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James Whittaker: Focus on Ads and 'Social' Destroying Google
theodp writes "In June 2009, Google welcomed James Whittaker as its newest Test Director. In February 2012, Whittaker rejoined Microsoft. On Tuesday, Whittaker explained why he left Google: 'The Google I was passionate about,' Whittaker writes, 'was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus ...The old Google was a great place to work. The new one? -1.' Welcome to the real world, quips CNET's Charles Cooper in response to Whittaker's still-awesome-even-if-a-tad-naive rant."
More from from his post: "It turns out that there was one place where the Google innovation machine faltered and that one place mattered a lot: competing with Facebook ... Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people. Advertisers and publishers cherish this kind of personal information ... Larry Page himself assumed command to right this wrong. Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+. It was an ominous name invoking the feeling that Google alone wasn't enough."
True, TFA doesn't touch at all on why Microsoft -- just why not Google. I guess Microsoft doesn't have a new social media pony it's pushing on everyone at the company. In the battle of who's more of a technology company, Microsoft or Google, the winner is...the one that doesn't make its money from ads?
Google could have become the every man's corporate replacement for systems like Autonomy and Endeca. They could have gotten super aggressive at making a turn key, highly scalable search product that everyone from a 20 employee company to a 200,000 employee company could use. They have the talent to make a product that can do that. Instead, they never really went hard after the enterprise market where they could have not only revolutionized things, but have left themselves fairly independent as a whole business on advertising.
The sad part is that they probably could have beaten Autonomy like a rented mule because Autonomy's documentation is pretty bad and not easily accessible to people who aren't firmly on the Autonomy reservation.
Google has gone nuts with the ads. A few years ago there were plenty of text ads: nice and non-intrusive ones, but noticeable. Then they moved to images and then flash! It used to be the innocent child of the web, now it is the creepy old man hanging around the playground. I have been gradually moving away from their products - my default search engine is duckduckgo - but gmail still has me by the balls. Its only a matter of time though.
In the battle of who's more of a technology company, Microsoft or Google, the winner is...the one that doesn't make its money from ads?
Wouldn't that be Apple in this case? (at least it makes less of its money on ads)
Actually, I think they are very much interested in innovation, just perhaps not in areas that might seem quite so obvious. Why else would they hire Regina Dugan, the outgoing director of DARPA? Somehow, I don't think it's going to be for the use of UAVs as an advertisement delivery mechanism...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
No, Google has changed in recent years. That's been obvious even from the outside. At one time I was a big supporter of Google, recommended their stuff to friends. A month or two I deleted my Google accounts, and avoid using Google as much as possible now.
The change? It seemed they used to be dedicated to producing the best technology, and in making the ads that supported that as unobtrusive as possible. The "Do no evil" phrase was idealistic, but believable.
Now, I feel that Google is dedicated to spying on us all. They have information on me that I don't understand how they got, and I resent them having it. I believe they've crossed the line into spyware. "Do no evil" is now a ridiculous joke.
Do you have Facebook? If you do, you're living in denial.
My Google spying anecdote.
A few years ago I got a Droid X phone, switching over from Blackberry. I had to create a gmail account (apparently I was one of the few without gmail) in order to register the phone. No big deal, I don't hand out that email to anyone.
Somehow Google linked my youtube account (which was registered to a 15 year old hotmail account) with my new gmail account even though I had never used youtube on my phone. The only way I can conceived the match being made was from me being logged in on youtube from my home computer and checking hotmail from both home and my phone.
It makes me very leery. If I ever run for public office (no plans to do so, just hypothetical) I'm sure someone would be able to look at my youtube viewing history.. pick out some questionable content, and use it for character assassination.
Other than being a luddite, I think anyone in the public eye is going to be haunted by their internet history.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Hi, I'm User, from the Internet, and I'd just like you to know that I tried to keep my accounts separate so that getting banned from one of your services doesn't ban me from other services. During your Google+ Name Rage (where you banned people for not using their REAL NAME), my youtube account that I use to post Videos of my game studio's content (Which has a REAL name, just not an INDIVIDUAL's name) was somehow linked to my Google+ service -- I suspect I accidentally clicked a link to Google+ while using the Internet and signed into Youtube or Google+... Point being, I wasn't presented a page with a giant: "LINK THESE ACCOUNTS TOGETHER" button (which I never would have clicked, and such a thing should require re-authorisation).
The aforementioned ridiculous ACCOUNT BANNING you did for Google+ caused me to lose access to Youtube, Gmail and Docs services. Way to fail being business friendly.... Now that Google has shown us the unpredictable and dangerous LIGHTNING that lives in their "cloud" I'm scared to even recommend your services to anyone.
FYI: The sooner you STOP UNDERMINING OUR TRUST, the better.