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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."
So he moved back to Microsoft? Huh? Don't get it.
Now he'll experience a "corporate mandate called $variable"
where $variable = { "the cloud" , "Windows 8" , "whatever marketing thinks up next" }
Who thinks they would have made that push into automated cars if they had the choice to rethink that today?
The whole company is getting focused on profits rather then innovation.
That might be valid. However, it might also be possible that the best way to ensure future profits is to take risks now on new ideas.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Exciting startup with a couple of people does exciting things, attracts excited developers because they can do exciting things.
Over time company gets big, has to worry about shareholders and lots of internal politics with growing levels of management.
Company is grown up, things slow down, life becomes boring, bored developers seeking excitement move on to next startup.
Are there any exceptions?
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.
To keep the profits growing, you have to innovate because the copycats come fast; especially with a non-tangible product - like everything software related.
If they were strictly focused on profits, they'd be making cuts exclusively to boost their bottom line - like what 90% of corporate America has been doing in the last few years. But that's pretty much a one shot deal - it's a just a bump in profits: not growth. Hence, that is one of the reasons (Asian operations is another for some) why corporate America has record profits -cuts mostly people. Now, we have this very high unemployment rate that for the life of me, I don't see how it's going to abate anytime soon - regardless of who's in the Whitehouse next year.
Uh, i'm sorry, the rants about Google innovating too much are down the hall? Whittaker is complaining that Google _used_ to be innovative, but now they're not. He's claiming that they used to let the engineers spend 20% of their time on whatever they thought was cool, but now there's an ultimatum (it's not clear if it's official or not) that everything has to be subservient to the goal of pushing "social" and "sharing" in general and Google+ in particular or it gets thrown under the bus. He's not complaining that they're innovating too much, he's complaining that things like Google Labs and other experimental projects have been killed.
I know that not RTFA is considered the norm, but how did you manage to interpret even the blurb as the exact opposite of what it said? Or did you just assume that if two different parties complained about google within 24 hours then they must be complaining about the same thing?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Google should be all about advertising, because that is their only business which makes money: They made $35 billion or so last year on advertising, and $1.3B on everything else . Assuming 1 Billion on-line people, thats $35 a year for every man, woman, and child on the Internet.
And the way for more effective advertising is more effective stalking, err, profiling of people. Google is very good about tracking its users when there are advertisements, but was losing out to Facebook on non-advertising pages, thus the advent of +1.
It also explains a huge amount of the change in Google's privacy policy: before they would silo data, but now its all-inbounds. If its beneficial for them to data-mine your email (or email sent TO you from gmail users), including paid email accounts and to correlate it to the advertising tracking cookie for DoubleClick, they now can do it. Even services like Cloud Storage and App Engine are under Google's privacy policy. Fun, hu?
"Its hard to believe in a company that says 'Don't Be Evil' when they are busy firing a death ray"
Test your net with Netalyzr
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!
I use for reverb when recording.
What's immature about it? He called out the list of reasons that caused him to lose interest in working at Google, and he did it articulately. There was no name-calling or whining. Kudos to him for being honest and moving on.
Facebook is the new AOL
Rant? Please. I know ranting, and this isn't it. The guy didn't like his job, and a billion people were bugging him about it, so he tried to articulate his reasons. Maybe he didn't do a great job there, but trying to argue with somebody about the validity of personal decisions like why they chose one job or girl or car (yes, a girl is like a job and expensive possession all wrapped into one, deal with it. imaginary girl that may be reading this, you may substitute guy. unless you're gay, then don't. unless you're a gay guy, then do. and if you're bi, pick one or both depending on ... jesus christ I don't care. see, I told you I know ranting) is the very essence of immaturity. They're always going to be right--it was their decision. If it doesn't seem "right" to you, then you're just not able to get into their head well enough. Even if it ends up making them less happy in the end, they made the best decision they could with the information they had, which is their entire lifetime of experience.
The real rant is in the response. Somebody is all upset because somebody else left a company they don't even seem to like that much, but they're pursuing their own happiness and that just needs to be nipped in the bud. This is the real world! Things don't work that way! A company's gotta make money! Aristotle younger generation cliches!
Seriously? You're going to go there, but you don't realize that people rarely make solid arguments in defense of personal decisions? I guess if it's not something that's repeated a thousand times as if it's some sort of amazing insight that you can parrot, it's not worth thinking of on your own.
The greatest shows occur when the person being attacked for their decision doesn't realize that theirs wasn't the objectively correct one for everybody in the world, and tries to further defend their position as if it was. Increasingly specious arguments fly back and forth, people on both sides burrow further and further into their own heads, and the argument just gets weirder and weirder. The only way out of it short of running out of steam is for somebody to both realize what's happening and not care at all what either their opponent or spectators think, because all you can do is go, "it was my decision, I don't give a fuck what anybody thinks" and then stop defending yourself. Or, "wait, I'm trying to convince somebody that they aren't right about their own desires." Either one needs to just deal with everyone too wrapped up in the argument to realize that it's completely changed from where it started, thinking they "won". My prediction: Whittaker will have at least an intuitive understanding of this and shut up, the internet will continue to argue. Blog author will move onto a new inflammatory subject. But sometimes ... sometimes magic happens, and it escalates for everyone to see, until it explodes in some self-destructive chest-beating. On the internet, where it can be watched by everyone and remembered forever. Or until something else shiny and loud comes along.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
I know reply to my own post but this quote from Whittaker,
When I search for “London pub walks” I want better than the sponsored suggestion to “Buy a London pub walk at Wal-Mart.”
This is the single reason I almost never use Google anymore. Ten pages of links like THAT before something relevant comes along. Yahoo used to find exact quote matches in pages from 2002. Google is under the impression that if it's not RECENT and it's not visited by 1 million web crawlers or 1 billion naive people who don't realize a search result is an ad until after they clicked it, well then it shouldn't be returned as a search result at all. I was "researching" the effects of amphetamines on DNA/RNA mutations (want to have a kid, don't want to have an autisitic kid, nevermind the details) and I found nothing but links to paywalls on Google. Why did google give me a direct exerpt from the page which, once I click, does not contain that exerpt without a fee?? Fuck that! I used Yahoo and then Bing and I have a veritable library of PDF's on the subject, scientific peer reviewed publications from 1984 through 2011, and I'm still sifting through (then I found out my local university has all this stuff in its Reserved books section, oh welll...) (and I realize now my 2 years on Adderall won't likely be a deterrant to my choice to try to have a kid)
Google. Sucks. It hasn't been useful to me since 2009 or so. If ads are its business, it's not getting it from me, and that's because it isn't offering me anything in return.
Google could still put ads in front of more people than Facebook, but Facebook knows so much more about those people.
Knowing nothing of James Whittaker other than what is in the summary, and having not RTFA, I'll assume he is a very intelligent and successful person.
He is also missing the obvious (and he's not the only one).
Facebook knows more of what people want other people to know. Google knows about what is really going on with people. People lie in surveys, whether it's to say what they want to be true or what they think is expected. Facebook is like a survey you create yourself.
Facebook has your holiday photos, knows you've been to an island, like partying on the beach. Google knows you're reading up on herpes treatments.
Maybe Facebook knows you're married. Google knows you're trying to find a divorce attorney.
If Google is relying on + to compete with Facebook, it has already lost the battle.
Because, love them or hate them, Microsoft is a software company trying to apply engineering to diverse software problems.
Ultimately, they make their money through the sale of products, so their interests tend to align with their users'.
Google, on the other hand is an advertising company trying to apply engineering to, um, data mining algorithms; and acquiring start-up companies for the purpose of increasing data collection and improve the targeting of ads.
Ultimately, they make their money through better and more targeted advertising, so their interests tend to align with those of advertisers'.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
I'd put it differently:
Man leaves job for higher paying opportunity and doesn't want everyone else to think he's a sellout.
There are a number of theories, though I don't really think this is newsworthy. Frankly, I'd be surprised if the situation was reversed: someone working for Google but saying they'd rather be working for Microsoft. Badmouthing your current employer is rare and interesting. Badmouthing your past employer, especially when it's a major rival of your current one, not so much.
No, before Adwords Google was a modest sized company with decent growth - no Yahoo! or MSN, but still a rather decent third place. Then, in 2000, came Adwords. And then Google 'flourished', at least in the sense of cash flow... which blinded everyone (even Google itself) to reality - they were still a distant third in terms of eyes on their own pages.
Then along came Facebook, and beat Google and everyone else at their own game. Not only garnering more eyeballs, but also getting more time on the page per eyeballs, *and* gathering more data allowing for more accurate (and more profitable) advertising.
That, fed by geek hubris, is a popular mythperception. It makes the geeks feel better about themselves, and gives the pundits something to holler about to endear themselves to the technorati... but it's bullshit. If you actually watch things like Yahoo Buzz and Google Trends you see the daily ebb and flow of people seeking information. Yeah, the shallow readers will only see the shallow people searching out Hollywood buzz, but discerning readers following them over time will note the searches for more serious information as well.
What you, and other shallow readers miss is that there are two kinds of information people use the web to seek. The first is their 'daily dose'. News on their favorite sports teams, their favorite bloggers latest posting, sales at their favorite stores, following the latest trends etc... etc... That's why (among other things) RSS feeds were invented. One stop for everything. (Hold on, more on that in a minute.) Millions of people search daily for these, and thus they dominate search trends - most of the time. The second is "situational searches", what do if your 1996 Taurus breaks down?, what do these purple spots on your forearm mean?, how to cut a rabbet without a tablesaw?.... Literately an infinity of different detailed searches, with millions of people each searching for millions of different things. These, they don't show up in 'top results', misleading those who mistakenly take top search results for the whole of the search universe. Though the hints have always been there for those with eyes to see... Like the guy who sued google over the ranking of his flower shop. Or JC Penney's being slapped by Google for their misleading methods of getting to the top of their categories.
The other thing missed by the shallow and short of memory is that the portal, one stop for everything, has been the Holy Grail of the commercial internet since practically Day One. Even Google has tried their hand at this early on, first by making their site(s) easy to use by introducing a single username/password for all their services. Later, they introduced Google Homepage (since rebranded as iGoogle) to the great joy of the geek community. ("Now we can use Google instead of Yahoo! or MSN!" Oh, the irony - since much of the same community derided portals.) Alongside that came their RSS reader, Google Sites, Google Business, Picasa, etc... etc... Ever more services and sites trying to keep eyeballs on Google's ads and trying to gain even more personal information to more accurately target those ads.