They made their brand synonymous with the word 'search' - my god man, that's worth billions, minimum.
They've done it in an oddly naive 'authentic' way, by I think truly believing their own schtick, and drinking their own coolaid. And I'm not nearly as cynical as the above posters, Google is way more ethnical that most companies. My god man, if Google wanted to they could change electoral outcomes, simply form a massive hedge fund and beat everyone at investing, do evil things the likes of which we've never hard of. I'm constantly impressed by how actually objective they've been about a lot of stuff given 99% of other CEO's would have abused the data position a long, long time ago. Not to say they are perfect, but ... compared to most, they have been pretty good. Though that's changing.
They've done it without any hardcore ad spends, or any real classical marketing attempts to make us believe things one way or another, so kudos on them.
But yes, they are kind of bad at most classical parts of marketing, communications ... heck even some kinds of product management. But the 'Engineers first' mentality got them where they are, I'm going to doubt that part of their DNA will change.
And they kept that promise! Look at the internet today.
Microsoft is no longer "evil", and the internet is fine, so "do no evil" is no longer necessary.
People assumed do not evil had something to do with privacy, or this or that, or lots of other things people read into it.
It didn't. It was just one thing: Open standards and promoting the open internet.
I'm not sure if I believe DNE was exactly about Microsoft, rather a more general mantra. In 98' the founders were running around giving talks about how 'advertising was ruining the internet' which wasn't really an MS things. So I think MS was just one factor, but yes, most don't remember a time when they were so dominant.
Not that it matters too much, but the motto was the much less ambitious (and more achievable) "Don't be evil".
So, where's the open standard for Hangouts?
(It used to be XMPP when it was Google Talk. But it's not anymore. And even back when, it wasn't federated, contrary to "the open Internet.")
In general, it feels like you're right, but only in a sense that Google did drive open standards - to bludgeon Microsoft. Which it did quite successfully, and we're all better off for it. But now that they have their own empire, they're not so keen on all that open stuff anymore, whenever they have a monopoly position to abuse.
The Wikipedia article [1] presents the motto (which is actually "Don't be evil") as being much more than that, from its origin and throughout its use. On second look, it doesn't even use the adjective "open" or mention standards.
I am looking. What I see is it being devoured by Google. Search 99%, Chrome 80%, private email 90%, Google accounts for work, for school kids, and Google Analytics tracking in every web site.
I said private email accounts.
I don't know why they haven't been punished for that yet after the successful taming of Microsoft some years ago.
All that while their primary business is advertising - not generally a well-liked industry.
Their PR management is so great that most people would be shocked to realize they're even in advertising at all.
The company also has a great reputation among engineers, and is among the most desirable employers not just in its field, but in the US in general, at a time of a booming job market with plenty of other great choices.
I also don't know about those "UX failures". The company has several web-based services that have effectively beaten all other services, including desktop-based services in their field. Do people forget this feat was considered impossible back when Google got started?
This was no easy feat - Google realized none of the browsers that existed back then was up to the task, so it launched its own browser (!) with a revolutionary new Javascript engine that was an order of magnitude faster than anything else at the time. This was an incredibly ambitious technology project, and they made it a huge success.
So while Google certainly has its failures, and we can expect more of those as it keeps its unrelenting march to become one of the most powerful corporations that has ever existed, describing them as bumbling fools who always botch "human interaction" is simply false and misleading.
For comparison the banking sector managed to take down the entire economy and came out of it virtually unscathed by Washington. That is successful PR and lobbying.
"Unscathed by Washington"? Sure. With a squeaky clean image...? Not so much.
There was Occupy Wallstreet, demonstrations all over the country, and for the vast majority of people, the image of the banking industry has been tarnished.
Also, even though no banker went to jail for fraud, they did get more regulated, and their business suffered from government-imposed restrictions (which they are working very hard to undo).
With emphasis on "was". People where angry for a while, the government let them vent and then everybody went back to their normal lives and government gave the rich a massive tax cut and slowly started to loosen banking restrictions.
Occupy Wallstreet had a huge, lasting impact on the way much of the population views the banking and finance industry.
> government gave the rich a massive tax cut and slowly started to loosen banking restrictions.
The tax cuts are not specifically for the banking or finance industry.
Google however is failing horribly at the "getting rich" part. Sure they are successful, but the EU is taking a massive chunk of their business with GDPR. California is trying to impose similar measures, and if they keep this up others will follow. The hammer of regulation will dampen their profits.
Getting into too many fields and ending up all over the place is bad management.
Executives protecting their turfs may indeed be a recipe to getting bad UX, but that doesn't excuse the fact that it's bad UX or that bad UX is all over Google. If anything the latter points towards more bad management.
And as you wrote, customer service has always been bad.
I'm glad Google (and Apple and Amazon) got into the phone business, the camera business, the phone service business (Google Voice), the car business (Waymo) and the entertainment business (Youtube, Music, etc.)
The status quo was so awful (remember cable TV contracts with 200 channels you didnt want to watch?) and has finally improved with the tech giants putting pressure in cushy lazy incumbents.
Same for self-driving cars. Where were the efforts before Google and other tech giants go into the game? I seem to recall only incremental innovation for decades.
What I really wish is that they didnt botch some of these things (Google Voice is a great example of an amazing product with massive underinvestment (abandonment?) from Google.)
We also missed out on Google Voice, will miss out on whatever TV play they're making with YouTube.
To be fair, us Canadians are in the same boat. You can be literally a stone's throw from the U.S. and still not get a lot of features available. Voice was never available, Wallet took several years before it was rolled out here, YouTube Red isn't available here either. Hell, most new Home/Assistant features take months to arrive here too.
Except there's always going to be some critics, especially when you're talking about a corporation of Google's size.
There's going to be people concerned about privacy, corporate overreach, the nature of some of its activities (such as defense contracts).
You will also get various biased opinions, such as people who were hurt in some way by Google: rejected candidates or businesses that folded due to some Google service grabbing their market share.
Hell, even if Google religiously avoided all the above, you will still get some astroturfing campaigns by its competitors!
Negative commentary on a niche website like HN doesn't actually mean much in the grand scheme of PR. Check what the average person thinks about Google. Most likely you will find it quite positive. If you're looking for a company with serious image problems, compare to Facebook.
I feel like this is in part because the people that write bad things about other people owned google stock or had many close friends in google.
Thankfully, unless they remove IMAP access it isn't something that I have to deal with most of the time.
This is an overstatement. Yes, they want to stick their fingers in all the pies but they don't try very hard and cancel products on whims too.
Search and its revenue is all they cared about. I would actually commend Google on that focus where most others would lose themselves in the mix. Search, Gmail, Docs were their major contributions. Chrome browser is based on Apple's WebKit.
I don't think that's actually true. In particular, I think that Google for most of its history was masterful at PR and communications - they managed to maintain a very positive public image all the way through 2011, despite being both far more powerful, more naughty, and more ruthless than the general public saw them as. I think management and UX are also quite strong at Google - they're known for sparse design and UX fails, but there's often a lot of subtlety to how Google products are designed that makes them very effective for their purposes. They did always suck at customer service, though.
Rather, I think Google's hubris is...hubris. They feel the need to have their fingers in everything. It's not enough to be the world's best Search company or even organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, they also need to be the best social network, and best cloud provider, and best AI company, and best mobile-phone OS, and best web browser, and best daily deals site (remember their aborted Groupon purchase, soon followed by a competitor?), and do government contracts for the military, and get into China, and build self-driving cars and robotics, and be a major payment provider and operate half a dozen different chat services.
Most of the PR, communication, management, and UX fails are forced errors. They happen because there's an inherent contradiction in Google's business model. You can't simultaneously market yourself to engineers with "Don't be evil" while devising ways to help the military kill people more accurately or censoring Chinese search results; hell, at some point the military is likely going to have an issue with China potentially hacking into Google's cloud infrastructure through their partnerships. A surprising number of the UX fails also come about because some executive is protecting their turf and won't let the obvious integration & UI simplification happen even though both engineers and customers want it.