Why I left Google (2012)

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx

by Hitchhiker • 13 years ago

392 112 13 years ago

blogs.msdn.com

wslh2• 13 years ago

Are Google's driverless car just a way to show more ads? Instead of driving a car you could be watching an ad.

Hitchhiker3• 13 years ago

No , that is the first foray of Skynet .. much more interesting than ads.. and provably the single handed elimination of human drivers from taxi services ;-).

knome• 13 years ago

Automated cabs would be a great place to advertise for nearby businesses and things. "Google, what restaurants are nearby?" which gives a list sorted by relevance ( X of Y users returned to restaurant Z more than twice ), with a few purchased restaurant advertisements proceeding them

VLM• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, as per the article, the response would most likely be:

"sponsored suggestion to “Buy a restaurants are nearby at Wal-Mart.”"

dale386• 13 years ago

No, they are a way to more effectively collect photos for Street View and WiFi AP locations for GPS-free location based services... both are which are products of Google Maps which itself is a vessel for selling advertising.

skrebbel• 13 years ago

that sounds very far fetched.

subsystem• 13 years ago

While there's surely some nice research being done, it always seemed like a PR project to me.

meerita2• 13 years ago

And Google Glasses? Chromebook? Nexus? Jesus this guy is plainly wrong.

kbouw• 13 years ago

And don't forget to mention Google Shoes :P

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/11/google-shoes_n_2853...

lurker143• 13 years ago

My Chromebook and Nexus are full of ads.

photorized2• 13 years ago

Glass doesn't have a compelling use case yet. At least they have not unveiled it.

With iPad, for example, it was very clearly positioned as a media consumption device from the very beginning.

With Google Glass, potential customers are being asked to brainstorm what they would do if they had Glass.

Does not seem particularly innovative to me.

JoCoLa• 13 years ago

Absolutely. American spend more time communing than ever before. That's a lot of time spent steering that could be spent swiping.

frogpelt• 13 years ago

I believe the overarching focus at Google is search. To search Google must index.

To continue indexing and searching Google has to make money. The most obvious path to billions is leveraging the indexing and searching into ad revenue.

What makes me more nervous than Google being capitalistic is Google not having boundaries about who/what/when/where/how they will index the whole world's data.

voodoomagicman• 13 years ago

So he goes to microsoft?

thinkling• 13 years ago

See: "Why I joined Microsoft", http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/14/why-i-...

jaredmcateer• 13 years ago

More interestingly he actually went back to Microsoft.

http://googletesting.blogspot.ca/2009/06/james-whittaker-joi...

numbsafari2• 13 years ago

The way these things read... I wonder if people are getting paid an extra bonus to have PR write up a "why I left the other guy" post and put their name on it as way to just bundle up a bunch of FUD in one place.

I'm not a big fan of either Google or Microsoft, so I don't really care about what they say. It's just that these "why I quit" letters have become boilerplate PR pieces that don't really offer anything new or interesting.

niggler4• 13 years ago

I look at it as a more public exit interview. I don't doubt that his expressed concerns were part of why he did leave (I also don't doubt that there are other factors)), and by making those concerns public there's a chance that more people may see it and try to rectify the problems.

numbsafari2• 13 years ago

Yeah, but in the entire history of people quitting and writing "letters to the editor", has any manager ever actually read it and thought anything other than "whatever, dude wasn't on board, glad he left"?

Do you really think Sergey Brin or Larry Page or Eric Schmidt are going to read this and think "oh man, we better change what we're doing".

Nope.

People who are fans of MS are going to read it and say "yeah, see, I told you google is evil. Even his 15 year old daughter had a poignant critique of Google+ that shows she's not only wise beyond her years, but that Google+ sucks just like I always thought already."

It just doesn't sound genuine.

James_Duval• 13 years ago

Given how transparent Microsoft's "Scroogled" campaign is and how closely the reasons given here skew to the Scroogled message, I'd wager you're pretty close if not bang on.

They probably genuinely believe what they write though, at least on some level. You'd have to, or go mad.

EDIT: I also feel mild antipathy towards both parties.

pablasso• 13 years ago

That sounds a little paranoic. I imagine the negative PR a company would get if this gets known would be far worse that whatever they could gain with a small blog post like this one.

rpgmaker• 13 years ago

I remember reading this story when it came out and reading this comment: So what made you join Microsoft?

Still no answer from the guy.

mannu4u4u• 13 years ago

Google's New Portal Provides Help for Hacked Sites http://www.hackersnewsbulletin.com/2013/03/googles-new-porta...

niggler4• 13 years ago

Hate to be that guy, but who is James Whittaker?

(nice writeup, as it mirrors the feelings many of my google friends feel)

enginous• 13 years ago

He was an engineering director for a couple of years working on the dev/test tool chain and Google+.

He's done a few books, including one he co-authored called How Google Tests Software, which is a fairly pragmatic discussion of large-scale testing practices at Google. (I'm not sure if this is still the case, but Nooglers used to read this book as a part of their orientation.)

jrockway• 13 years ago

This is from March of last year, BTW, and has been discussed numerous other times on HN.

(Ironically, there have been so many other articles titled "Why I left Google" on HN that I can't actually find this one in the archives. But it's there :)

theltrj• 13 years ago

Definitely seen this before as well, not interesting then, not interesting now...

niggler4• 13 years ago

Next time search by url: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3700277 was the previous discussion (910 upvotes, 370 days ago)

Hitchhiker3• 13 years ago

ironically, i did not mean for this to go through as I was trying to locate the discussion on it.. obviously the url regex ain't working for this corner-case.

wslh2• 13 years ago

The issues around "Why I left A_PUBLIC_COMPANY" are really important. The question go beyond Google(s), it forces us to think if there are alternatives to growing or being public without doing a deal with the "devil". I don't think so, the definition of a public company implies that.

Can private companies with less capital win this game and stay relevant in the long term?

joonix• 13 years ago

There are plenty of massive, dominant private companies. Koch, SC Johnson, the list goes on ...

The nature of VC or anyone investing OPM requires a short horizon. When it's your own money you don't ever have to cash out.

onemorepassword3• 13 years ago

You must not be familiar with the "devil" called private equity firms.

Especially fun in combination with a hostile takeover and the ensuing strip mining expedition.

brownbat• 13 years ago

Eh, I'd give this particular repost a pass.

This bit:

> The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.

I'd basically written that off a year ago as unfair, maybe someone with "everything used to be better" bias. Seeing it again in right after the Reader shutdown, it shifted my thinking a bit.

I know this hasn't really snuck up on many other people, there've been other great product deaths, and Google sells a lot of ads, but seeing this again, it just nudged me to consciously reevaluate it all...

pnathan• 13 years ago

Although it might be distasteful to explorers, isn't a company with a single focus probably in a better mentality to do better in that area?

troebr• 13 years ago

This blog post is one year old.

namenotrequired• 13 years ago

I'm sure I've seen it on hackernews before.

Colliwinks• 13 years ago

"Sharing is not broken"

"Share this on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, LinkedIn, SlashDot, Myspace, Technorati, Friendfeed, Messenger, or Stumbleupon."

rburhum• 13 years ago

Only two of those are relevant. With the right content, a third one may also work. The rest, you can ignore

fatjokes• 13 years ago

Probably what somebody said about Reader, when all the Google services were listed.

Apocryphon2• 13 years ago

I suppose we should be thankful that HN doesn't come with a share plugin.

Gormo• 13 years ago

What is the juxtaposition of these two sentences supposed to convey?

They seem to be pretty consistent: "sharing is not broken - here are some the places that people are already sharing stuff without Google's involvement".

aviraldg2• 13 years ago

I lost all interest in reading the article after looking at the msdn.com domain.

EDIT: Downvoters, I don't see how this is wrong. Microsoft has a long history of spreading FUD about competitors (Florian Mueller/FOSSPatents, http://www.scroogled.com/ [when their own practices are very much the same], sponsoring fake studies that show that the TCO of Linux is much greater than that of Windows, and so on.) I certainly would be interested in an unbiased opinion on the topic, but I don't think anyone on Microsoft's payroll can give me that.

jere2• 13 years ago

The article is all about the difference between the innovation being created by low level employees and the stupid decisions by top level management who want to shut it all down. The author is among the former and even says he doesn't like ads, so I think your proposition that he is a Microsoft shill working in an elaborate anti-Google marketing campaign is misguided.

There's not much excuse for not reading things and then complaining about them.

twinge• 13 years ago

James Whittaker was not a "low level employee," he was a director of engineering. This is the same level as Kurzweil. At that level he was responsible for many management decisions, some of them probably "stupid."

onemorepassword3• 13 years ago

Scroogled isn't FUD. It might be (well, certainly is) tasteless negative marketing, but factually it's dead-on.

Just like this particular post, which regardless of the author's ulterior motives is factually accurate.

aviraldg2• 13 years ago

Guess what? Microsoft isn't being upfront about the costs of maintaining and providing a high quality email service. The bills have to be paid somehow, and that's why Google's ads are targeted using email keywords. Microsoft, on the other hand is using free Outlook accounts as a loss leader, and I can assure you with a great degree of certainty that they would do the same if they had as much of the market as Google does.

lucb1e• 13 years ago

Shouldn't the title be Quitting Google instead? This title sounds like Google is quitting, when instead an employee quit Google.

piyush_soni2• 13 years ago

Right. That's what I thought while clicking the link "Google quitting what? "

qompiler2• 13 years ago

That's it folks, Sergey pulled the plug out of the Google server below his desk. Everyone go home.

dclowd9901• 13 years ago

Maybe it's a play on words, initially as the author participating in the act of "google quitting" but also meant to be interpreted as google itself quitting being the google it was.

sidcool• 13 years ago

Why is this being upvoted now is beyond me. Am I missing something?

Mahn• 13 years ago

HN works in mysterious ways.

michaelwww2• 13 years ago

So he leaves Google because of steps they are taking to protect and enhance their revenue stream, and joins Microsoft? As a former Microsoftie, all I can say is that is like going from the kettle to the fire and doesn't make sense.

forgotAgain• 13 years ago

I've worked for neither company but my thought was the same as yours.

Anyone who licenses software from Microsoft knows that lately their most important objective is increasing licensing revenues.

Changing products to increase licensing or changing them to enhance a different revenue stream is six of one, half a dozen of the other for me.

michaelwww2• 13 years ago

After reading this (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/05/25/google...) I think his preference is mostly cultural. I never worked at Google, but I was born, raised and work in tech in the Bay Area. Microsoft culture rubbed me the wrong way when I was there. It seemed more what I imagine to be an organized and orderly Northern European governance under the cloudy, rainy skies. California Bay Area culture is more sunny and free libertarian with a dash of anarchy thrown in. You may discount my general characterization, but these things matter and people definitely have a preference.

qompiler2• 13 years ago

I don't like Google. But I don't like Microsoft either.

And this guy has evil written all over him. He worked at Microsoft for 3 years prior to joining Google. He is now back working for Microsoft. Blogging on msdn.com.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-whittaker/13/878/229

chollida1• 13 years ago

> And this guy has evil written all over him.

Can you explain what about him makes him "evil"?

paranoiacblack• 13 years ago

I think it's fairly clear that if you work for a large company like Google or Microsoft, you are quite literally the spawn of Satan.

mikelat• 13 years ago

I caught him munching on the bones of ethnic minorities once

nchlswu• 13 years ago

I feel like I've read or seen a fair bit of Google criticism from ex-Googlers on the msdn blogs. Can anyone confirm I haven't just been seeing this post over and over?

I don't care if it's just optics; having a post about this on your current employers blog platform makes me highly suspicions, no matter how many people share his opinion

piyush_soni2• 13 years ago

The fact that this 'personal blog' is on blogs.msdn.com says a lot :)

mikecane• 13 years ago

So it's a year later and sharing still isn't broken and Google still isn't part of it. Maybe that's the point?

petrel• 13 years ago

Google first Kills or acquire small companies and then kill the acquired company for integrating it with Google Plus. Then turn off the service without thinking about the peoples using it.

It is the power of huge money, monopoly and over confidence.

ttrreeww• 13 years ago

The guy joined Microsoft as a Partner, Partners got it good at Microsoft, 500k/year (range is around 300k to 1 million a year) average and they were exempt from the yearly 10% mandatory cut the rest of the workers are exposed to.

nilkn• 13 years ago

This guy was only at Google for three years (less, in fact), but this reads like he was a 10 year veteran or something. I can't really take it all that seriously because of that.

He was offered a Partner position at Microsoft. That's why he left. No need to philosophize about corporate culture here.

platinum1• 13 years ago

The funny thing is, before he was at Google, he was at Microsoft... and here's what he had to say to CNN/Fortune (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/29/the-problem-with-micr...) in 2011 about Microsoft:

"You want to innovate in mobile? ...deal with the made men who run the relevant cartel. And if they don't like you or your idea, your innovation goes nowhere."

Apocryphon2• 13 years ago

Between this piece and other comments I've seen in the wake of the anti-Google backlash of this past week, why is it that supposedly under Eric Schmidt, a "business guy" Google was all innovation and tech, and then when Larry Page, a very technical cofounder, took over, the company is now some sort of ad machine? If this is true, what does this say about leading personalities and company culture?

ohsnapman• 13 years ago

I've always felt that Ben Horowitz's characterization was the best:

http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/15/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo/

TLDR Eric was a peacetime CEO and could allow the company to do the things he allowed. Larry is a wartime CEO. Hard decisions need to be made, and the company needs to be driven with focus.

qdog• 13 years ago

I think this person's opinion is rather colored. Google has been about ads since before they were public. I personally don't have a Facebook page, and don't use g+ that much, so I'm not as infatuated with social networking as much as some I suppose, but I keep track of my karma on HN hourly when I post a message here, so to each his own.

I have no idea what his second article about Microsoft and the mobile space is getting at. Look, if you think g+ is failing, what makes you think Microsoft is going to suddenly own the mobile space? I interviewed at a place in Seattle about 7 years ago that was doing Windows phone stuff, and again at MSFT at a different point for the windows mobile team as an embedded SWE. Microsoft has been in the mobile space forever, yet he's saying they are the innovative company capable to turning on a dime and taking over a new space? I don't believe it.

My wife has a windows phone, I don't like it, she hates the Bing search. I just bought a nexus 4 to replace my G2 because I want software updates for a long time. My wife is probably moving to an iPhone or Nexus. Last I looked gmail supports imap, you don't have to view ads. I only see ads on my nexus when I use google services, they don't flash up on my screen randomly.

I work on security for Windows, but for my own personal use, I just bought an ARM chromebook. It's a great price, despite the 'secure bootloader', it took me about 5 minutes to get the Ubuntu install started on an SD card, and if I screw up the recovery is drop dead simple. Right now, we are sweating bullets because if we make a mistake on Win8 boot, we are going to hose up the machine and recovery is long and painful.

Google has plenty of problems, and sure if you ask me, Google+ has a terrible interface and shipping it without a good API was brain dead, but Microsoft sure doesn't seem to be setting the mobile world on fire.

So I'd take this and many articles like it with a giant cake of salt.

herdrick• 13 years ago

I don't know. Google has come up with Glass and is working hard on the self driving car. Sounds pretty innovative still to me. I hope the author is wrong about the pipeline of new stuff.

kushti• 13 years ago

Google+ is a bizarre

ok_craig• 13 years ago

This is going to come back every time Google does something the community here doesn't like, or which they see as "corporate-minded focus" over innovation.

shreeshga• 13 years ago

"Why I left Google" - said no Guido ever.

packetslave• 13 years ago

Um, you do know that Guido works at Dropbox now, right?

nailer• 13 years ago

This site has very wide columns. Here's a readability link that might be easier to scan:

http://www.readability.com/articles/nljhmuka

weix• 13 years ago

Working at Google have much higher pressure than MS. not a place for loser.

flyinRyan• 13 years ago

Nice personal attack for someone who's writing is barely comprehensible.

saturdaysaint• 13 years ago

Little mention of Android and Chrome? No mention of Docs/Drive, self driving cars, Go, Google Fiber or their growing forays into hardware (Nexus, Glass)?

As a lot of these indicate, one of Google's chief contributions in recent memory is helping to make computing cheap, ubiquitous and decidedly not monopolized by Microsoft. In the blink of an eye, we've gone from a world where everything the average person owns that can install software runs on Windows to a world where more like 1/3 (and shrinking) of a household's computing devices run Windows. And in 2013, Chromebooks and Steamboxes look like they could displace a lot more of MS's presence.

There's a conflict of interest here. Even if their game is more complex than Coke vs Pepsi, these are very direct competitors. An ambitious Microsoftie has something to gain in a coy, well written put down that conveniently ignores the competition's bigger recent achievements.

elaineo2• 13 years ago

I recently switched from using the Google Translate API to the Bing/Microsoft Translator API for my Android app, because Google charges usage fees while MS is free at the lowest tier. This was the first time I saw Google charge money for a service that Microsoft offers for free.

nivla2• 13 years ago

Can you be kind enough to comment on the quality of translations? I am in need of a translation API for one of my projects and it is down to Google or Bing.

elaineo2• 13 years ago

I have only used English-Spanish, but as far as I can tell, the results are approximately the same (translating individual words with appropriate verb conjugation but no regard for context).

You can test them out in their browser apps: http://www.bing.com/translator/ http://translate.google.com/

arthurrr• 13 years ago

The way I see it, Google is the new Microsoft, and Microsoft is not dead yet, but becoming more and more irrelevant. Now, what has to happen for Google to become irrelevant?

qwertzlcoatl• 13 years ago

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

- Jeff Hammerbacher, Facebook

Why I left Google (2012)

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