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."

Re:huh?

[IamTheRealMike]

Hi, I work on the Google accounts team (on spam and security).

I just want to clarify something. We don't merge accounts using non-explicit / ambient information like you are suggesting. I suspect what happened is that at some point, you used your Gmail account on YouTube and we noticed you already had a YouTube account (you were logged in to both). When YT was acquired it obviously had its own account system and over time, that has been integrated with the regular Google account system. As part of that accounts have been merged together. It may be that you don't remember this happening, but we definitely don't try and spot related accounts and merge them without some explicit user action.

I'm not sure why you think people would be able to see your YouTube viewing history. That's a private part of your account, it's hard to imagine that ever changing. Unless your account gets hacked nobody else can see it, and we put a lot of effort in to try and stop account compromises (it's what I work on all day, in fact).

Anyway, a lot of peoples concerns about privacy boil down to (a) transparency and (b) control. That's what BasilBrushes concerns seem to be about and it's completely understandable. The Dashboard (www.google.com/dashboard) might help. This stuff is discussed in the privacy principles [google.com] document, which is the official voice of the company on the topic. I actually think Google has got a lot better at these principles (transparency, control) over the last few years - we have made things like Chrome incognito mode, the Dashboard, the Ads Preferences Manager, added better security against hackers (no.1 privacy threat) etc. But peoples expectations have gone up even faster, so there's still lots of work to do.

Re:Test Honcho?

[jvkjvk]

You don't often see a lot of innovation coming out of QA,...

Well, perhaps you should look a bit deeper at what Dr. Whittaker has done in the past before saying stuff.

This particular QA Manager is also a CS PhD.

You might be perhaps interested in his dissertation:

Markov Chain Techniques for Software Testing and Reliability Analysis

Perhaps that would by why we care about what this QA Manager thinks about software testing.