In general, because I felt there was too much resistance to me pursuing ideas that I wanted to pursue. Google has become increasingly top-down, whereas it was fairly bottom-up when I started in 2005. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I felt that I personally would be happier running a startup where I could call the shots.

FWIW, if you just want to write code, be comfortable, and make a crapton of money, and you don't care if you're implementing someone else's ideas, I highly recommend working for Google. That's not meant to be sarcastic or disparaging -- I totally respect that approach and there are days when I wish that were me. But if you have ideas of your own and you won't be happy unless you see them implemented... it probably won't happen at Google.

(To be fair, some people at Google would surely argue that my problem is that my ideas are crazy and bad, and I don't have any firm evidence -- yet -- that they are wrong.)

FTFY

It may not be that your ideas are crazy and bad, but rather that your sane good ideas simply aren't appropriate in the context of advertising.

Enough with the Stockholm syndrome. There are pleanty of perfectly great ideas that Google would never pay their employees to work on, however explicable or inexplicable the reason might be.

>A blow for mobile advertising: The next version of Safari will let users block ads on iPhones and iPads [1] : [...] An Apple realist might argue that its great rival Google makes more than 90 percent of its revenue from online advertising — a growing share of that on mobile, and a large share of that on iPhone. Indeed, Google alone makes about half of all global mobile advertising revenue. So anything that cuts back on mobile advertising revenue is primarily hurting its rival. (Google has been less friendly to adblockers than its “open” positioning would suggest.)

[1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/a-blow-for-mobile-advertisi...

Your post was snide. Snide remarks are commonly downvoted on HN, regardless of their accuracy.

Regarding your follow-up, you're taking a very simplistic view of Google that doesn't really capture reality. Google obviously builds lots of technology that doesn't directly affect advertising revenue. Most decision-makers at Google are not asking "how does this affect advertising revenue" for every decision. You'd know that if you ever worked there.

Several reasons, but most critically:

The phrase "advertising company" generally refers to a firm in the business of creating advertising. Google's main business is an online media company selling advertising space (both in its own advertising-supported services and alongside online media provided by others.)

That sounds like a pretty major advertising company to me.

Can you name a bigger advertising company than Google?

If they're actually a technology company driven by the demands of their users and striving for technical excellence, then do you expect Google to support built-in ad-blocking in Chrome and Android like Apple already supports it in Safari and iOS any time soon?

To what extent are such disagreements purely technical (e.g. byte-oriented wire encodings vs. roughly-like-memory) and to what extent are they "political".

By "political" I am talking about your claims about decentralisation and diversity, as if you are selling Sandstorm as the IBM-PC for the cloud millennium: a neutral platform any old software developer. That is very different from Google's way of doing doing business.