Another Google Doubter
February 16, 2015
Is there a blossoming Venus Fly Trap in our Googley world. “Hoping Google’s Lab Is a Rainmaker” recycles grousing by US big media about investments without returns. I don’t want to peer into the Google Glass thing. I just see so so technology and mental health challenges.
This morning I read “Don’t Be Google.” The source was an outfit known to find good things to say about Googley things. Times seem to be changing. The write up has a clever graphic. The query “google where did it all go wrong” is entered into a search box. And like IBM Watson, no reasonable answer is forthcoming.
The article points out three actions in the forms of quotes from folks supposedly in the know. The first question concerns YouTube. I have wondered about YouTube for a long time. There is a reference to Google’s orphaning projects. Do you remember Web Accelerator? It was a crude antecedent to SPDY, which has been killed too. GTalk is a goner. Do these examples suggest more misses than hits.
But the killer point is that Google has morphed into Microsoft. The supporting fact for this remarkable idea is that Google has more former Microsoft employees than employees from any other company.
The paragraph I circled is illustrative of the more critical view of the online ad giant:
This may help to explain why Google is, I believe, slowly but steadily losing our trust. Nowadays, when you interact with Google, you don’t know if you’ll be talking to Awesome Google; Mammon Google; …or a former Microsoftian whose beliefs and values were birthed in Redmond, and who, as a result, identifies a whole lot more with Mammon — and with bureaucratic infighting — than with Awesome. Say what you like about Apple, and I can complain about them at length, you always know what to expect from them. (A gorgeous velvet glove enclosing an exquisitely sleek titanium fist.) But Google seems increasingly to have fragmented into a hydra with a hundred tone-deaf heads, each with its own distinct morality and personality. That wouldn’t matter so much if trust and awesomeness — “don’t be evil!” “moonshots!” — weren’t so intrinsic to the Google brand … which, to my mind, gets a little more tarnished every year.
I don’t agree. I think Google is just the superest information and content processing company I used to monitor closely. Google, as I recall, is the company that informed China it had to change its ways. How is that working out?
Stephen E Arnold, February 16, 2015
Comments
One Response to “Another Google Doubter”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
Hi there to every body, it’s my first visit of this web site; this blog consists of amazing and in fact good stuff in support of visitors.