Recently departed Google employee James Whittaker has criticised his former company, claiming the firm has sacrificed its focus on innovation to morph into an “advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus”, and that focus is Google+.
He wrote on his blog this week that when he joined Google, it was “a technology company first and foremost; a company that hired smart people and placed a big bet on their ability to innovate”.
Whitaker worked as on Google+ as a development manager, but says it did not work. Earlier this year, he returned to his former employer Microsoft. He believes things changed after Google’s current CEO Larry Page took over.
As Facebook started taking ad dollars and market share, Whittaker said Google placed emphasis on synching the Google+ social network with the company’s popular services such as search and online video venue YouTube.
“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,” Whittaker wrote.
Google shut down its Labs initiative to support experimental projects and soured on a policy that lets employees spend 20% of their time on ideas unrelated to their usual jobs, according to Whittaker.
“As the trappings of entrepreneurship were dismantled, derisive talk of the ‘old Google’ and its feeble attempts at competing with Facebook surfaced to justify a ‘new Google’ that promised ‘more wood behind fewer arrows’.”
Whittaker told of working on Google+ but seeing the social network make little headway against Facebook.
“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 was not enough. Page instructed that all products tie into Google+, stopping experimental projects such as Google Labs.”
Whittaker references the Google+ announcement, in which the company says ‘online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.’
“As it turned out, sharing was not broken,” he said. “Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just was not part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialised. Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he was not 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.”
Read the blog in full here
