critique of Google+ that shows she's not only wise beyond her years, but that Google+ sucks just like I always thought already."
If they are hearing the same complaints murmured (muted, more anonymized and filtered) inside the company, but saying, "whatevs, they'll stay for the paycheck", and people start walking away from the paycheck and announcing it, it might sink in.
Of course, when leaving Google for Microsoft, it's hard to claim that culture/mission/vision are really the reason for leaving, as opposed to: MSFT offered $X,000, and GOOG managers said "you're not worth that to us"
Given how transparent Microsoft's "Scroogled" campaign is and how closely the reasons given here skew to the Scroogled message, I'd wager you're pretty close if not bang on.
They probably genuinely believe what they write though, at least on some level. You'd have to, or go mad.
EDIT: I also feel mild antipathy towards both parties.
That sounds a little paranoic. I imagine the negative PR a company would get if this gets known would be far worse that whatever they could gain with a small blog post like this one.
I lost all interest in reading the article after looking at the msdn.com domain.
EDIT: Downvoters, I don't see how this is wrong. Microsoft has a long history of spreading FUD about competitors (Florian Mueller/FOSSPatents, http://www.scroogled.com/ [when their own practices are very much the same], sponsoring fake studies that show that the TCO of Linux is much greater than that of Windows, and so on.) I certainly would be interested in an unbiased opinion on the topic, but I don't think anyone on Microsoft's payroll can give me that.
The article is all about the difference between the innovation being created by low level employees and the stupid decisions by top level management who want to shut it all down. The author is among the former and even says he doesn't like ads, so I think your proposition that he is a Microsoft shill working in an elaborate anti-Google marketing campaign is misguided.
There's not much excuse for not reading things and then complaining about them.
James Whittaker was not a "low level employee," he was a director of engineering. This is the same level as Kurzweil. At that level he was responsible for many management decisions, some of them probably "stupid."
A company the size of Google has 100's of "Director"s. There are probably 3 or 4 layers between a director and the CEO... if not more. I doubt he had much to do with the actual market direction of the company (ironically... since the word "Director" would lead you to believe that it had something to do with directing).
Fair enough. I may have read that incorrectly by focusing on him saying "shipping code", but he's still not the part of management at the very top making company wide decisions that have the power to crush large swaths of innovation (i.e. everything has to fit into google+) and that is more what I was referring to.
Guess what? Microsoft isn't being upfront about the costs of maintaining and providing a high quality email service. The bills have to be paid somehow, and that's why Google's ads are targeted using email keywords. Microsoft, on the other hand is using free Outlook accounts as a loss leader, and I can assure you with a great degree of certainty that they would do the same if they had as much of the market as Google does.
This guy was only at Google for three years (less, in fact), but this reads like he was a 10 year veteran or something. I can't really take it all that seriously because of that.
He was offered a Partner position at Microsoft. That's why he left. No need to philosophize about corporate culture here.
"You want to innovate in mobile? ...deal with the made men who run the relevant cartel. And if they don't like you or your idea, your innovation goes nowhere."
Automated cabs would be a great place to advertise for nearby businesses and things. "Google, what restaurants are nearby?" which gives a list sorted by relevance ( X of Y users returned to restaurant Z more than twice ), with a few purchased restaurant advertisements proceeding them
You know, after using Google Now on my phone, I'm confident that Google can deliver context-sensitive results that make sense. Not always, not for everything, but I bet they could pull it off in a cab just fine.
EDIT: I guess it's worth pointing out, however, that Google Now doesn't show ads.
No, they are a way to more effectively collect photos for Street View and WiFi AP locations for GPS-free location based services... both are which are products of Google Maps which itself is a vessel for selling advertising.
I believe the overarching focus at Google is search. To search Google must index.
To continue indexing and searching Google has to make money. The most obvious path to billions is leveraging the indexing and searching into ad revenue.
What makes me more nervous than Google being capitalistic is Google not having boundaries about who/what/when/where/how they will index the whole world's data.
No , that is the first foray of Skynet .. much more interesting than ads.. and provably the single handed elimination of human drivers from taxi services ;-).
I think this person's opinion is rather colored. Google has been about ads since before they were public. I personally don't have a Facebook page, and don't use g+ that much, so I'm not as infatuated with social networking as much as some I suppose, but I keep track of my karma on HN hourly when I post a message here, so to each his own.
I have no idea what his second article about Microsoft and the mobile space is getting at. Look, if you think g+ is failing, what makes you think Microsoft is going to suddenly own the mobile space? I interviewed at a place in Seattle about 7 years ago that was doing Windows phone stuff, and again at MSFT at a different point for the windows mobile team as an embedded SWE. Microsoft has been in the mobile space forever, yet he's saying they are the innovative company capable to turning on a dime and taking over a new space? I don't believe it.
My wife has a windows phone, I don't like it, she hates the Bing search. I just bought a nexus 4 to replace my G2 because I want software updates for a long time. My wife is probably moving to an iPhone or Nexus. Last I looked gmail supports imap, you don't have to view ads. I only see ads on my nexus when I use google services, they don't flash up on my screen randomly.
I work on security for Windows, but for my own personal use, I just bought an ARM chromebook. It's a great price, despite the 'secure bootloader', it took me about 5 minutes to get the Ubuntu install started on an SD card, and if I screw up the recovery is drop dead simple. Right now, we are sweating bullets because if we make a mistake on Win8 boot, we are going to hose up the machine and recovery is long and painful.
Google has plenty of problems, and sure if you ask me, Google+ has a terrible interface and shipping it without a good API was brain dead, but Microsoft sure doesn't seem to be setting the mobile world on fire.
So I'd take this and many articles like it with a giant cake of salt.
What is the juxtaposition of these two sentences supposed to convey?
They seem to be pretty consistent: "sharing is not broken - here are some the places that people are already sharing stuff without Google's involvement".
I recently switched from using the Google Translate API to the Bing/Microsoft Translator API for my Android app, because Google charges usage fees while MS is free at the lowest tier. This was the first time I saw Google charge money for a service that Microsoft offers for free.
Can you be kind enough to comment on the quality of translations? I am in need of a translation API for one of my projects and it is down to Google or Bing.
I have only used English-Spanish, but as far as I can tell, the results are approximately the same (translating individual words with appropriate verb conjugation but no regard for context).
Maybe it's a play on words, initially as the author participating in the act of "google quitting" but also meant to be interpreted as google itself quitting being the google it was.
Little mention of Android and Chrome? No mention of Docs/Drive, self driving cars, Go, Google Fiber or their growing forays into hardware (Nexus, Glass)?
As a lot of these indicate, one of Google's chief contributions in recent memory is helping to make computing cheap, ubiquitous and decidedly not monopolized by Microsoft. In the blink of an eye, we've gone from a world where everything the average person owns that can install software runs on Windows to a world where more like 1/3 (and shrinking) of a household's computing devices run Windows. And in 2013, Chromebooks and Steamboxes look like they could displace a lot more of MS's presence.
There's a conflict of interest here. Even if their game is more complex than Coke vs Pepsi, these are very direct competitors. An ambitious Microsoftie has something to gain in a coy, well written put down that conveniently ignores the competition's bigger recent achievements.
I feel like I've read or seen a fair bit of Google criticism from ex-Googlers on the msdn blogs. Can anyone confirm I haven't just been seeing this post over and over?
I don't care if it's just optics; having a post about this on your current employers blog platform makes me highly suspicions, no matter how many people share his opinion
Between this piece and other comments I've seen in the wake of the anti-Google backlash of this past week, why is it that supposedly under Eric Schmidt, a "business guy" Google was all innovation and tech, and then when Larry Page, a very technical cofounder, took over, the company is now some sort of ad machine? If this is true, what does this say about leading personalities and company culture?
TLDR Eric was a peacetime CEO and could allow the company to do the things he allowed. Larry is a wartime CEO. Hard decisions need to be made, and the company needs to be driven with focus.
Google first Kills or acquire small companies and then kill the acquired company for integrating it with Google Plus. Then turn off the service without thinking about the peoples using it.
It is the power of huge money, monopoly and over confidence.
He was an engineering director for a couple of years working on the dev/test tool chain and Google+.
He's done a few books, including one he co-authored called How Google Tests Software, which is a fairly pragmatic discussion of large-scale testing practices at Google. (I'm not sure if this is still the case, but Nooglers used to read this book as a part of their orientation.)
This is going to come back every time Google does something the community here doesn't like, or which they see as "corporate-minded focus" over innovation.
I don't know. Google has come up with Glass and is working hard on the self driving car. Sounds pretty innovative still to me. I hope the author is wrong about the pipeline of new stuff.
The way I see it, Google is the new Microsoft, and Microsoft is not dead yet, but becoming more and more irrelevant. Now, what has to happen for Google to become irrelevant?
I don't like Google. But I don't like Microsoft either.
And this guy has evil written all over him. He worked at Microsoft for 3 years prior to joining Google. He is now back working for Microsoft. Blogging on msdn.com.
The guy joined Microsoft as a Partner, Partners got it good at Microsoft, 500k/year (range is around 300k to 1 million a year) average and they were exempt from the yearly 10% mandatory cut the rest of the workers are exposed to.
(Ironically, there have been so many other articles titled "Why I left Google" on HN that I can't actually find this one in the archives. But it's there :)