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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.
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.
but the user is not the customer - the advertiser is. All of those MeToo things he complains about are more ad real estate - that's what google is, an ad company, period.
These are symptoms of becoming a large company. Size makes it difficult to change. Size must be paid for. It is easier to rely on cash cows than it is to take a risk to that may pay off later. People who manage the routine start to rise to the top. Many companies have survived the change and thrived, others run into a brick wall and it's over.
I heard Google HR invented thirteen new genders, five new categories of sexual assault, and TWENTY THREE ways of shaming white men in a fiel invented by white men.
That's innovation!
1) Are we making money? Is it happening easily? Is it likely it will continue for a while? If "no" to any of the questions, goto #2. Otherwise end.
2) Innovate.
I've grown to trust Google less and less. After the Damore letter and now this, i'm seriously considering switching to an alternative email service.
Thankfully, adblocking keeps most of their shenanigans at bay, but just the other day I discovered Google Maps Timeline. WTF is this?!
Why, it's a complete list of every location i've been to logged by Google for the past 4 years. Google even had the audacity to post one of their little surveys next to it.
"Does Google make it easy to control your private data?"
Hell to the NO!
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.
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.
Na, the previous CEO's were innovators.
The current CEO is an MBA.
Put an MBA in charge of a company and they simply chase the next big thing instead of innovating and creating the next big thing.
They do this because they are not innovators and creators, they are simply followers and maintainers.
It seems to be the plight of large companies to not want to take the risk of hiring an innovator. So they look for someone who "knows how to run a business." They get what the look for, stagnation.
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.
Their eyes on fixed on their shareholders, not their competitors or customers. As I pointed out in another topic related to broken business models, this is EXACTLY what happens to every company. They start out nice, innovate, do good, then IPO, then this, focused on profit, on protecting their market share, etc etc. Another good idea turned to an evil entity.
Took a lot of balls for this guy to step out and speak up about. My hat is off to you sir. Awesome.
Didn't Google start you know... a search engine? Like Netscape and Yahoo and AltaVista? Then they started a webmail service... just like Hotmail and Netscape and Yahoo before them. Oh, then they also started a online map service... just like MapQuest before them. When were they ever anything other than a "me too" company? Have they in their entire history made a single product that wasn't a dig at some other established market? I'm seriously expecting them to target Amazon or Netflix's business plan next.
We are Google's product. Soylent green for the ad agencies.
I originally started this post by asking when did Google ever innovate as I would argue that from a product/solution perspective Google has never produced anything before anybody else or entered an under-serviced market with a truly game changing product.
It seems to me that Google's success was in its ability to listen to customers, hear their complaints and produce (or improve existing) products to address their concerns. Google's innovation comes in the form of better/simple UIs and the underlying algorithms.
I think the ability to understand what the customer is saying/complaining about existing solutions is what has driven the innovation and growth at Google. The question is if this is still true.
I suspect, the answer is a qualified no - like any huge company, Google reach has increased and the people with the passion/perspective/skills that made the company a success in the first place can't be a part of/don't have the expertise of the various business groups of the company, which is the cause of the innovation dilution that Mr. Yegge has experienced.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
No, MapQuest was in existence *long* before Google and had their first web product in 1996 (two years before Google was founded).
What Google did was make quality maps available for free, easy to use and then, listening to customers (see my post below), added Street View.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
"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.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I've noticed their search has been getting worse as well. Google has been using their search results to penalize sites for things other than quality: not using HTTPS, not using Google's AMP for mobile pages, etc. Those are fine things, but.....
When you stop making "page quality" your primary focus, the search results are going to stop reflecting page quality. Even yahoo search is as good as Google now.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Apple in a perfect example of this! (I'm a fan, so moderate your opinion accordingly...)
Tim Cook knows how to run a business, but since he's taken over the company their products aren't revolutionary, but evolutionary. They're often released before they're ready and riddled with bugs / issues. Apple is so focused on making a buck with iPhone they leave profit on the table. (The Mac mini hasn't been updated in over two years. The Mac Pro just got dusted by the iMac Pro, which is absurd.)
Steve Jobs was for all intents and purposes a smelly bastard to work for, but he drove people to innovate like mad! He really did strive to change the world and didn't much give a fuck about the competitors.
I think you're mixing your metaphors. Maybe he's burning a bridge, bearing a cross, or grinding an axe.... but I'm pretty sure he's not burning a cross.
As it happens, he was planning on bearing a cross, but while grinding his axe, sparks set fire to the cross, which he then dropped onto the bridge...
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
The innovators are always in the spotlight, but for every successful innovator there are 1000 failures.
When you are small and have nothing, it absolutely makes sense to risk being an innovator. You don't have much to lose, and if it takes you can win big.
Once you are big and have a lot, that stops making sense. There is a lot to lose, and you have safe money sitting right on the table.
What I am getting at is....there is no moral failing in ceasing to be an innovator once you have built your empire. It is natural and ok to shift to the conservative. And it is also ok for people who dislike that corporate environment to leave (and be replaced by people who prefer the new, less risk-takey corporate environment).
There is no cause for lamentation here.
Whatever. Dude, I owned a Palm back in the 90's. I also, shortly before the iPhone came out, bought my first "smartphone" -- a Symbian device -- which made me conclude that there just wasn't really any use for having a smartphone.
The iPhone completely changed the game for smartphones. They made it actually useful. Just like they did for mp3 players back in the day.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Google docs is also improving and chrome browser is improving where google wants improvement. They want auto play videos, no matter what I do they sneak it in.
They are not good in lek. ( A lek is a clearing in the forest/woodland where male pheasants gather and strut. Females choose to mate with fancy foot work strutting males, in theory. In practice, it is crowd behavior. Females pick the male picked by most females. It is an unstable system. Using robots scientists could make the females gravitate towards one, and on command, the robots to another one and the females follow suite. My sincere sympathies to the frustrated males in that experiment, would perfectly understand them going postal ;-).
On platforms like Facebook, Twitter, the winner is whoever most of your friends and family pick, regardless of quality, price or security. It is a lek. It is very difficult to break into lek dominated apps. One can only wait for it to collapse (like myspace or geocities before that) and pick the pieces, and bide your time. Build capacity, build the technology to be ready to capitalize when the lek leader fumbles.
In personal computers Microsoft was an early lek winner. All the companies picked Microsoft because all other companies are picking microsoft. When it stumbled, Firefox pounced, when it was fending off firefox, Google pounced and reduced the cash flow from Office apps.
So all these me too platforms from google are simply waiting for a fumble by Facebook or Twitter or Apple.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Without Jobs, computers would be ugly and unpleasant things to use.
Now, I didn't think OS/2 was that bad...
For explanation, without Jobs working on MacOS, Gates and Microsoft wouldn't have been scared enough (or able to) steal the MacOS code to create Windows 1.0. It also means that OS/2 might actually have been finished earlier instead of being sabotaged by Microsoft. Presuming that Microsoft sabotage OS/2 because they didn't need it once they had Windows. Now, Microsoft might have just stolen the OS/2 code, but that might have more difficult to do. In any case, it's conceivable that we might have had two decades of IBM's OS/2 operating system instead of Windows.
I'm not sure how Smartphones would have turned out without Apple, though. Maybe they'd all be Blackberry clones, or maybe the iPhone touch screen design is so obvious that someone else would have created an equivalent at around the same time.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
I still don't see a use for a smartphone - I'd take a feature phone with Audible and Kindle if one existed. And Apple's MP3 players were shiny garbage - they were always the worst, from a geek perspective, and not well liked on Slashdot back in the day.
Jobs's genius was in turning personal electronics into jewelry. Having an iPod, and later an iPhone, was a status symbol. He invented that! Didn't matter whether the actual products were any good. Pure genius.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Googles goal is to amass as much data as possible for sale and their side projects (AI etc.) and in order to achieve this goal they have to replace every application every user may ever want with their own data-farming product. Making new stuff may be fun but copying existing stuff is enough to farm 99% of the user base.
Props for the rant feedback (a good rant is always entertaining and often enlightening), but Steve has also failed to see that The Patent Wars have not merely stifled innovation. It has destroyed it altogether.
I can try and innovate something very specific, and even if I'm somehow lucky to get my product off the ground, some overly vague patent barely related will be politically pushed into a courtroom by an army of litigators with the end goal of ass-raping the "competition".
No shit innovation is dying. The MBAs of a world fueled by litigation get what they deserve.
Tim Cook knows how to run a business, but since he's taken over the company their products aren't revolutionary, but evolutionary.
So were most of the products that came out under Steve Jobs. Apple only makes 1-2 "revolutionary" products per decade. Their last big one was the iPhone/iPad (really the same product) which hit the market 10 years ago (7 for the iPad). Prior to that was the iPod which came out 18 years ago. Prior to that was the Powerbook (1991) and the Macintosh (1984). The real question is can Apple do another product on that scale again? They are so big now that it's hard to develop products that really move the needle revenue wise. For them to grow just 10% they have to basically build a business the size of eBay from scratch. There just aren't that many things you can do to generate that many billions in revenue. It's (comparatively) easy to look innovative and grow fast when you are small. Not so easy to make the elephant dance.
Apple is so focused on making a buck with iPhone they leave profit on the table.
Well the iPhone does account for well over 50% of their revenue. It is fair to point out that the Mac has been somewhat neglected of late though.
Steve Jobs was for all intents and purposes a smelly bastard to work for, but he drove people to innovate like mad! He really did strive to change the world and didn't much give a fuck about the competitors.
If you think Jobs didn't care about competitors you are mistaken. He cared a lot. See the "I'm a mac and I'm a PC" ads. The difference was that he was really good at product design and keeping the company focused so it didn't seem like he cared. But he had flesh eating lawyers on speed dial (ask Samsung) to deal with competitors.
You're looking back at the first iPhone with rose-tinted glasses. With a Symbian phone of the era, you could take pictures that did not suck, which you couldn't do with the iPhone because it had a toy camera. With a Symbian phone, you could do video calls, which you couldn't do with the iPhone because it didn't have a front-facing camera. You could use a Symbian phone as a navigator, which you couldn't do with the iPhone because it didn't have a GPS receiver. Most importantly, the first iPhone wasn't programmable, so it couldn't even be classified as a smartphone. And I'm not even talking about nerdy features such as Bluetooth, FM radio, SD card slots and IR blasters, that you would find on a Symbian phone but not on the iPhone.
I think that people bought the iPhone because it was an innovative combination of design and usability, not because of its technical advancements or intrinsic usefulness. Also, it was marketed well.
Apple in a perfect example of this! (I'm a fan, so moderate your opinion accordingly...)
Tim Cook knows how to run a business, but since he's taken over the company their products aren't revolutionary, but evolutionary. They're often released before they're ready and riddled with bugs / issues. Apple is so focused on making a buck with iPhone they leave profit on the table. (The Mac mini hasn't been updated in over two years. The Mac Pro just got dusted by the iMac Pro, which is absurd.)
Steve Jobs was for all intents and purposes a smelly bastard to work for, but he drove people to innovate like mad! He really did strive to change the world and didn't much give a fuck about the competitors.
Where/when the REAL innovation took place was when Woz, Jobs, and Gates were working out of garages.
Small businesses and startups are where real innovation occurred most of the time in the past. The problem is a Jobs, Gates, or Woz could not do the same today. A large reason why much "innovation" happens in megacorps today is that there are so many regulatory/legal/financial/taxation barriers in place that a random guy in a garage stands almost no chance even with a radically innovative idea with large potential. The lower rungs of the "ladder" have been sawed off by existing businesses using government taxation, legislation, and regulation to keep raising the barriers to entry for potential future competition.
Without serious competition, stagnation becomes inevitable.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
From one of the links in TFS:
But in the U.S., people love to hate on Uber because “their drivers are slave labor.” The driver has to pay for a car, maintain the car, insure it, pay for fuel, clean it, etc., so on the whole Uber is viewed as somewhat predatory. I honestly don’t know how much of this is truth vs. perception. But given that millions of drivers are opting in, and given that people are generally pretty clever about optimizing their income, the economics would seem to be at worst a moral gray area in the States and Europe, and more likely a pretty good deal for most drivers.
It's a pretty big and highly questionable assumption that people are good at optimizing their income. If he did just a little math on being a ride-sharing driver, he'd see that it amounts to something like a reverse mortgage against your car. You're not making money, you're just extracting bits of it over time against something you own.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
without Jobs working on MacOS, Gates and Microsoft wouldn't have been scared enough (or able to) steal the MacOS code to create Windows 1.0.
You're crazy and this is crazy talk. Microsoft started working on Windows 1.0 in 1981, before the Mac ever shipped. Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had seen demos of GUI computers at Xerox PARC and both determined that their respective companies should make GUI computing products. Microsoft fearing Apple was not in any way a factor. In 1981 the standard Apple computer was an Apple II with Microsoft BASIC and there was no adversarial relationship between the two companies, let alone fear.
The MacOS code wouldn't run on standard x86 hardware, and was a mix of Pascal and 68000 assembler. The MacOS code didn't have support for the crazy graphics cards people were running on x86 hardware in the late 80's. Windows 1.x was able to run on an 8088 chip, on top of DOS, so it was full of hacks to deal with the insane memory architecture needed for that. In short, even if Microsoft had stolen the code somehow, it wouldn't have done them any good; and I flatly don't believe that Microsoft stole any code. Apple never accused them of stealing code, and Apple was never shy.
It also means that OS/2 might actually have been finished earlier instead of being sabotaged by Microsoft.
I worked at Microsoft in the early 1990s and when I was hired, everyone expected OS/2 to be the future. I personally ported a bunch of utility programs so that they could run under OS/2 because we all were running OS/2 on our dev machines. (The utility programs were written in a DOS version of SNOBOL; I rewrote in Thompson AWK, which had a native OS/2 version.)
What happened to OS/2: customers voted with their dollars, and they voted for Windows. It didn't happen overnight... it took over 8 years for Microsoft to develop a Windows customers wanted. Windows 1.0 was a joke. Windows 2.0 became less of a joke (Jerry Pournelle at the time said something about Apple never needed to worry about Windows 1.x but ought to start worrying) but was still ugly and limited compared to a Mac. Windows 3.0 was a home run and flew off the shelves.
Windows 3.0 running on a 386 or higher could virtualize DOS apps, thus letting companies standardized on DOS apps run them side by side with each other and with native Windows apps; OS/2 at the time still had a single "compatibility box" for running one DOS app at a time. If you had a computer with a luxurious 4 MB of RAM, you could use all of that memory... Windows 3.0 was even better than DESQview.
Microsoft management decided to run with the product that the customers liked. They negotiated a "divorce" with IBM where IBM kept OS/2. The only "sabotage" Microsoft committed was to stop working on OS/2. If you want to claim otherwise, please provide some proof.
Now, Microsoft might have just stolen the OS/2 code, but that might have more difficult to do.
Microsoft helped write the OS/2 code. I'm sure they had plenty of copies of it. IBM never accused them of doing anything improper with their access to the code. And we have the same problem as with your idea that Microsoft stole Mac OS code: the OS/2 code is nothing like the Windows code. As an example, IBM insisted that the graphics coordinate system for OS/2 be different from Windows... IIRC the 0,0 pixel was in the upper-left of the window instead of lower-left, something like that. Microsoft tried to get IBM to agree to let OS/2 be more compatible with Windows so that it would be easier for companies to port apps to both. (Most companies at the time targeted OS/2 for app porting, since everyone expected that the IBM OS would ultimately win. Microsoft covered all the bets, porting their apps to both Windows and OS/2, so when Windows took off Microsoft had their apps ready to sell.) As another example, Windows used cooperative multitasking, except on a 386 or above where it used 386 features; OS/2 at the time used 286 Protect Mo
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
This is why they created Alphabet; to be the holding company of their cash cow (Google) and all of their other innovating companies. If you think that Google is not innovative, then transfer to one of the other bets that are more innovative.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
Good comment and deserved the insightful mod. Reminded me of an aspect that hasn't appeared in any part of the discussion I've read so far:
Change is going to happen. The questions are not not "if" or "how to control it", but "when" and "how much" and "does it hurt". I actually think evolutionary change is better than a revolution. The defining characteristic of a revolution is that someone gets badly hurt, and the huge problem of a revolution is that there is no assurance that the outcome will be better.
Yes, on the long-term average, things have gotten better, but the oscillations are unpredictable. Sometimes things get better and sometimes they get worse. If the oscillations get too strong, you can go into the negative territory with such outcomes as death, bankruptcy, or extinction. The way things are going, I'm afraid we're heading for a no-survivors outcome.
The corporate cancers that are in control are NOT worried about survival. They are inhuman and unthinking and not worried about anything. They are only programmed to generate the largest possible profits, but infinity is NOT possible, even if the cancer could actually understand why there is no Gawd but profit.
Yeah, I have a fixation.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Microsoft spent decades queering the word "innovation" until the conversation degenerated to this level.
Look up every time a Microsoft executive spouted the word "innovation" as one of their first-paragraph talking points. (Try not to break Google while doing so.) Every damn time "innovation" was used in the context of product innovation, as if that's the only (or main) kind of innovation worth paying attention to.
They did this because Microsoft was a spectacularly innovative company, but their preferred field of invention was "business methods (unethical)". They didn't really want people asking how they became worth hundreds of billions of dollars with very little product-side innovation under their belts. (The other explanation conveys a bitter whiff of anti-trust.)
There was at least a decade where Google was easily one of the most innovative companies ever founded.
The core innovation was figuring out that they could only monetize each search result to a fraction of a cent. Hence they had to deliver each search result for far less than a fraction of cent. Their innovations in algorithmic efficiency, parallel computing, computing at scale, data center management, hardware efficiency, and internal network efficiency are legendary, and with just cause.
On the revenue side, Google innovated running a sponsorship auction on every search result (I don't know this side very well myself, but Laszlo Bock talks about it in his recent book).
It's hard to say how this all rolls out internally, but Google remains formidable in the machine learning space. AlphaZero is one of the most jaw-dropping results of my lifetime, and I still remember 1972 with a fair degree of clarity. My family was so insular, I barely understood that hockey was part of the Canadian zeitgeist until the Canada–Russia series. Somehow that culture shock woke up my internal PVR, and I've been archiving my impressions of the greater world around me ever since.
Frankly, at this point, I'm not actually sure that Google should be in the business of innovating whole new product categories. When Yegge signed up, that was probably part of the mission that attracted him, but the world changes, and not every company grinds away in the same groove forever and ever.
Google's manta is "organize the world's knowledge" and the various product categories they developed were a means to an end. ML is far more instrumental to their long-term vision. Page understood from the beginning that ML is highly dependant on big data, so they innovated preferentially in product categories with an accrued data payoff (geography, the social graph, speech recognition, machine translation).
The problem for Google at this point is that they have become king of Passive Advertising Mountain. I'm using the word 'passive' here to mean that their advertising approach is largely based on influencing the lizard brain.
'Active' advertising (for which the word 'advertising' might not even be appropriate) is finding out where your users want to go in life, their deep goals and aspirations, and then helping to filter out everything that does contribute to this.
Filter bubbles are great, so long as the bubble is a mentorship cocoon with your own best interests at heart, rather than sculpted out of libidinous landfill.
99% of silicon valley is presently suffering from VC lock-in to libidinous-landfill business models.
The opposing business model hasn't been figured out, yet, so far as I can see.
One could envision a Guild system, rehashing MOOC technology, where a person signs a contract with a Guild, wh
Hmm... No relation to diamonds? I still think you should have gotten a nice mod point or three, but moot to me since I never get a mod point.
Per my longer comment on types of people, I think management is only concerned with two types of people: Humanists are good for lower management and Materialists for upper management. The innovative founders are idealists and normally disposed of as soon as the corporation has become sufficiently cancerous.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
They even Me Too'd Me Too from Microsoft!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Paradoxically, the reason they're shipping more Macs than ever is that the desktop is becoming less relevant - and as that happens, and Windows becomes less necessary for more users, alternatives like Macs and Chromebooks become viable. So, yeah, they can sell more Macs - because they still have an aura of 'the computer for artists, etc.'. But how long is that going to last?
And in any case, Mac minis (the OP's example of Apple no longer innovating) never had that aura - precisely because they were cheap and not portable (i.e., not status symbols). So, while minis may have been bought by mac fans, they don't need to be upgraded much, because most people who bought them don't need a new computer - and they didn't buy them to show off with.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
This is why they created Alphabet; to be the holding company of their cash cow (Google) and all of their other innovating companies. If you think that Google is not innovative, then transfer to one of the other bets that are more innovative.
The search engine market is mature, as are most of the other technologies developed under Google. There's not much we can do about that.
But this isn't news, someone quitting because they've realised that the company they work for is just a company isn't newsworthy.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Almost the entire landscape in every area has changed radically since the 1990's
Technological landscape? Yes, absolutely so. Taxation not so much. In legal front two things happened — software patents and rise of closed source model, in which MS and Apple thrived.
I don't think that regulation plays a large role, because IoT is having it's own Cambrian explosion and regulations don't seem to matter. Microsoft gained foothold because it gave cheap OS (and later cheap GUI) on cheap PCs. World now is littered with free operating systems and graphical shells. Reason why Apple and MS could grow so big and fast was because they where the only game in town. That world is gone, but not due to regulation, legal issues or taxation.
In a largeish company you cannot do anything without concensus or the ceo dropping the command. There are many companies with problems where a lot of people clearly see an issue which, if resolved, could remove a major barrier to innovation and agility. The reason these issues dont get tackled is mainly cultural. The CEO is surrounded by yes men....completely his/her fault. Project intake is too franktic and drains resources without yielding many benefits. Managers are afraid to carve out a side project that will save a company because there wouldnt be much fanfare for pulling it off and the risk is high. The list goes on and on. It takes someone who is really down to earth at the top to see and fix these things. Being at the top though is not condusive to being down to earth. The board is often your only hope and a lot of those are snowed by managers....outright lied to.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock