James Whittaker: Focus on Ads and 'Social' Destroying Google 236
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."
huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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" }
Google seems to be less interested in innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Normal lifecycle... (Score:5, Insightful)
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 is always experimenting, nothing new here (Score:3, Insightful)
They have a bunch of failed experiments--Buzz, Wave, Health, Google wifi, and probably 100 others that died in the vetting rooms at Google.
They also have some stunning successes that started out as private projects within the company--Gmail, notably.
That's not a sign of a dying company--it's a refreshing sign of a company that dares to experiment and isn't afraid to fail occasionally.
So this guy retreats back to a safe, old-school software corporation--Microsoft. 25 years ago, Microsoft must have been an exciting place to work. Today, it's stodgy, rigid, backward thinking, corporate-focused, a follower and not a leader in most areas. He'll feel right at home in his safe, easy corporate 9-5 job.
Google reminds me of the old AT&T Bell Labs organization, where you were expected to put 25-50% of your time into your own projects. It wasn't for everybody; some people need to be basically told what to do 8 hours a day, while other people could feel free to create amazing (or stupid) things, and management just knew that sooner or later something useful would result.
The real question is, how does a large corporation preserve its startup mentality. You really can't, but at least you can try to make the place fun for people who are chasing new ideas all the time. Me, I'd work for GOOG any time. It would be a blast being around so many smart people!
Nothing to see here (Score:4, Insightful)
Happens all the time. Move along.
Re:Test Honcho? (Score:2, Insightful)
James comes to us most recently from Microsoft. He has spent his career focusing on testing, building high quality products, and designing tools and process at the industrial scale.
Was he in charge of testing Vista?
So, why do we care what the QA Manager thinks about this? You don't often see a lot of innovation coming out of QA, but you see a lot of vague bitching about it with no offer of a solution.
Re: Google seems to be less interested in innovati (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
It is a case of better the devil you know, from what I read he was *expecting* Google to be a 'technology company that empowered its employees to innovate' - turns out they aren't....they are only interested in making money from information gained through their technology.
His perception of Google has changed, his perception of Microsoft has little to do with this.....
Re:Google is always experimenting, nothing new her (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Saying 'Don't be Evil' while holding a Death Ray.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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"
Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
internet is becoming the TV of the 21st century (Score:4, Insightful)
the internet of the late 20th century and the first few years of the last decade was you go find the information you want. Google flourished because they were able to organize it better to make life easier for you.
Facebook, twitter and the rest of social is the new internet. You "like" or follow brands and then read the stream of their updates/news feed. sort of like a custom RSS feed. the point is that you no longer find the information, you are fed a stream of data. just like TV of the 20th century where you sit in front of a box and consume the content.
this is where google is having problems. the whole idea of fighting spam in gmail was to force those companies to use google for advertising. Yes, all the shady loan companies and no prescription drug companies used google almost 10 years ago to advertise. but with SEO the spam problem is coming back and the only way to solve it seems to be social where people crowd source the content filtering.
that's the whole point of Plus, to filter the content. but lately Plus is crap as well. Just a bunch of bloggers/internet oprahs and you are supposed to comment on how cool they are when they post something
Re:Nice rant (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google missed an even bigger opportunity (Score:5, Insightful)
Google wants access to all the data, and that means selling as few turnkey systems as possible, because they want more people to outsource, which will inevitably lead to many of them outsourcing to google, at which point google can sniff through their data for their own purposes, whether nefarious or not.
Re:Google is always experimenting, nothing new her (Score:3, Insightful)
You're correct, that's exactly what the article is saying. And the gp is correct about MSFT.
As a (recent) ex-employee I can testify that there is definitely nothing exciting or innovative about MSFT now, coupled with the age-old problem of thinking if it compiles then ship it (that's why I left). As far as products go, they're stuck in the backwaters of stale tech and middle management seems to be ok with it as long as the big dollar enterprise contracts are renewed.
Of course the research division is fine but outside of Kinect, very little ever seems to produce revenue. Employee morale is even lower than the Vista days which is amazing since Win8 isn't too bad. Larry Page had better hope that Google never comes close to being the type of company that Microsoft has devolved into over the last 10 years.
Bottom line is that absolutely nothing can save them from drifting into obscurity while Ballmer remains at the helm.
Let's call it a draw.
Immature. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nice rant (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Immature. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Smart people can be dumb. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The Punchline (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty easy: first, pay for a non-free email account. I chose fastmail.fm and like it. If you are all, "waaa, I don't want to pay" then you will pay with something else - your data, in this case.
2nd step: use an alternate search provider. I use DuckDuckGo. It's not perfect and sometimes I have to revert to Google, but it's better than getting sucked into the Google ecosystem.
It's so easy to avoid getting sucked into the blackhole. You just steer around it before its gravitational pull (waaah, I want an Android phone) sucks you over the event horizon. Buh-bye.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:internet is becoming the TV of the 21st century (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [yahoo.com] and Google Trends [google.com] 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.
Re:huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
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).
I'm not sure why you should retain that history. If you didn't retain it, it wouldn't matter as much if my account were hacked. That "nobody else can see it" (for now, until the money equation changes) comforts me not at all.
Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, my problem is that Google is spying on me. I was first alerted to it when Google+ suggested friend to me, and 2 of the suggestions were only linked to me because they are the authors of blogs that I visit from time to time. I don't visit them by searching on Google. They are not hosted on Google's Blogger. And I'd never posted any links from those blogs on my Google+ account.
Then more recently Google was asking me a question about security, and presented me a list of all the searches I'd done on Google for the last X months. Well, that's not information that I believe Google ought to be storing, and at that point deleted my account, and switched to using non-Google services.
THEN I found out that Google will continue to store my searches against my name even though I don't have an account any more.
At one time "Don't be evil" meant something. Now Google is a creepy spyware company. I want nothing more to do with them.
Re:huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh yes, I remember who you are not. You're the one who whenever he's stuck for something to whine about posts some off topic link attacking Apple. And you question me on why I criticise Google?
You hypocritical cunt.