It’s even more funny since google got worse intentionally. It’s one thing to go IBM and just get slowly bad through attrition and attenuation. A whole different level of curiousity to cuck yourself.
I hope they wise up and improve as I actually would rather have 2-3 highly competitive search companies rather than just 1.
I suspect they've figured out that whole search engine business model thing has been deprecated for months in its current form. Their product has been shitty in specific areas for several years now.
Google being ran internally akin to the Soviet union has lead to a competitive advantage being not just lost, but far surpassed. As nature intended.
Google is cursed by its own success. Any product they release will always be on shaky ground when compared to their advertising and search money-printing monopolies.
At this point, they should give up and settle into their role as the 21st century IBM.
Google can pretend they're not IBM, but that doesn't make it true.
Google no longer innovates or launches products of note. They throw ideas at the wall, like spaghetti, and hope things stick.
Perverse incentives create competing products, dead end projects, and invariably everything created winds up getting cancelled.
Google got drunk off of easy search ad revenue. Their founding leadership went off to do zeppelins and politicking. Now that golden goose looks like it may be cooked.
Google had the Bell Labs of AI research, but their ability to build product around it looks a lot more like IBM Watson.
Over the next half decade, their top tier talent will leave and get venture funding to do their own things with their own equity.
Even outside technology, Google went from that cool "don't be evil" company, to suppressing search results so that people would vote the way Google wanted.
Add a few cases of Glassholes[1], killing products people loved, and it eventually piles up.
I will add though, that just because the company has lost its lustre, doesn't mean the people working there are any less talented. I just think that on a long enough timeline, Google becomes IBM[2].
I don't know why Google isn't recognized widely as an IBM. They're a huge company that consistently has neat ideas that they cripple with mismanagement and are slowly looking to squeeze what they have harder and harder with time to keep up profit growth.
As they squeeze they will keep getting more hatred until something finally rises to fully replace them.
YouTube is slowly turning into an almost television like experience in terms of ad counts.
Google search barely works anymore.
Their AI division doesn't release much of anything on the back of morality concerns.
Their phones have all been pretty buggy. They have their place but total quality of their software has been crazy lackluster and nowhere close to competing with apple.
Google cloud is third fiddle to aws and azure
In the absence of growth they'll squeeze everything they can. Their customers and their employees, and they will slowly die.
SO has had a very similar trajectory to Google search - getting worse over time because of some fundamental product decisions, no real hope for improvement in sight and somehow still the best product in their category.
I don't know if this is so surprising. It took a little longer, but Google is basically becoming what Yahoo! became. A gameified search engine with a decent email and chat client for the era it was dominant within. As their search results get worse, people will migrate somewhere else, (like DDG), and the cycle will continue.
It’s sad to see that Google is such a hollowed out version of what was once a great company. The decline has been going on for years.
It’s just now the most cynical version of what people thought of it, a company that squeezes even more profits out of its ad business at the expense of its search quality and other products. I don’t know a single person who thinks Google search hasn’t declined.
This is the company that tried to scan all books to make them searchable, created an open source mobile OS, helped RSS explode in popularity, invested billions in open source and Linux.
One that, for a while was organizing the worlds information and making it accessible to all.
It wasn't like that in the early days. They were a scrappy garage outfit spawned from a couple of academic researchers, fighting against Yahoo and Altavista and the like. At its release, Google Search was a true technical marvel compared to its contemporaries.
For another decade after that, they (through acquihire or in house development) revolutionized office suites, online mapping, aerial imagery, email, photo search, Android, web browsers... seemingly all at once.
It wasn't until the last 8-10 years that they seeming stopped innovating and entered "hang on to our profits at any cost" mode and really increased the advertising spam everywhere.
I hope they wise up and improve as I actually would rather have 2-3 highly competitive search companies rather than just 1.
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