There was once a company called Google that I loved. I called this company friend. A friend that made a brilliant search engine that was unbiased, sold nothing on its homepage, although it could have made plenty of money by putting up a banner ad like every Tom, Dick and Yahoo was doing then. Instead, when the time came to monetize, it did so brilliantly by coming up with context-sensitive ads.
It created a breakthrough email system that broke through a commoditized market. You could only get one of these email addresses if one of your friends had it. This email system had zillions of bytes of space and a very clean, basic interface. This friend helped you break free from all those 2 and 3 MB limitations that the big, evil email providers enforced upon you at the time. It's not that the friend did no evil, but you always thought of it as a flawed friend you loved. Like when the friend failed regularly at getting its social media plans going. It tried using Gmail - added Buzz to it and killed it soon. It created Wave, which we waved goodbye to soon enough.
You hung out with it even when it bought an operating system, copied ideas from Apple's iOS and applied it to the OS and got it off the ground. This OS was open source and 'allowed innovation at every level' or something of the sort. Eventually this OS nudged ahead of iOS in terms of what it could offer and how it looked. The versioning system of said OS was based upon alphabetical increments, named after desserts. When you first realised this, you thought - "This is so smart, the hackers must still be in control!"
This was a company of full of such little touches. The use of Ajax with GMail, an open-source mobile operating system, a super-complex search engine whose user interface could be written with the most basic knowledge of HTML, a voice-recognition system so good and under-advertised, you only realized its accuracy when Apple built a crappy one of its own, a browser that stood out in yet another commoditized market, because of how fast and how easy-to-use it was. Even people who made the operating system couldn't make their browser run faster than Chrome.
But you trust friends because you know you can rely on them. Not because they stop doing stuff because the big boss doesn't like it. The little defective touches are now slowly being ironed out. The operating system, web and mobile apps are among the prettiest looking out there.
The real moment where you felt your friend slip away was when it justified the violation of the most principal of its principles - the clean search engine. It did this by saying that a bully was building an alternative web. It said it had to do this to survive. And maybe it was true. So, the social media effort is now propped up by the search engine; those days of not showing biased results are over. And the friend you knew is now suddenly someone else. Every time you go to look for something, some alert is vaguely ringing in the top right corner of your screen, essentially a link to Google+. Google+ results abound in Google searches, Google+ results appear as 'information' all over the place, more attractively than the search results themselves. Only a mouseover shows you that this 'information' is actually a social network.
The last straw is that Android's latest 'quirky' name is a popular commercial candy bar. I know, it probably sounds like a tiny thing, but for someone who has travelled so long with this company, it tells me that the hackers are not in control anymore -- the marketing folks have taken over. It tells me that I cannot trust everything it tells me.
I don't think this means that Google's stock will fall or that its businesses won't do well or even that I'll stop using Google's products. It's just that with the corporate types taking over, I will have to always keep an eye out for alternatives now, like I didn't have to before. Or as Google would say, I need to take a Kit Kat break from this friendship.
It created a breakthrough email system that broke through a commoditized market. You could only get one of these email addresses if one of your friends had it. This email system had zillions of bytes of space and a very clean, basic interface. This friend helped you break free from all those 2 and 3 MB limitations that the big, evil email providers enforced upon you at the time. It's not that the friend did no evil, but you always thought of it as a flawed friend you loved. Like when the friend failed regularly at getting its social media plans going. It tried using Gmail - added Buzz to it and killed it soon. It created Wave, which we waved goodbye to soon enough.
You hung out with it even when it bought an operating system, copied ideas from Apple's iOS and applied it to the OS and got it off the ground. This OS was open source and 'allowed innovation at every level' or something of the sort. Eventually this OS nudged ahead of iOS in terms of what it could offer and how it looked. The versioning system of said OS was based upon alphabetical increments, named after desserts. When you first realised this, you thought - "This is so smart, the hackers must still be in control!"
This was a company of full of such little touches. The use of Ajax with GMail, an open-source mobile operating system, a super-complex search engine whose user interface could be written with the most basic knowledge of HTML, a voice-recognition system so good and under-advertised, you only realized its accuracy when Apple built a crappy one of its own, a browser that stood out in yet another commoditized market, because of how fast and how easy-to-use it was. Even people who made the operating system couldn't make their browser run faster than Chrome.
But you trust friends because you know you can rely on them. Not because they stop doing stuff because the big boss doesn't like it. The little defective touches are now slowly being ironed out. The operating system, web and mobile apps are among the prettiest looking out there.
The real moment where you felt your friend slip away was when it justified the violation of the most principal of its principles - the clean search engine. It did this by saying that a bully was building an alternative web. It said it had to do this to survive. And maybe it was true. So, the social media effort is now propped up by the search engine; those days of not showing biased results are over. And the friend you knew is now suddenly someone else. Every time you go to look for something, some alert is vaguely ringing in the top right corner of your screen, essentially a link to Google+. Google+ results abound in Google searches, Google+ results appear as 'information' all over the place, more attractively than the search results themselves. Only a mouseover shows you that this 'information' is actually a social network.
 |
| A Google search for Breaking Bad - the story of a nice guy becoming 'bad' |
The last straw is that Android's latest 'quirky' name is a popular commercial candy bar. I know, it probably sounds like a tiny thing, but for someone who has travelled so long with this company, it tells me that the hackers are not in control anymore -- the marketing folks have taken over. It tells me that I cannot trust everything it tells me.
I don't think this means that Google's stock will fall or that its businesses won't do well or even that I'll stop using Google's products. It's just that with the corporate types taking over, I will have to always keep an eye out for alternatives now, like I didn't have to before. Or as Google would say, I need to take a Kit Kat break from this friendship.
