Why I Left Google - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx <comment><USER3> I think people here are being ungenerous towards the author. Too me this story sounds genuine and not like a pr move dictated by Microsoft. It strikes me to be a personal account by someone who's trying to make sense of the past and actually mourning what he believe is the death of old Google. This deserves our respect as professionals because inevitably we are all going to find ourselves in a similar situation, trying to learn from the past and seeking understanding by our peers.

<comment><USER4> I agree the responses seem a bit harsh.

Also as someone who never worked at Google but has been a pretty big Google "fanboy" (of the search, Google Apps, Android, etc) his waning enthusiasm for the brand as an employee seems to have taken a very similar dip to my waning enthusiasm for them as a user, though due to personal investment his dip was probably faster and deeper than my own.

I've loved Google in the past precisely because they weren't Apple and they weren't Facebook. It seems increasingly like they are trying to be Apple and Facebook rolled up into one, which (most importantly for me) sucks because I'm not a fan of Apple or Facebook and (most importantly for them) sucks because they aren't a very good Apple nor a very good Facebook, so they're trading in their old fans for the hope of new fans that probably aren't interested anyway.

Larry Page, I am disppoint.

<comment><USER5> _"I've loved Google in the past precisely because they weren't Apple and they weren't Facebook."_

I absolutely do not understand this frame of mind. Why not just like a company for its products, rather than liking them because they're "not" some other company?

Life is too short to get caught up in the identity politics of corporations. Google is a business, not your buddy.

<comment><USER6> Trust.

If you invest time/money in something, you want to have a good feeling about it. I want to know I'm not going to get screwed down the road.

I think of if like a relationship with person. Do you want to be friends/lovers with a thief/liar/cheater?

Reputation matters.

<comment><USER5> _"I think of if like a relationship with person. Do you want to be friends/lovers with a thief/liar/cheater? Reputation matters."_

It's entirely possible to have good feelings about products, value the reputations of brands, and trust companies (or not) without getting caught up in politics. I like Whole Foods because they have really good produce, not because they're "not Safeway".

You don't have to choose sides in a religious war to make product judgments.

<comment><USER7> It's not necessarily always about 'choosing sides'. We are at the point where buying a product from one of these large companies no longer simply means "buying a product" (like you would produce at a Whole Foods). Popular tech products are so intertwined with their parent companies, that it basically implies more of a wager. As a user, when you make a purchase, you place a bet that in your commitment to use this product, the company behind it won't do something that will decrease the enjoyment/utility you get out of the product during its lifecycle. Now this doesn't have to be some new policy/action that literally occurred after your purchase, but rather something that was not obvious upon purchase, and might not even have to do directly with the product itself. Either way, this type of assessment still fits into what you're saying about evaluating a product on it's own merits, but at a certain point, the politics behind a product actually DO affect the product's merit, because they are so intertwined.

In my case for example, I just recently got bit by the fact that iPads are restricted to syncing with only one computer while I was developing an app for it. The iPad on its own is a fine piece of hardware, and is a generally nice product, but this one detail devalued it for me significantly. Can you honestly say this detail is completely detached from the fact that it is an apple product? I wouldn't think so, that move is completely expected from apple; it's part of the locked-down ecosystem you buy into with apple products. I actually like apple's products 'on their own', because they are well made and have attention to detail; however, I will [most likely] never again buy one due to apple's aforementioned politics, which directly affect my experience with their products as a user. Similar thing happened with Samsung/T-mobile and my Vibrant which they never even updated Gingerbread; awesome product on its own, but the service I got with it (part of my 'experience') was poor, and totally determined by the politics behind it.

So while it might be easy to detangle product from company for something as simple as produce, it gets a bit trickier when looking to purchase a longer- term tech product. If you're ok with lock-down, and/or lack of updates, that's great, Apple and Samsung products are totally awesome, they're just not for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ouch.

Not enough people think about year 10. You know, that's when you're 10 years old as a company and you've got a lot of huge successes behind you. Kind of like teenagers when they realize that finding a job is suddenly not an 'optional' thing in their lives.

James' rant here reminded me of a similar rant I read (internally) at Sun on its 10 year anniversary. They had published a book all about Sun's first decade, and somehow excised the fact that Sun had built a workstation called the 386i. It emphasized the successes, and papered over the mistakes. The rant was about how Sun, who had kicked DEC in the nuts and had them retreating to the data center, was walking right into that same data center because Microsoft was starting to make PC's as useful as workstations. (there used to be a real distinction there.)

I remember thinking that somehow Sun had gone from bringing technology to the folks who could use it, to being all about being a more impressive Sun Microsystems. Sun's "Google+" moment was the day they announced they were going to merge System V and SunOS.

In my brief time at Google I was exposed to the folks who had become more about 'The Google' and less about doing cool stuff. I saw many of the same things James did, and I hear Marissa's 'call to arms' about Social and said to myself "If she can't say what it is, how can she expect the troops to achieve it?"

If you read the stuff about Mark and Facebook (and I have to believe that at least _some_ of it is true.) the man is on a mission. And his mission was to make a new place in the universe that didn't exist before, he left it to others to figure out how to monetize it. Google did the same with search, make it real, then monetize.

But I think at some point the operating committee at Google looked at monetization of all the things Google has done and if you included search advertising the in the bar graph everything else looked like zero. And you ask yourself "We've got all these smart people doing all these projects and not a single one even comes CLOSE to the income that search advertising does? Give me one good reason I shouldn't just fire all of them?"

The sad thing is that I saw multimillion dollar a year businesses get tossed under the bus because they just didn't move the needle.

Ten years on, ask yourself, "What value do you bring to the table?" if you don't know, that is a big problem.

<comment><USER9> Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" was motivated by DEC getting killed. He claims that DEC was a victim of a disruption: a new technology that offered something that didn't seem to be a threat, become successful in other markets and eventually improved enough that it was threat - then it was too late. There, the old technology was minicomputers; the new technology was workstations.

The new technology isn't perceived as a threat because it is not as good and will never be as good in the old market. It manages to survive in a different new market (because it really can't compete in the old pond). As it improves, it never catches up with the old technology - but it becomes _good enough_. That is, the old technology has also improved, and is definitely better - <USER2> the old market doesn't care for that extra improvement. You can see there are a few things that have to happen for disruption to occur.

One of the reasons for Google's 20% was to try to prevent this kind of thing, but it never worked out. Some business types redefine terms, so that "invention" is a new technology (make something), and "innovation" is a new business (people want). Google's made a lot of stuff, but most isn't wanted and didn't create a business. They aren't innovations. Closing down businesses that aren't making enough to move the needle is the classic mistake of disrupted businesses: Christensen suggests setting up separate, autonomous business units (even separate businesses; startups), with limited resources, that _will_ get excited by small wins - because new disruptions start small. (YC is pretty much doing it right...)

However, right now, Google is fighting for its life. At the beginning, facebook didn't seem threatening - or at least not _that_ threatening. Then again, I'm not sure that Google ever could win this fight; social is such a different kind of business. Perhaps the best that google could hope for is to settle back into owning search forever.

My only disappointment is that google didn't manage to transform its internal inventions into innovations. I'm not saying it's easy or that I could do better, it's just that unlike winning social, it seems _possible_... and who knows what new disruptions might have come from that?

As it is, Google seems closer to Xerox: one fantastic invention/business, invents the future, makes no money from it.

<comment><USER10> Here are my thoughts as an engineer at Google. These are my own thoughts, not Google's :)

I don't think Google is fighting for its life; people are not defecting away from search to use Facebook's search or Bing or whatever. Right now, Google+ is something like, "let's see what happens if we build a social component and integrate it with our products". It doesn't seem like much right now and it's certainly not killing Facebook, but that's not the goal; the goal is to have something in case being able to post pictures and "interact with brands" turns out to be important in the future. (Do people like ads? I say no; I avoid them at any cost. But many people like ads and like companies and like products. So we'll see how that goes! Look at the brand Apple has built. That's advertising, my friends.)

It's easier to understand if we look at past events. So let's take Picasa, for example. It was never as popular as Flickr or even SmugMug. Why bother maintaining it when it's clear that Google "lost" to Flickr? The answer is because it could later become relevant. Now that people are running around taking pictures with Google phones, sharing them with GMail and Google+, it's logical to have a Google-owned picture repository. That way, we get total control over the user experience and can make a really integrated product. Take a picture on your phone, instantly share it with your friends from your computer. Pretty neat!

Google Play is similar. People loved iTunes' integrated payment system, music store, book store, movie store, app store, and phones. Google had all the infrastructure for these things (Checkout, Music, Books, YouTube / Video, Android Market, and Android), but not integrated, so people didn't tend to buy Android phones to get apps and content. But, time allowed Google to unify these discrete components into Google Play, and now users have access to something very much like iTunes. It was a very slow incremental thing, which people aren't as excited by as "one more thing" style announcements, but now we have something that's pretty cool and will make Google products more attractive than they were before. It was worth keeping stuff like Checkout and Books alive, even if they were not exactly putting PayPal and Amazon out of business.

So today, Google+ is maybe not the best thing ever. But some day, it might be a useful piece of software to have, and so we have it. Right now, I think it's really great as an internal bulletin board that I can fine-tune to exactly my interests. It may not be as cool as Facebook, but it's still a useful piece of software that was worth writing. (I've never seen an internal bulletin board system that lets me subscribe to certain topics and people, after all.) Rather than ensure that everything we push is an epic success on day one, we're putting it out there for people to try. Some people don't like Google+, some do. I use it as a better Twitter; the interface is nicer, I can write more, and so I use it more than I used any "social" products before Google+. So there's one data point, though I realize I am not the average user. (Facebook never excited me and I didn't have an account. Google+ was interesting enough to entice me into trying social networking.)

Yes, management sounds a lot more excited about Google+ than I do, and that's fine, Google is not my company and I am more practical :) Worst case: G+ is a nice internal tool for Apps customers. Middle case: something that's good to have if we want to play with social ideas. Best case: a new way to use computers that people love. All are good.

(Remember Google Checkout? It was a nice foundation for Google Wallet. So it's worth trying things and having products that may not be the industry leader, because you can always improve them!)

Personally, I'm working on a new product at Google that will make computers do something that they've never done before, something that many people have wanted for a long time. I have no idea how it will ever make money, but we're doing it anyway because people will like it. And no, this is not some rogue 20% project. :)

So to summarize; I'm not upset with Google for creating products that are not overnight successes. Yes, social is where your friends are, and everyone is on Facebook today. Clearly Google+ isn't enough to get people to abandon their friends for a while. But it's worth continuing to develop, because it will only get better with time. I don't think that means the end of Google :)

<comment><USER11> Actually, speaking as an android user who LOVES that I can auto upload my pics to the GOOG, I absolutely _hate_ that Google has any social platform at all.

Because G+ exists it makes Facebook a competitor. Can I easily share my auto uploaded pics with my Facebook friends? Not at all. Can I change where I upload my pics to? (Ie : not picasa) not at all.

Picasa is about lock in. Not about user experience.

<comment><USER12> You can upload all your pics from your phone to facebook with a couple of clicks from the Android Gallery app. A lock in would be if you were not allowed to, or at least if they went out of their way to make that harder for you. But instead they go out of their way to put the share button and inter- app communication (intents) to allow you to easily share your pics with third parties.

I understand your frustration, and I too would like some kind of API to let us better control auto-upload. But "lock in" seems a bit of a stretch. You're asking to go out of their way, again, to better support competitors. When there's already a lot of support for them in place.

<comment><USER13> Can facebook or flickr or whatever poll the pictures directory to support auto upload, if they (app writers) want too?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > App Engine fees were raised. APIs that had been free for years were > deprecated or provided for a fee.

From where I'm sitting Google has been pretty rough on independent developers recently.

I think their lack of caring (or understanding?) indy devs is best summed up by the Google+ API. Read-only is understandable as they get off their feet, but you can't even get a user's profile stream (you can only fetch profiles one by one).

Now that the Buzz API is shut down I have yet to find a way to "share" anything programmatically on Google. How can you be social without a share API?

<comment><USER15> Google's recent behavior was central in our decision not to embrace their technologies and APIs. If they're going to either be suddenly shut down or have prohibitive, anti-startup pricing applied to them then why should we hitch our wagon to their horse?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> IMHO what's sad is that Google+ is not better than Facebook for average people. Better is, for them, more warm, where you may express more about you in a simpler way, and so forth. Google+ is clearly designed by people not exactly in touch (mentally speaking) with the average person using Facebook, that's why nobody of the non tech guys want to switch to it.

p.s. IMHO Google is going to lose in the email space soon as well, times are mature to beat it in simple ways, only protection they have in this space is that there is a big "optimization" part in email that is anti-spam and they are good at it.

<comment><USER6> ^ this.

G+ is a worse Facebook (and not in the worse is better sense).

Gmail is getting slow and the recent changes haven't been for the better. In fact it's hurt usability for common users for the (dubious) benefit of "power" users.

The unified google interface is rather crappy. I don't know which which i have to click/hover/etc to get to my account settings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As a Microsoft employee, I wish this hadn't been posted to a Microsoft-branded website. Other than that, I thought it was an interesting perspective and I loved the money quote:

"I couldn't even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, "social isn't a product," she told me after I gave her a demo, "social is people and the people are on Facebook.""

<comment><USER18> But "the people" were on Myspace, Hi5, Friendster and other social networks before Facebook - hundreds of millions of them. So clearly it's something about the product, too.

<comment><USER19> While that's true, I don't think any of them really had critical mass. Of those you mentioned, I had precisely one friend on Myspace, none on Hi5 or Friendster. I had two friends on Orkut. I think Facebook played it smart by making it an exclusive network on college campuses at first, then opening it up.

<comment><USER20> I don't think the exclusivity was a long-term strategy, but rather a natural progression from its beginning as a site for Harvard undergrads. It was really useful at providing specific needs for college students at the start. It was easy to find who was in your classes so you could ask for homework help or invite people to work on a group project back when everybody listed their classes through Facebook's central app. But after it opened up to everybody and a whole bunch of apps appeared, there were multiple competing class- listing apps with no clear winner and you needed to use all of them if you wanted to see everybody in the class. It became less convenient and most students no longer bothered to list their classes at all.

Once Facebook understood the appeal the site had to the general population, they realized that it would be better for them to create an ecosystem where network effects were optimized for the decentralized user base as a whole rather than the centralized subnetworks that made the site take off in the first place. At each step, they focused on what worked for the users at the time.

Google+, on the other hand, really did deliberately start out as an exclusive network, largely for people in the tech world, and it hoped to quickly transform into something with universal appeal. You can draw your own conclusions about how well that worked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I also miss the old Google.

I think it's a mistake to blame this on ads though. I don't believe that the G+ crusade is being driving by advertising (though I'm sure it looks that way to people who assume that everything is about ads).

<comment><USER22> Really? Please enlighten me, what is Google+ (or Facebook for that matter) about if it isn't about advertising?

Because as far as I know, every service that isn't about being so great people would pay for it is about advertising and nothing else.

<comment><USER12> It always seemed to me that social is the evolution of search. And google knows this very well. Social signals are very important for finding what you're looking for. The idea of g+ was always to implement something like the new "google + your world" on a larger scale on all google products. If they didn't do this, they would fall behind to the competition. They felt forced to.

Erick Schmidt once said something like "we only want facebook to open their data so people can search for it, failing that, we'll find other ways to get it". It was clear from that day, that they were building a facebook competitor. Not because they were looking for new ways to spam people with ads (that's an overly simplistic generalization). But because they found it important to keep their existing business relevant. Independent of which monetization they were using. Even if google search was a paid premium, they would need social anyway. It's clearly not "about the ads".

<comment><USER23> There's nothing evolutionary about "social signals". It's very, very old. Since the beginning of time advertising companies have used big data to better target their ads. Facebook obviously makes this easier, but it is not new. 20 years ago advertisers knew, within a margin of error, what type of car you drove, how much money you made, and whether your wife was pregnant.

Social signals are less valuable than search terms. Search terms very often lead to a direct purchase. Social is just another avenue, like TV, to build brand awareness. It's very valuable, but it's not search-valuable.

<comment><USER12> I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm not implying they need social signals to better target ads. But to give better search results. (as in google + your world)

The competition was already doing this, Google was threatened. Bing had a deal with Facebook. Users were already using Facebook to look for information instead of Google. They tried to outsource social to facebook and twitter. That proved an unideal strategy. Social was too important for their business to rely on the good will of another company. _Social is the future of search._ Google saw this coming a mile away and got into social before they could become irrelevant.

Social is the future of search, this fact is independent of advertising. Even if Google had a different business model for their search engine. They would still need social. They didn't get into social because of ads, they did because search needs it.

<comment><USER24> > Social is the future of search

Says who? The fact is that arguably the most hardcore googlers are here on HN, and I would imagine that most of us don't care for, and even dislike, social search.

That's not enough to prove that social isn't the future of search, but it's enough to think twice about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I do miss the old Google. They had some good products. Search was search, and it was clearly designed to provide the very best search possible. Unadulterated and honest. Same story with Gmail, despite the ads. No lock in, no rent-seeking.

Too bad, really. The new Google is obnoxious in a "why-are-you-doing-this?", Facebook kind of way.

<comment><USER26> I would put the difference this way. I used to feel like Google was providing me cool, useful services. Now I feel like Google is trying to figure out ways to collect my data.

I think they will learn to their cost that trust doesn't grow back.

<comment><USER27> This pretty much sums up my feeling about Google, too. It's the same feeling that made me stop using Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Google should focus on their product- the search bar.

Google Plus Me should mean I can find anything of mine via the search bar. If I want to find a file on my computer, I should be able to search for it using google.com instead of spotlight. I should be able to do this even if I'm not on my normal machine.

It's not just desktop files. If I want to show my dad pictures of my trip to Cabo, I shouldn't have to log into Facebook, find the always moving Photos app button, find the album, find the picture.

I should be able to search 'My cabo pictures' in Google.

The omnibar should really become omnipotent. That would be compelling, cool, futuristic must-have UX. That's what Google Plus Me means to me.

<comment><USER29> They have that: Google Desktop. If I recall correctly, it even lets you do it from your other machines. Admittedly, it's been a while since I've used it, so I might be wrong there.

(Methinks that it would be vastly improved if they got simply got rid of the big clunky desktop widget engine. Possibly even got rid of the search box and just let you use a web view -- as you described above.)

<comment><USER30> I'm pretty sure that has been shut down in one of the last few culling rounds. I agree that it was very useful, it also had a good sidebar that seemed to learn which rss feeds were likely to be interesting among other things, but I stopped using it quite a while ago...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> An observation from the inside of what I've been seeing/feeling from the outside.

When Google started killing the "cool" stuff, I perceived (rightly or wrongly) the writing on the wall as far as attracting and retaining top talent. And they lost my semi-hesitant... "devotion". I wanted to believe they really did care about e.g. next generation energy sources, at a time when even our lame- ass federal government can't get its act together on that front. And Earth, Maps, various API's (Translate, for example), and the like produced fundamental changes in various environments and endeavors, both professional and hobbyist.

Now, sliding into "corporate", lame-ass Google. So sad. Perhaps inevitable; nonetheless, if so, then "just another".

P.S. As I reflect a bit more, I still have more respect for them than e.g. Facebook (manipulation) or Microsoft (domineering, monopolistic, and (perhaps resultantly) now fumbling senior management). But I fear the arrow is pointing in the wrong direction.

And yeah, this is just one random guy's observation. I guess I've added it because in the past Googlers (and "Google") seem to have occasionally observed and perhaps absorbed some of the collection sentiment expressed on HN.

</comment><comment><USER32> G+'s problem at it's root is that it's a FB clone. They copied the core functionality and tacked on a few specs that make it, literally, FB+1. The problem is no one is going to move their whole social network for FB+1 or FB+2. Google needed to build a product an order of magnitude better to win social.

There are plenty of colas that are +1 better then Coke but to take away Coke's base you'd need to be Coke+100.

The obvious solution is to stop trying to make a FB clone and do something else to get your ad demographics. I think they should stick with their core advantages and innovate in the vein of their own Adsense product:

(1) Users sign up with Google and volunteer their demographics.

(2) While signed in, Google tailors searches to them.

(3) Google gives the user a tiny percentage of the increased ad revenue. It's peanuts for most people so make it Google Play credit.

(4) If you're not signed in everything is anonymous.

Test run the whole thing on a smaller scale with Android users that already have Google accounts and (for many) credit card info on file.

Nielson families give up a lot of personal data about their viewing habits. This is rewarded with free cable, internet and cell phone service, heck they may even be paid. Even people that just take an hourlong phone survey about tv or radio are rewarded with $50+ checks. The reason market research companies pay this is because the data is extremely valuable to them and their clients. Obviously every web company wants to get that data "for free" like they do now but the giant tracking databases and all the personnel behind that certainly aren't free and create an adversarial relationship that can dilute your brand.

<comment><USER33> I don't think giving users a percentage of ad revenue is a feasible business model. How/why would that work?

<comment><USER32> Shrug I thought I made the case already.

If Google makes X on untargeted ads and X+Y on targeted ads then it comes out ahead by offering Y/10 of that money to the user somehow.

Yeah it's peanuts so you make it Google Play credit. For some people maybe it's only one song a month, for others it might be one movie a quarter.

<comment><USER34> Or Google could make a deal with Facebook: If Google makes X without Facebook's data and X+Y with their data, they can offer Facebook Y/3.

<comment><USER13> But Facebook is gunning for that X+Y. There are only 12 billion * 24 eyeball hours in each day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If life were a movie, all the "advice" Steve Jobs gave to Larry Page toward the end of Jobs' life was completely bogus, and part of a long con aimed at destroying Google in retaliation for Android being a "stolen product" ([http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/20/steve_jobs_vow...](http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/10/20/steve_jobs_vowed_to_destroy_google_android_called_it_a_stolen_product/))

We all know Jobs was enough of a mastermind to pull it off; but was he that malicious?

<comment><USER36> He may have truly believed in what he was doing.

After all, this is the guy who believed every computer with a switching power supply was ripping off the Apple II. [http://www.arcfn.com/2012/02/apple- didnt-revolutionize-power...](http://www.arcfn.com/2012/02/apple-didnt- revolutionize-power.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Today google is doing what MS did some years back. Google wants to be facebook and some years back MS wanted to be Google(when they started bing).

People at google say "don't be evil", you cant run business without being evil, google in its early days tried being the least possible evil, but as Shakespeare said: "lowliness is young ambitions ladder".

But the ambitions of MS were clear from start and they did not even care about what was evil, they wanted their supremacy all over. By joining MS you have come to a place that is more evil, more evil than putting ads or compromising slightly on privacy of users, look at the open source initiatives that Google takes, agreed google labs has been shut down, app engine prices have gone high they have dedicated some of their focus working on Social Networks, but which company would not want to have a chunk and share in what is hot. By the way, what do you see on MS being done, even they are wannabe in their approach. free 90 days trial for azure and the sun will rise from west if they offer anything that is not free/freemium. The point i want to make here is

When you talk about privacy, i am sure you would curse facebook for privacy, won't you. The only reason that compelled you to leave google, was you did not get a project that you would like to work on, more geeky, irrespective of what the company gave you, you should have tried paying it back by being proactive in your efforts and pointing out the errors. I respect google for what it has built, i am sure the amount of effort it has put, the horizons that it has opened the initiatives it has brought remains unsurpassed, yes there is a tinge of evil air that currently surrounds it, but again as you mentioned Google learns from its mistakes, and rectifies them.

By joining MS you have done more bad than good, probably you will be given some hardcore engineering project, but you could have got them as google as well, with some efforts.

</comment><comment><USER38> The author states that in his time at Google he realizes it was always a company funded by ads, but that he did not have to personally feel the need for Ads in all products. That's a fair point. Where I lost him is his connection of Google+ with Ads.

I disagree that G+ is an Ads play. It's a play for staying relevant on the internet. When you think about it, Facebook is a closed system. They want CNN to post articles into the CNN FB stream. They want people to read those articles on the CNN page (yes, this currently links to outside FB... that will change). They want to do this so that you never have to leave FB, and in fact if you look at the user behavior of 13-17 year olds you will see disturbing trends that this is the case.

Facebook is a danger to a free and open internet by becoming the de-facto internet. I concede that this is a stretch, but it is within their power to do so and from my understanding is how their strategy is lined up.

TL;DR: G+ is only about Ads in the way that Google needs users to serve Ads to and there is a threat that all users of the internet only go to Facebook and nowhere else.

<comment><USER39> _"When you think about it, Facebook is a closed system."_

People say this all the time without any justification. As far as I know, all content within Facebook that has no privacy restrictions can be viewed without being a Facebook user. Facebook has an API that can be used to both read and write.

Facebook is stingy with phone numbers and email addresses, which is a significant failing in my opinion. Other than that, I can't imagine a more open social network that allows users to control who can see their content.

<comment><USER23> So what you're saying is that Facebook is open because you are allowed to fetch information that Facebook allows?

<comment><USER39> You're allowed to fetch data that _users_ allow, with few exceptions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> [http://www.quora.com/Who-is-the-Bing-Director-of-Test- that-l...](http://www.quora.com/Who-is-the-Bing-Director-of-Test-that-left- Microsoft-for-Google-twice-over-a-span-of-a-few-days)

Maybe the third time will stick?

<comment><USER41> Is that the same guy (I honestly don't know)? There is no answer on Quora that I saw. If so, then yeah that post would be viewed in a very skeptical light. If not, well then unrelated.

Edit: Looking at other responses about his history I doubt it, it sounds like he previously worked in DevDiv (my home), not OSD (the home of Bing).

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Valid reasons to quit Google, but then he joins Microsoft?

<comment><USER43> My impression is that Microsoft is actually _very_ diversified and focused on technology. There was an article a while back about where the various large companies (Google, Apple and Microsoft) make their money; Microsoft had the most diversity by far.

Microsoft is also not afraid to fail or try random things, which makes it much like the "old Google" in this blog post.

<comment><USER44> Microsoft's diversification is not really a good thing. IMO, it is no use building lots of technology without being good at any of it.

My belief is that Microsoft will improve, but I would not go there because they already have their technology goals right. (I would go to Microsoft as an intrapreneur trying to fix their technology/innovation story).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I dream of a day when the world will wake from this social sharing bad trip. Facebook is not only making the web worse, by breaking most of its core assumptions, but it's destroying one of the greatest companies to arise in recent years.

Google has made accessing the world's information transformatively faster and easier. Facebook has made blogging more pervasive and closed.

<comment><USER46> >Facebook has made blogging more pervasive and closed.

I've got to disagree with you there. Blogging in general refers to longer-form posts than the average status update field on Facebook is comfortable for.

If you're going the angle I think you are, you could make the same argument of Twitter.

<comment><USER45> Facebook inspires a shorter writing than a typical blog post, yes.

But Facebook is in a completly different category than Twitter.

Tweets are encouraged to be public. You don't need to fill in a form a agree to EULA to follow a link.

Anyone can compete with Google because the information they are indexing is public. Last "App" I did for Facebook required me to give them my cel phone number to access the information the user consent in giving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Larry Page is killing his company to chase after a market that is less profitable that the one he currently owns.

<comment><USER47> Larry Page, like anybody else with any chops in the business, understands that the internet is about communication, and communication is about identity, data, and a sharing protocol. If Facebook owns those things, they own everything.

As long as all the users are on one identity and sharing platform you can develop all the open social APIs you want but it's totally pointless. We need at least a duopoly and angry users wanting to share with people not on their platform for any kind of standards to emerge.

You're thinking ad money, ad money, ad money. And Microsoft and others are quite happy to feed that theory with there substantial PR budgets and lack of ethics. But I don't think that's what's on Larry's mind. I might not agree with his strategy, or particularly like Google+, but I think if you study the man you would come to the same conclusion.

<comment><USER48> I'm reminded of the term "architecture astronaut". When you're discussing business strategy in highly abstract terms, I'm not sure whether you're onto something or whether you're being a business strategy astronaut.

At first blush, Facebook's got a stronger foothold in "identity, data, and a sharing protocol". At second blush, they still make less revenue/profit than Google, which in turns makes less revenue/profit than Apple. And it's hard to see how that will change without flying up into the stratosphere talking about ungrounded abstractions.

Facebook gets more buzz and is considered hotter shit because it's newer. It doesn't mean anything.

What _does_ mean something is that Facebook can provide targeted advertising, and obviously an amalgam of Facebook and Google could provide the most targeted advertising. For instance, if I googled something about online dating but my Google+ account said I was married, the CPC/CPM on Adwords for my search should be different than if my Google+ account said I was single. If Google has any business sense, Google+ is about targeted SERPs and targeted advertising, it's not about vague abstractions that may or may not have anything to do with turning a profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> " As the trappings of _entrepreneurship_ were dismantled, derisive talk of the "old Google" and its feeble attempts at competing with Facebook surfaced to justify a "new Google" that promised "more wood behind fewer arrows.""

Simply put, Google stopped investing in it's future through building entrepreneurship in its engineering ranks. This is bad for Google's future growth prospects, full stop. They've drawn a line in the sand "we're about ads, not technology innovation!" and that is where the company will slowly age and die.

Google is no longer about where it's going, but about how it ages.

</comment><comment><USER40> Why does he even bother bringing Wave into this? As a Googler he should know that Wave was never meant to be a social network. It didn't even have the subscribe of 'friends', it was an attempt to create a new kind of Email.

He worked at Google but didn't realize that all that innovation, be it GMail, Android, Chrome, Search, Maps, Google Car, etc was paid for by ads?

</comment><comment><USER50> I think Google+ 's mistake, like the author, has to do with a changing doctrine, but i think it has more to do with a branding issue than an innovation or technology issue. (it could be both, but i would argue perception comes before reality when it comes to success)

I think "Google+ is a dud," has less to do with whether social is broken, but rather with human perception and branding. Much the way Google owned the category search in peoples minds, Facebook owns the category social in peoples minds.

Google made two fundamental mistakes. 1\. Using their brand that stands for Search on something else. The human mind is like wet cement, once a brand owns a category, that impressions is almost impossible to change. (Ever try to change someones mind from his political philosophies? almost impossible).

2\. Building a product in a category that is already owned by another brand without positioning themselves opposite it.

This is classic... Burger King will never take over Mcdonalds market share because they are trying to convince people that they are better. Since the category is owned already, they need to claim, "We are different"

When it comes to branding, its all about human perception. Like the authors daughter said, "Facebook is where the people are." Even if that statement weren't true, the perception is ingrained in peoples minds.

A good example of competing with an established brand is Coke vs. Pepsi... coke was the real thing, original coca cola, so pepsi came out and said were for the new generation. Why be old when you can be young and fresh.

Avis didnt say we are better than hertz, they said, sine we are number 2, we try harder.

Dominoes didn't say we have better pizza than pizza hut, they said, we will get it to you faster.

Listerine didnt say we taste better than scope, they said, "the taste you hate twice a day."

This is branding 101. A brand can only stand for One Thing. (a brand that stands for everything, stands for nothing.)

If google wants to compete in the social game... They either need to create a niche of social like twitter, foursquare, and pinterest did, or they need to use a new brand name, and position themselves opposite facebook, not claim they are better...

Big executives always talk about convergence, but the Human perception just doesn't work that way. When you combine two things, people assume you are compromising on quality on both sides. When you separate things, people assume you do that one thing much better than everyone else...

Google owned the search brand because that was all they did, Search. The new ways of trying to get into other businesses like Paul Graham said," is a chink in their armor."

Just my two cents.

<comment><USER51> Agree totally.

However I think G+ did in fact differentiate itself at the start. They made a big play out of how circles were there so that you weren't sharing things publicly all the time. But the nymwars hit and it went horribly wrong at that point. You can't sell a message that you're the champion of people's privacy and _then_ kick them off your network for not revealing their identity to you. They basically lost all credibility as being differentiated from Facebook and became just "the same" as Facebook but worse because none of your friends were there.

<comment><USER50> Very valid point. Brands are built by third party validation, not by your own claims. If there is incongruity between your message and your product, you wont be able to get over the initial hump of credibility. Without credibility, it doesn't matter how well you try to position yourself, no one will believe you.

Nobody believes what you claim about yourself, but they believe what others say about you. This is why PR is such an important element of building a strong brand.

<comment><USER51> > Brands are built by third party validation, not by your own claims.

I actually think what a company claims about itself is tremendously important, but not because people believe it, rather because it influences how people frame their ideas. It's like the public are viewing you through a magnifying lens and what you can influence is where the lens points. What is actually seen through the lens is then what you really _do_.

So claiming something about yourself that is authentically true and then behaving genuinely in accordance with that is quite powerful. But you can't fake it, you have to really do it. Claiming G+ is about privacy and then doing things like forcing real names and public profiles is extremely harmful (and not just to G+, but the whole Google brand).

Google has to figure out the good things that are really true about themselves and then talk about those. If they can't think of anything then they have to really take a serious think about where the company is heading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Social seems to be to Google what mobile is to Microsoft... they might have good stuff here and there, but nobody's ringing the bell.

</comment><comment><USER44> I am not a Google Employee - but I do want to defend Google here. Yes, Google used to be a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. However, in the process they built a huge amount of UX Debt.

Bad UX was forgivable a few years ago, but that is no longer the case. Google has not figured it out yet, but with the web maturing, I am glad that they are trying to evolve to be a more UX focused company.

<comment><USER53> I disagree. Search used to be fast and clean. Ditto GMail. Even Maps has gotten slower and more cluttered.

Google's recent UI changes are about _branding_ , not UX.

<comment><USER44> I agree with your points. I categorize them under growing pains. Good UX is not easy - especially when you have such a large number of users and products.

If you look into the reasoning for many of the cluttered items, you will see things like "doing X would make it more readable/useful/etc for the general population".

Perhaps I am just an optimist. My fingers are crossed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I think advertising has a lot to do with google's growing pains.

Google clearly has empireitis and that alone is causing them to grow into something that the google of, say, 2000 would look on and despise. But aside from that the incentives of being an ad focused company are harmful to what used to be google's core values.

The problem with any ad-focused company is that your users aren't your customers. Your customers are the ad companies, and your users are your product. There's less reason to make a product that people love passionately, deeply, and value greatly. There's only a reason to make a product that people use frequently. This is a subtle but hugely impactful distinction. It's the difference between a newspaper full of hard-hitting investigative journalism married to solid, thoughtful analysis and an run of the mill tabloid rag. When all that matters is how many eyeballs are looking at ads then it makes the most financial sense to maximize that at the cost of everything else.

</comment><comment><USER55> Granted these charts are 2 years old now, but 2 years ago when I first saw them I thought they might be a pretty good indicator of the future for the respective companies...

Google revenue broken down by product: [http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-24/tech/29964449...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-24/tech/29964449_1)

Microsoft revenue broken down by product: [http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-10/tech/29961217...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-02-10/tech/29961217_1)

Apple revenue broken down by product: [http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-04-21/tech/29988935...](http://articles.businessinsider.com/2010-04-21/tech/29988935_1_iphone- revenue-apple)

I know which company I would want to work for if I was interested in the opportunity to work on and be passionate about a variety of different projects.

It also boggles my mind that the Apple chart is pre iPad...I would love to see what that chart looks like now.

</comment><comment><USER56> This individual joined Google in 2009, and left before he'd been there 3 years. He's in no position to be waxing nostalgic about the "good old days" of Google.

</comment><comment><USER57> To be very honest I am glad he left google. The googletesting blog went to shit as soon as he came along. It was very enlightening to read it until he showed up.

Whittaker reminded me of one of my over enthusiastic handwaving lecturers, very short on substance. Compare and contrast the articles written by Misko (Hevery) and Whittaker. I don't think his departure is a manifestation or representation of anything at Google, and I think it's telling he returned to MS.

</comment><comment><USER58> Google has really taken it on the chops these last few years. I remember back in 2006 or whenever the time was when they were the shiznit, and were easily the most admired company in tech. And I remember thinking, let's see how well it goes when everyone is NOT cheering you on and you have a tailwind in your sails. Google is definitely in that situation now.

</comment><comment><USER59> Weird choice to post such an article on msdn.com, of all places.

<comment><USER60> It's sort of a cultural thing amongst a lot of Microsoft employees, especially older ones (or in this case, ones that have returned), to run their blogs off of Microsoft's blogging platforms.

In this regard, Microsoft's culture actually does a very good job of encouraging its employees to blog from the inside - I've never felt quite the level of direct engineer access and communication working on Google platforms as I have on MS platforms, even in cases where Google's platforms are actually superior. (Chalk it up to Google groups being a little opaque and Google product blogs being run by product managers.)

<comment><USER59> So he ran from Google to Microsoft because Google did not live up to his ideals anymore. I am not actually a Microsoft hater, but I'll take that story with a grain of salt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Is it me or does several of his complaints about the overly-aggressive targeted marketing apply to Facebook as well? He must really hate Facebook then. Personally, I think all this targeted stuff is not as good as stated by the people selling it.

I can understand that he felt the need to leave because something changed for him and his attitude towards his employer. But I seem to remember the big statement someone made not too long ago that Google+ was the future of the company and if you didn't like it you were welcome to leave. I suppose he took their advice.

As for any meaning or message one could get out of this about the future of Google, Facebook or even Microsoft; I see very little substance. It's one guy explaining to anyone who wishes to know why he left Google. That's it, let's not make more of this than what it is.

<comment><USER62> for the most part, facebook can only target you when you're on facebook. google now targets you across their properties some of which have significant lock in. it's not as easy to escape google being creepy as it is to escape facebook being creepy.

<comment><USER40> Facebook can target you across any site that has a Facebook Connect or Like button, and eventually they will turn those Like Buttons and Comment plugins into display ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Every company grows up. I'm old enough to remember when Microsoft was cool. I remember my first copy of Windows 286; all 12 floppy disks worth. I was excited. Now I fight with the MS sales team over MSDN prices. :)

My point; it's part of the process. Google's grown up. Do I like it? No.

</comment><comment><USER64> This article could easily be paired with the Godman-Sachs article to teach a business class on the value of having right priorities in business. Often businesses lose themselves placing the pressures of business ahead of the priorities that got them to where they are in the first place. Sort of the proverbial "putting the cart before the horse" analogy. Google should focus on being itself. It sounds as if they have lost touch with what they really were in the first place. After all, they were the search engine that changed the world to such a degree that most everyone now says "google it" in reference to searching the web.

</comment><comment><USER65> I wish Google had focused on being the champions of the open, pluralistic web, instead of on Google+, which ironically seems like Bing.

</comment><comment><USER66> I think the problem with larger companies is that they have something to lose. So fundamentally, almost at a physics level, they become less flexible. They have more momentum in a given direction.

The problem with larger _technology_ companies is that technology don't give a s*. And it's fast. Things iterate quickly. That's just how automation and computers work.

</comment><comment><USER67> There is a ring of truth to this blog post. Especially in Google's seemingly blind, dogged attempts to beat Facebook at their own game, in the social space. It reminds me of how MS went after AOL with MSN - and we all know how that ended up.

</comment><comment><USER68> I thought google used to be a company of innovation (and still had potential to become better) and now that they find themselves competing with Facebook just brings them down from where they started.

Rant:

A company with so much money, and still no idea what to do with it. Here's a hint, use all that brainpower you waste optimizing advertising machines and make something that solves a problem that many people face using technology? maybe seek to reach out to a new audience? maybe quit sucking on the corporate tit that thinks advertising works in its current form? It's barely working for fb and thats because they dont care about user privacy (facebook actually sounds like a legal phishing company for advertisers, and i rather be shot than to put any of their API's on any site i create). Whatever, sheeps will be sheeps. And google isn't immune it seems.

</comment><comment><USER69> Smart move to leave Google b/c it was buying its way into social and then go to Microsoft who's trying to buy their way into relevance #fail

</comment><comment><USER70> Google is at trouble. They are following Facebook on the web/search front, and following Apple on the mobile/media front. What are they leading?

</comment><comment><USER71> Why didn't they just buy Facebook?

</comment><comment><USER72> when the best a company can do is copying, no wonder people are leaving.

</comment><comment><USER73> To understand why Google isn't what it used to be, one has to understand what happened in 2009-2011. This is the era when Google decided to get "real managers" and they hired a bunch of executives from places like Oracle, IBM, and Intel. If Google had told them to wipe their fucking feet off before tracking shitty culture into the place, it might have survived. It didn't.

Google has an immense amount of talent "under its roof". Unfortunately, there's a necrotic layer of useless and counterproductive middle management coming up with a series of "innovations" that each have made the company worse. For a few examples:

* 20% time is dead. It requires managerial approval. More on that later.

* Until recently, people were hired "between levels" on the engineering ladder (which is generally a disaster at Google; see this: <http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/04/promotion-systems.html>) and then about 2/3 of them were "downslotted" to a lower level. It didn't affect their pay, but it blocked future raises, was a career kiss-of-death, and generally shat all over morale. What's amazing to me is that no one ever said, before this bit of syphilitic idiocy could reach implementation, "This is a terrible idea and you need to stop abusing cough syrup on the job." Fucking California culture, man. In New York, terrible ideas cause buildings to fall down kill people and so we refuse to tolerate them. Unfortunately, Google's executives seemed to lack the insight to recognize an obviously horrible idea as horrible. (Downslotting was abolished last year, but I'm astonished that such idiocy got in the door in the first place.)

* Engineers (not just managers) literally drop everything for 1-2 weeks each year to write "Perf" (for themselves and peers). The high-stakes performance review process is just that important.

* Google is resistant to any change that might improve engineer productivity beyond the rather plodding rate it has now. C++ and Java are the real house languages; Scala's not even on the table. Python is listed as a house language so Google can still hire people but it's rarely used and nearly deprecated in production.

* Managers have free rein to fuck over an employee in Perf if they believe him to be "distracted" or at risk of future distraction by 20% time, even if that employee's performance is otherwise strong. This doesn't make Google any worse or any different from more traditionally managed companies. It does deprive them of the right to market 20% time as a perk without being called out as liars.

* Last summer, it was announced that every employee had to have a 3-word "mission statement" that managers could change, and a 63-word quarterly summaries of their work. This was the infamous "7/20" all-hands in which the deprecation of 20%-time was announced.

* HR ignores severe ethical lapses by influential managers, including a person who was outright proven to be using low performance scores and PIPs (Performance Improvement Plans, which stop transfers) to block transfers.

To make it clear, Google still has some really great people and could turn itself around if it just fired most of the middle layers. The company still has an incredible number of immensely talented engineers of whom I think quite highly, but the company is so horribly managed that I see nothing but a cold, miserable twilight in its future.

<comment><USER74> You are truly either delusional or an attention-monger that needs to troll to feel better about yourself.

Like cletus mentioned, many people reached out to offer you constructive advice. You ignored everyone, thought yourself superior to everyone.

I bet you were just waiting to be the first to comment, no? You did well...not only did you throw Google under the bus, you also threw California under the bus. Learn to have a little class.

<comment><USER73> I'm going to take you seriously even though you don't deserve it.

Any rip on a state with 50 million people in it is somewhat in jest. Anyway, there are a lot of great things about "California culture". When applied to technology, an open-minded and experimental "Let's try it" mentality is great. Necessary, even. When applied to management without enough attention paid to the fact that some of the people posing ideas have bad intentions, some awful ideas get into implementation and it damages companies. It hurts people. So more conservatism in selecting what to implement is in order, and discussing ideas that might be harmful (with thousands of people) until they've been explored is a bad idea.

The problem with Google is that it's got the conservative New York culture technically (I mean, even Scala isn't allowed) and the California culture with respect to hare-brained managerial ideas like downslotting-- the exact opposite of how things should be.

Put it this way: technological and managerial innovation are utterly different. If you do a tech demo and it's slightly rough around the edges, that's fine. You're awesome for having the courage to put yourself out there. If you're putting forward suggestions that are going to affect the way thousands of people work, the traditionally sloppy (for tech, I mean "sloppy" in a positive sense) tech demo is _not_ how you should be communicating.

<comment><USER75> I think I agree that the existence of downslotting was a mistake. However, the problem it was attempting to solve (you got hired at one level, but performed at a lower level, because you managed to fool people in the interview) is a real one and there _is_ no good solution for it. So I appreciate that they tried to find one, and realized their attempt didn't work, and tried something else.

If management was easy, we could all read a book about how to manage a company and then all do it optimally. Since that's not the case, experiments are necessary, and I admire the attitude that leaves them open to things that might not work. I disagree that it was "obvious" that the downslotting mechanism would not work - or rather, that it was obviously worse than any other alternative, because once you have the "not performing as expected" problem, all your options suck.

And BTW, I'm in New York :)

<comment><USER73> _However, the problem it was attempting to solve (you got hired at one level, but performed at a lower level, because you managed to fool people in the interview) is a real one and there is no good solution for it._

These levels are a convenient fiction. Performance is way too context- dependent to believe that there's some "platonic" level for each engineer. This ([http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the- trajector...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/01/26/the-trajectory- of-a-software-engineer-and-where-it-all-goes-wrong/)) is the best model I could come up with for the software engineer trajectory, and even it has a 0.2 to 0.4 point (out of 3.0) swing for most individuals based on technology choices, interpersonal topologies, motivational flux, etc.

What you mean is "some people don't work out". Right. So there are people you "manage out" (that is, try to get them to find another job and fire them after ~6 months if they don't get the hint and you absolutely have to) and there are people you work with to bring them up to speed, or to figure out what's blocking them. Typical management stuff. What doesn't work is to keep people around but at a lower level than they were promised in the hiring process. That just creates a class of miserable, shafted people who hate their jobs and the company they work for.

By the way, a lot of the idiots on this subthread think I'm airing personal gripes. I joined _after_ slotting. I'm just pointing out what kinds of ridiculous results come from an out-of-touch management culture. What drove me insane at Google was being at a company where the engineers were so good at their jobs and yet the people making important decisions were so epically bad. The disconnect was shocking. I was watching an awesome company self-destruct in front of me.

Also, on downslotting: careers are sensitive things and once you make one overt move so directly against an employee's interests, you've essentially lost that person. Loyalty is pretty much binary. Once you make a move like that on someone, you now have someone whose full-time interest is career repair, which usually involves getting the fuck out and lining up the next job. If this is what you want, then fine. (If someone really is a bad fit, for that person to begin full-time job searching is the best thing.) That category doesn't encompass most of the company. Downslotting only makes sense as a mechanism for managing people out, and (1) there are better ways of doing that, and (2) you shouldn't be managing out over 50% of new hires.

The real reason for slotting, I think, was to put a better job title in the offer letter than people were actually expected to get, since the upper title is what was used. This works only because of Google's brand: what keeps it from doing major damage is that downslotted people have the Google name on their resumes and can get the fuck out long before they become "problem employees".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Between attack ads and blog posts it seems like Google is all that Microsoft have to discuss lately. Not sure if Google is flattered by this obsession.

Wonder why the author chose not to post on his personal blog, a Microsoft employee bashing Google on an official Microsoft blog rings hollow, specially with the use of the same generic talking points.

And using engineers as PR people isn't the most sepathetic thing either.

<comment><USER12> I avoid making generalization and try to stay away of anthropomorphizing companies. But this isn't the first, nor second, nor tenth time I watch Microsoft trying to smear the competition. Which doesn't seem to be common among other companies. It does gives us outsiders the impression that it's part of their company culture to try to sell more by smearing the competition instead of by building better products.

How does that work on the managing level? Are Microsoft engineers encouraged from top down to do this? Is it just a culture that gets passed indirectly through informal conversation between employees that influences this behavior? Or is just the PR firm they hired that keeps insisting on the same weapon?

<comment><USER77> > _Are Microsoft engineers encouraged from top down to do this?_

I'm an IC, and while there is bit a "boo Google" going on in the kool-aid, we don't sit around shaking our fist at them every moment we get.

I try to use the best tools I can, whether it be that made by Google or MSFT or someone else. I look up MSDN documentation using Chrome, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

<comment><USER78> This might just be a one off case that I heard of, but isn't not using IE shunned at MS? A classmate of mine interned there and was asked to use IE instead of FF. He did end up not hating the product, but I am not sure if the reason was love for IE or hatred towards not-MS products.

<comment><USER79> No it isn't shunned... i regularly use chrome at Microsoft, Some peers stick to Microsoft products but I see a lot of people carrying iphone/androids around and using chrome and FF

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Google's Focus On Beating Facebook Is Wrecking The Company, Says This Former Engineer. Google's Focus On Beating Apple will seal the company's fate. Google's Motorola acquisition is going to be a disaster for Google.

</comment><comment><USER81> On the bright side, now all Google has to do to defend against antitrust claims is link to that post.

</comment><comment><USER82> I think it's problematic to find this kind of story on Hacker News. The biggest problem I have with it is that it's very difficult to write an automated filter which rejects stories for being excessively corporate and insufficiently entrepreneurial, at least within the limits of my current skills. I can understand why people debate the strategies of very large corporations, it's kind of like discussing football teams, but it's not what I come here to read at all.

<comment><USER32> No aggregation site is going to please everyone all the time.

Don't click on the stuff that doesn't interest you, problem solved.

<comment><USER82> I have an automated filter site at <http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/> \-- "don't click on what doesn't interest you" is way inferior to "don't see what doesn't interest you."

<comment><USER32> That's interesting but I'm not sure what your asking of us to solve your inability to filter the things you don't want to see. Site would cease to exist if everything one user wasn't interested in was removed.

Your filters will always turn up some things you want to just like they'll always filter some things you wish they wouldn't. You'll have to live with that degraded experience the rest of us have and not click on those things. Bellyaching about unsolvable problems is just lowering the sites signal to noise ratio unnecessarily.

<comment><USER82> Actually I made minor progress on it by just banning the msdn domain.

I think I've also figured out a pretty cool product idea from this as well. However I'm not going to get into it here because people have taken my product ideas and turned them into products twice now (actually one of them was a Hacker Newspaper iOS app which looks very, very, very similar to my <http://hacker-newspaper.gilesb.com/>).

In terms of what I want, well, any ideas on how to improve signal/noise on HN, whether via automated filtering or some other method.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> So you quit Google and headed over to M$. Hacker News, this should be Wanker News.</comment>


Y Combinator in Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.akropolix.net/rik0/blogs/2008/10/29/the-y-combinator-in-python/

<comment><USER2> Of course, if you actually _use_ this you can smash the stack -- Python doesn't currently have any kind of tail call optimization. (That factorial function isn't tail-recursive anyway, though.)

It doesn't look like Ruby has tail-call optimization, either. Lua does...what other primarily-scripting (i.e., not Scheme or Haskell) languages do?

</comment><comment><USER3>
        # Ruby 1.8.7
        def Y
          lambda { |f| f.call(f) }.call(
            lambda do |g|
              yield(lambda { |*n| g.call(g).call(*n) })
            end)
        end
        Y { |this| lambda { |n| n == 0 ? 1 : n * this.call(n - 1) } }.call(5)
        #=> 120

</comment><comment><USER4> The Y combinator is just like python decorators, or generators, you just HAVE to blog about them, or you're not C001!

</comment><comment><USER5> This must be about the 6th different 'Y Combinator in X' I have seen on this site.

</comment><comment><USER6> That's a pretty solid butchering of the design of daringfireball.net

</comment><comment><USER7> Perl6 ftw:

my $factorial = sub (Int $x) { $x < 2 ?? 1 !! $x * &?ROUTINE($x - 1); }</comment>


Toy Chest - A 'Flat UI'-inspired color scheme for Sublime Text & TextMate - <AUTHOR> http://toychesttheme.com/ Here is a 'Flat UI'-inspired color scheme for programmers (Sublime Text & TextMate supported).<p>Flat UI - http://designmodo.com/flat-free/ <comment><USER2> This is the second day I've seen 'flat-ui' colour scheme postings on HN, but I don't really see the connection between flat-ui and a colour scheme.

Can somebody explain that? Or is it just over-use of the term flat-ui.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tale a look here <http://designmodo.com/flat-free/> to color swatches - <http://i.imm.io/14sXs.png></comment></comment>


Frustrated Greek Cypriots 'feel cheated by the EU' - <AUTHOR> http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/frustrated-greek-cypriots-feel-cheated-by-the-eu.aspx?pageID=238&nID=43567&NewsCatID=351

<comment><USER2> > Greek Cypriots feel cheated by the EU. They used to get support; they used > to get whatever they wanted. When in the past Greek Cypriots blocked certain > issues in the EU with logical or illogical motivations nobody punished them. > They were always helped out, but now they are treated much more severely > than the others who asked for a bail out.

Certainly, the same rules could have been applied to Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, but it obviously makes more sense not to guarantee more than you committed to if you don't have to take your own voters' money but (predominantly) Russian money. Add to this the low corporate taxes in Cyprus (similar to Ireland) and it becomes very, very hard to justify giving more than necessary.

The other option would of course have been to take these 10 billion and compensate private European losses occurring by Cyprus leaving the EU (and, again, that could/should also have happened to Ireland/Greece/Portugal etc.).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is probably the most complete summary of everything happening in and around Cyprus. There is so much more to the story than "yet another EU bank bail out". When you consider that the situation involves the EU, Turkey, Russia, and Syria...it's a fascinating story for any student of international politics as well as economics.</comment>


URX: A Mobile Ad Service That Deeplinks Customers To Ecommerce App Product Pages - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/16/urx-ads/

<comment><AUTHOR> As someone who knows the founders, I've been following them since their pre-YC days. One thing I have gotten from URX that isn't related to their business model, but clarified something that I had always struggled to grok, is the difference between a URL and a URI. URLs are web links, URX's are deep links, but both are URI's. I just needed an example of a non-URL URI.</comment>


Ask HN: How to deal with a domain impersonating my company, stealing accounts - <AUTHOR> Let's say I've got a company with the name and domain great-software.com, and someone started running a scam domain called greatsoftware.tech. This website tries to trick users into providing their account details and stealing their funds. The scam domain is registered with a Russian domain registrar.
Have should I go about this, and what options do I have?
Thanks a lot. <comment><USER2> Warn your existing accounts, give the usual cautions against social engineering phishing attacks to gain their credentials. If accounts are valuable, give each an account USB U2F security key, if capable of that kind of security. Adds $10 to your costs, but might be cheaper. Or you can use an Android or Apple security App, like gmail does. Might aggravate clients. It is a balance.

U2F sells here

[https://www.amazon.com/HyperFido-K5-FIDO-U2F-Security/dp/B00...](https://www.amazon.com/HyperFido-K5-FIDO-U2F-Security/dp/B00WIX4JMC/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1512037601&sr=8-9&keywords=U2F+security+key)</comment>


Ask HN: what do you think of these flash cards I made for young kids? - <AUTHOR> http://www.kangadoo.com/

<comment><USER2> Very nice. I'm guessing little kids will love it. I found some of the labels hard to read because there was too little contrast with the pic. To me the robin didn't look like a robin.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a 3 kids between the ages of 2 years and 11 years. My youngest would definitely enjoy these and I think it's a good start.

It's a very simple idea, so I think you'll need to add some features (pause button, music, more card sets, etc.) to encourage parents to visit often.

Also, I love the domain name and can see that this project was created while scratching your own itch (which is a great way to stay motivated).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Yeah, I have about 20 ideas for new card sets--if you or anyone else has any I'll add them to my list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They look really nice, good job!

Maybe it's my connection, but the cards are going by a little fast, it skips to the next card before the image has finished loading. You could add a speed option and/or a pause button.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, once they load once, they should be cached thereafter. I've seen this issue too though. A pause would certainly be good. I'll put that on the list-- thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What is the rationale for making flash cards at all? (This is a serious question; I've never seen a need for flash cards, in my youth or in my children's youth.)

<comment><AUTHOR> A few reasons. First and foremost, I want to offer my children the opportunity to learn as much as possible, up to their interest and abilities. Studies show kids learn best via repetition and pick up language faster the more you talk to them (surprise surprise). Flash cards address both those learning modes by both repeating words and giving you prompts to expound about them, i.e. "a beaver swims in the water." Quite simply, by using them I find I talk to my son more and in a more directed (learning appropriate) way.

Second, as a stay-at-home dad who also works on startups, I am searching for good (educationally-oriented) ways to entertain and occupy my son. I have a two-28"-monitor setup. I found I could put these up on one and still get some casual things done, e.g. reading email, on the other monitor.

Third, I really like big full screen images, and haven't seen any flash cards to date that use them effectively.

<comment><USER6> Why don't you buy some good children's books with images of animals in them? A story is significantly more interesting than a flash card.

<comment><AUTHOR> I already have tons of them :). It is a completely different mode of entertainment/learning. What you think is "significantly more interesting" isn't necessarily such to a baby.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Works best full screen (F11 on Win).

My son (4mo) and his cousin (14mo) really like these. However, I'd love to get some feedback from a wider audience before I start making a bunch more.

<comment><USER7> Nice! How about adding a spoken version of the animal name, for pre-readers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tiny tips for a better user experience: load the pictures in the background and display a spinner while they're loading; load the next/prev images while the user is looking at an image to minimize waiting.

</comment><comment><USER9> The images don't need to be that big, I think. Or you could possibly have a resolution option (small/med/large). Depending on your monitor, 30" flash cards?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can resize the window to your liking. However, the bigness was sort of the point--attracts and keeps my 4mo old's attention. Have you tried it big vs small with your young kids? I'd be very interested to know what happens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Should be "caterpillar"? Don't want to teach kids the wrong spelling ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, will switch :). It should also be 'opossum' I've realized.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think if you can add colors, numbers, alphabets with spoken versions will be great. You should check out the apps on iPhone for kids. Some of them are just off the hook.

</comment><comment><USER12> Things kids are forced to do (flashcards) they will hate.

Things kids are allowed to do (watch National Geographic) they will enjoy.

Do you really want your kids to hate nature?

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, my son and every kid I've shared these with loves them. Do you have kids? If so, please try it out and let me know.

Maybe flash cards is the wrong word to use?

The idea is not to make them memorize anything, i.e. not fun. The idea is to show them pictures of stuff they like, i.e. fun. The vocab building is just a by-product of the activity.</comment></comment>


Can't upload to the App Store - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8353049/unable-to-process-application-info-plist-validation-at-this-time-due-to-a-genera

<comment><USER2> This is unfortunate. I worked like crazy yesterday to get a build out only to be thwarted early morning by this. Just FYI it seems like distributing an ad hoc build without validating doesn't work. The app won't run on the device.</comment>


Flowchart: are you Charlie? - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/gdizyUF

<comment><USER2> Lack of proper understanding of the flowcharts in this picture is disturbing.

Btw. is it some imgur glitch that the deletion link is visible for me?</comment>