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Google's Turn To Be The Villain
caesar79 writes "The New York Times has an article titled "Relax, Bill Gates; It's Google's Turn as the Villain" (also evil but at least free registration required) According to the article, the "go-getting" attitude of Google is coming across as arrogance to many people in the Valley. More importantly, it draws attention to the fact that Google has drained the market of talent, caused a 25% to 50% hike in salaries and made it difficult for startups to get funding."
clicky
fuckedgoogle.com
Has interesting facts, e.g. that Larry Page alone made more money selling stock than Google has had revenue in its entire existence. This is where the funding goes.
Since /. posters are always too lazy to find the reg-free link, here you all go:
l ley.html?ex=1282536000&en=344e9c533c3980cc&ei=5090 &partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/24/technology/24va
Not the parent, but one nice thing I've heard is that they give employees some high portion of time to work on their own projects. A day per week or something like that.
"Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 7 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment." Wtf, guys, that's absurd. How are we supposed to carry on a god damned conversation? Slow down cowboy my ass, a dead cowboy with no hands could type a post in less than six minutes.
That sure sounded bad. But if you'll look back you'll see he leaked some financial stuff he should not have pre-IPO.
Once I read that I realized the article had an agenda. Or the reporter just really sucks at fact checking.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's what venture capital does. It puts food on your table as you develop your product. It seems like an awfully successful system for something that's supposedly a sham.
The alternative is to fund everything out of pocket. If you have no financial resources, well then you're just another talented designer working at McDonalds.
Take the url to the NY Times story, and do a google search for it. Then click on the link next to "If the URL is valid, try visiting that web page by clicking on the following link."
NY Times allows google news to link to stories without login, so I guess this works in the same way.
Advice for my fellow geeks: before seeking out that threesome you dream of, you might see what a TWOsome is like first.
Ironic, isn't it? PayPal has been seizing account balances left and right under false pretenses, and they have the audacity to slander a company that hadn't actually done anything "evil" yet.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Google on the other hand releases specs and APIs to work with the system and they don't care which platform you happen to be running on.
The following google apps do not work in anything other than Windows:
Picasa
Google Desktop
Google Earth
Google Toolbar
Google Hello
Tim, I'm going to use your post as a starting point for my post, but please don't consider this a rebuttal to your post.
Google isn't quite in my neighborhood, but close by. I know people working there, and I currently do contract work for a start-up populated by ex-Google and ex-Borland employees. As you might guess, the truth is more boring and less extreme than people are making it sound.
Google is cornering the market in a very limited sense -- they hire PhD's who can survive multiple rounds of interviews and tests. In other words, they're hiring exceptionally smart, high-end scholars who can survive a brutal vetting process. As you might guess, there are NOT a lot people like this. For Google to grow, it has to suck that niche dry.
This does affect start-ups. How? Well, most start-ups employ a few of these geniuses to help give them an edge and establish some technical leadership. When each company had a handful of PhD-level employees, everything was spread out evenly. Now that Google has pulled hundreds of them in, it is NOT spread out. A start-up looking to appear experienced, or to have some token high-end leadership figures, is hard-pressed. And that impacts the VC dollars coming in. That's a real problem.
Having said that, I'm contracting for a start-up that shares a building with the Mozilla team. Guess what? The start-up is fine. There are plenty. They may not all have evil geniuses as figureheads right now, but they're plugging along.
Even more than that, Google has left the MA/BA/MS/BS-level employees alone. Or at least, it hasn't made a dent. If you have a Batchelor's degree in Silicon Valley and you want a job, you're going to have to pursue it just as hard as in the rest of the country. The economy is slowly turning around, but it really is slow. Companies are not fighting over average joes, as they did during the Internet boom. It's still a bust, people still fight for jobs, and salaries are NOT sky-high.
So yes, Google is having an impact. But no, it is not affecting most engineers. Yes, other business leaders are complaining. No, their sentiment isn't shared by the rest of the local community.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
A bit of exaggeration, no?
No.
Google's main product, i.e. the thing that allowed them to make 99% of its revenue, is sponsored search - something they "stole" from Overture (now Yahoo!) which they settled by paying $$$ to Yahoo.
Google never actually "stole" anything more than the idea. And their implementation was amazingly different. Microsoft, OTOH, actually used code directly from BG's University. Not to mention their licensing deal with Spyglass that had a small maintenence payment in exchange for royalties on the Internet Explorer sales. (Guess how much Spyglass collected in royalties?) Or the outright theft of the VAX design for the NT kernel. (Which Digital then settled in exchange for NT being ported to the Alpha. Guess how much good that did Digital?)
They also also trying hard to "steal" various trademark such as googles.com, froogles.com, and gmail.com through lawsuits too.
Uh, yeah. Whatever you say. Maybe, just maybe, Google is execising the law to get rid of scammers? Wait, that doesn't sound evil(tm) enough.
Lastly, it is well known that Google has made a number of purchases that are now products e.g.Picasa.
What's you're point? No one is annoyed at the very idea of acquisitions, just that Microsoft plays dirty to get those acquisitions, plus that Microsoft has never actually invented anything in-house. Google has invented plenty, and uses their acquisitions as a means of bolstering their business. e.g. Blogger.com provides a method through which Google can advertise their adsense program to professional bloggers. That's simply not what Microsoft does. Microsoft buys, steals, or outright blocks the next big thing so that all the money ends up in their coffers. Have you forgotten Microsoft's threats against Netscape, or their early announcement tactics against VisiOn?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade