Not sure about Google

[Lamplighter]

The Exec from Goldman-Sachs is making news, and so
the news media is picking up on another story today by
James Whittaker, a well known Exec who left Google recently.

It's worth reading the entire blog, but here are some snips.

JW on Tech
Why I left Google
13 Mar 2012

Ok, I relent. Everyone wants to know why I left and
answering individually isn’t scaling so here it is, laid out in its long form.
Read a little (I get to the punch line in the 3rd paragraph) or read it all.
But a warning in advance: there is no drama here, no tell-all, no former colleagues bashed
and nothing more than you couldn’t already surmise from what’s happening
in the press these days surrounding Google and its attitudes toward user privacy and software developers.
This is simply a more personal telling.<snip>

It turns out that there was one place where the Google innovation machine faltered
and that one place mattered a lot: competing with Facebook.
Informal efforts produced a couple of antisocial dogs in Wave and Buzz.
Orkut never caught on outside Brazil. Like the proverbial hare confident enough
in its lead to risk a brief nap, Google awoke from its social dreaming
to find its front runner status in ads threatened.<snip>

Larry Page himself assumed command to right this wrong.
Social became state-owned, a corporate mandate called Google+.
It was an ominous name invoking the feeling that Google alone wasn’t enough.
Search had to be social. Android had to be social. You Tube, once joyous
in their independence, had to be … well, you get the point.
Even worse was that innovation had to be social.
Ideas that failed to put Google+ at the center of the universe were a distraction.<snip>

The days of old Google hiring smart people and empowering them to invent the future was gone.
The new Google knew beyond doubt what the future should look like.
Employees had gotten it wrong and corporate intervention would set it right again.<snip>

As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy,
Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy.
A user exodus from Facebook never materialized.
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.”
Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited
to the party, built his own party in retaliation.
The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.<snip>

Perhaps Google is right. Perhaps the future lies in learning
as much about people’s personal lives as possible.
Perhaps Google is a better judge of when I should call my mom
and that my life would be better if I shopped that Nordstrom sale.
Perhaps if they nag me enough about all that open time on my*calendar
I’ll work out more often. Perhaps if they offer an ad for a divorce lawyer because
I am writing an email about my 14 year old son breaking up with his girlfriend
I’ll appreciate that ad enough to end my own marriage.
Or perhaps I’ll figure all this stuff out on my own.

The old Google was a great place to work. The new one?