Longtime Google Engineer Quits; Says Company Can No Longer Innovate, Is Mired in Politics, and Has Become Absolutely Competitor-Focused (medium.com)

Steve Yegge, a longtime Google engineer who gained popularity after his rant on Google+ went viral, wrote another rant on Wednesday, in which he announced he has left Google. His rationale behind leaving Google, in his own words: The main reason I left Google is that they can no longer innovate. They've pretty much lost that ability. I believe there are several contributing factors, of which I'll list four here. First, they're conservative: They are so focused on protecting what they've got, that they fear risk-taking and real innovation. Gatekeeping and risk aversion at Google are the norm rather the exception. Second, they are mired in politics, which is sort of inevitable with a large enough organization; the only real alternative is a dictatorship, which has its own downsides. Third, Google is arrogant. It has taken me years to understand that a company full of humble individuals can still be an arrogant company. Google has the arrogance of the "we", not the "I". Fourth, last, and probably worst of all, Google has become 100% competitor-focused rather than customer focused. They've made a weak attempt to pivot from this, with their new internal slogan "Focus on the user and all else will follow." But unfortunately it's just lip service.

You can look at Google's entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), and on and on and on. They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. They simply don't have innovation in their DNA any more. And it's because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers.

Comments

Re:Seems to be a trend

[jfdavis668]

Apple went without Jobs twice. During the first run, they came up with innovative things like the digital camera and the PDA. Only thing was they were too far ahead of their time. When Jobs returned, he dumped the innovative projects and started selling Macs in fancy colors. He had timing and flare, not necessarily innovation. He made people want the products. Technically, the iPhone wasn't any more innovative than what Palm had already created. But it combined the right things at the right time to make people want to buy it.

He really doesn't get it

[alvinrod]

For as much truth or insight as his post may contain, he still really doesn't get Google at all. Google's customers aren't the people who use Android, Google+, Google Voice, etc. Google's customers are advertisers that want to have eyeballs and ear holes to blast their ads at and they don't care about innovation, they just want something that works and Google wants to make sure that they keep those real customers of theirs by offering a rival to anything else that is being used to sell ads online. They didn't make Google+ because they wanted a better social network, they made Google+ so that if social networks became the new center of online advertising instead of web search that Google wouldn't end up out in the rain.

Sure, they have some people researching some really cool technology, but so does Microsoft and we saw how little of that managed to gain any traction whenever they bothered to let the public catch a whiff of something. It's the same with Google and for the same reasons that it doesn't go anywhere. They just don't truly care about it as a product and load it down with bloat or other cruft to tie it in with their existing programs or services instead of letting it be something useful on its own.

Re:Are we making money?

[110010001000]

Yeah, now they only have $300billion in revenue last year. Those chumps.

Re:Seems to be a trend

[Khyber]

"During the first run, they came up with innovative things like the digital camera"

They sure as fuck did not, that goes to Kodak in the mid-1970s.

Re:Confused... wasn't this always the case?

[mycroft822]

You should do some reading into the PageRank algorithm. Yes, search engines existed before Google, but they were implemented poorly and did not scale well. There is a reason 'googling' something became synonymous with 'searching', because it worked really well. Would you call Tesla a "me too" company just because other people have been making cars for decades? I'm not trying to argue that they Google isn't a "me too" now, just that I don't think it's accurate to say they started out that way.

Re:MapQuest was the first

[mark-t]

If you had actually read what I wrote, you'd know that it was Street View I was actually talking about.

I even put an asterisk beside "terrestrial virtual presence" in case you didn't know what i as talking about.

Being able to actually see what your destination looks like from ground level before you go to an unfamiliar location is damn convenient, and has remained a significant reason why Google Maps is so preferred to many alternatives.

On a slightly related note, I don't recall seeing a map like Google Earth by MapQuest... all I can remember them having was the standard Miller Cylindrical projection, and certainly nothing resembling an actual 3 dimensional globe.