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."
Re:huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
When will the users start leaving? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
In the battle of who's more of a technology company, Microsoft or Google, the winner is...the one that doesn't make its money from ads?
Wouldn't that be Apple in this case? (at least it makes less of its money on ads)
Re: Google seems to be less interested in innovati (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
No, Google has changed in recent years. That's been obvious even from the outside. At one time I was a big supporter of Google, recommended their stuff to friends. A month or two I deleted my Google accounts, and avoid using Google as much as possible now.
The change? It seemed they used to be dedicated to producing the best technology, and in making the ads that supported that as unobtrusive as possible. The "Do no evil" phrase was idealistic, but believable.
Now, I feel that Google is dedicated to spying on us all. They have information on me that I don't understand how they got, and I resent them having it. I believe they've crossed the line into spyware. "Do no evil" is now a ridiculous joke.
Re:Google missed an even bigger opportunity (Score:5, Interesting)
They didn't miss that opportunity, they dismissed it. They went on the path of becoming a search appliance, back when they were trying to find a stable business model. The 20% was also a way to fund research and development into new or orthogonal markets, and it made their employees happy to boot.
For a while it all looked good and the strategy seemed solid.
Then the advertising money started flooding their profit margins. All of a sudden, it became clear which direction they should go.
From that day on, they became a one-trick pony.
It's not that they sucked at everything else, it's that nothing that they have produced so far could match the rate at which advertising fills their coffers. There was no way to return to being an engineering or technology company if by doing so they had to lower their profits.
It didn't matter if they could succeed, they needed to make more money!
Eventually, this brutal mentality trickled down to the engineers and the rest of the crew. It's clear to most people now that, for all their perks and occasional technical brilliance, Google is no longer a technology company.
-dZ.
Re:huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you have Facebook? If you do, you're living in denial.
Re:huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
A few years ago I got a Droid X phone, switching over from Blackberry. I had to create a gmail account (apparently I was one of the few without gmail) in order to register the phone. No big deal, I don't hand out that email to anyone.
Somehow Google linked my youtube account (which was registered to a 15 year old hotmail account) with my new gmail account even though I had never used youtube on my phone. The only way I can conceived the match being made was from me being logged in on youtube from my home computer and checking hotmail from both home and my phone.
It makes me very leery. If I ever run for public office (no plans to do so, just hypothetical) I'm sure someone would be able to look at my youtube viewing history.. pick out some questionable content, and use it for character assassination.
Other than being a luddite, I think anyone in the public eye is going to be haunted by their internet history.
Re:huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hi, I'm User, from the Internet, and I'd just like you to know that I tried to keep my accounts separate so that getting banned from one of your services doesn't ban me from other services. During your Google+ Name Rage (where you banned people for not using their REAL NAME), my youtube account that I use to post Videos of my game studio's content (Which has a REAL name, just not an INDIVIDUAL's name) was somehow linked to my Google+ service -- I suspect I accidentally clicked a link to Google+ while using the Internet and signed into Youtube or Google+... Point being, I wasn't presented a page with a giant: "LINK THESE ACCOUNTS TOGETHER" button (which I never would have clicked, and such a thing should require re-authorisation).
The aforementioned ridiculous ACCOUNT BANNING you did for Google+ caused me to lose access to Youtube, Gmail and Docs services. Way to fail being business friendly.... Now that Google has shown us the unpredictable and dangerous LIGHTNING that lives in their "cloud" I'm scared to even recommend your services to anyone.
FYI: The sooner you STOP UNDERMINING OUR TRUST, the better.
It's Over (Score:0, Interesting)
Would someone pass this on to Google? Surely someone here has a connection. Sorry for posting as AC, but I feel more comfortable with some anonymity. You never know who is watching your every move.
Dear Google:
We're through. Once I loved you, but now it's over. Oh, it will take me awhile, a long while, to get shut of you, but make no mistake, it's over.
It's not me, it's you. I haven't changed, but you have. Once the deal was you gave me free email, news, and search and I looked at your ads, and I paid you for online photo storage, and you gave it to me. Oh, and you also promised not to be evil.
Now I can't tell what our deal is, but I'm pretty sure what you're offering is that you will gather every bit of information you can find on me through any source possible, and sell it to anyone who will pay for it, and sometimes, you'll just give it away. Every where, all the time, forever. In return I get access to your decaying product base.
Yes, you want it all. Just about every web site I go to, you've got your slimy little fingers there, tracking me. And on my phone, if I have GPS on, you are literally recording every step I take. So basically you are trying to completely record every possible thing you can about me. Oh, and screw you and your privacy policies. I know corporate doublespeak when I see it.
Yes, your product base is decaying. I haven't seen much new or interesting in awhile. Gmail has some strong points, but certain features have been missing so long its obvious that you don't care about the products. For instance, there's no way to automatically save sent items in the inbox. So every so often, I move messages manually. Forever. Let's talk about news. Have you actually looked at Google News lately? It's actually gotten pretty lame when compared to other news sources. There's just not much there. And Picasa. Wow, you *really* made a mess on that one. Picasa had promise, but in the last year or so all the Picasa efforts have gone into Google Plus. What do I know, but I have no use for Google Plus for sharing photos. I share photos with my family, and my volunteer organization. I was pretty happy with the way it was. G+ is certainly NOT the answer. Everything I ever wanted to do with photos, you've broken it. Google Sites. Pathetic. Google maps. Once pretty clever, now a technology laggard. And Android. I curse you Google at least once a day. First there was the inexplicable Google Talk authentication error that went on forever. Oh wait, before that. Has it ever occured to you that people might want to sort their address book by last name? You know that's how we've been doing it for quite awhile now, right? And "Google Play". Pathetic. The name makes me ill.
Oh yeah, about the don't be evil part. When we were young it was kinda cute. Sure, it was naive, but it seemed your heart was in the right place. Now it's taken on tones of doublespeak. You know, "war is peace". Like that. Now when you say "don't be evil", what you mean now is "Here at Google we aren't evil because we've moved past all that. Evil is a concept for mere mortals. We have higher standards. Besides puny humans, who are YOU to judge ME? Muah, hah, hah, hah!" Attempting to track my every move is by definition evil. It creates a power differenial that I can't mitigate. Your desire to collect everything reminds me of totalitarian states. Communist Russa. communist Romania, for god sake. North Korea. And I won't even mention you-know-what. Godwin's law, you know.
Oh, and Facebook? That you want to be so much like? They're evil, too. By the way, social media as a concept isn't evil, it's wanting to track people that's evil. Create a Facebook killer that doesn't track its users, and Facebook will become a distant memory.
There's only one way to deal with a power imbalance. Guerilla tactics. First of all, I'm going to do my best to never look at an ad you serve, ever again. And if I do, I'll write the ad buyer a