As you can see from my recent postings, the submission on Slashdot asking Has Google Lost Its Mojo? is no surprise to me. Here’s an interesting comment:
Speaking as a Googler, “some” is an understatement. The best and brightest have been exiting Google at the earliest for months, leaving behind the political climbers, backbiters and the just plain incompetent. Now Google mainly runs on interns, everybody else is too “smart” to do the grunt work like coding, debugging, or much at all beyond getting face time. The reason for this is simple: narcissistic managers whose main talent is claiming credit for the work of their subordinates while punishing anyone who shows initiative, and thus possibly could get promoted. These days at Google, showing skill and dedication is a great way to get a bad review from your manager. Eric and friends seem blissfully unaware of the developing train wreck. by Anonymous Coward
Bad PR always is a clear sign for upcoming problems. In this case, there are the privacy concerns about Google Street View:
Don’t expect privacy in your front yard, even if your house is located one mile down a private, dirt road. (PressDemocrat.com)
Also, Google is taking away free dinner. I mean, this is not the worst thing on earth, but still, bad PR, because you can see, that Google is not different from any other company, trying to increase its profits. Also, Google has serious spam problems with Gmail. Also, I noticed that Google Suggest is the default search now – that means, Google seems to care about cuil.com. And so on…
At a T.G.I.F. — a weekly meeting for anyone who wanted to ask questions of Google’s top executives — in June, the Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he had no sympathy for the parents, and that he was tired of “Googlers” who felt entitled to perks like “bottled water and M&Ms,” according to several people in the meeting. (A Google spokesman denies that Mr. Brin made that comment.) [...] When a stock was rising as fast as Google’s once was, it was easy to buy the view that there was something truly special about Google. But when the stock is falling, overlooked problems start to loom large. Having discovered that Google is not, in fact, the promised land, a number of Googlers have left recently to join start-ups, hotter companies like Facebook — and even Microsoft. (New York Times)
