It's an expectations mismatch. Google used to be the most loved company by developers. It was confident, strong, did wonders for dev comp and gave away lots of cool stuff for free. The only way from there was down, really. Then they did a bunch of things that upset people like getting buy-in into platforms and products only to then constantly kill them off, refuse to release their AI models as APIs on the grounds that devs weren't ethically pure enough to use them, as well as doing stuff that shows a lack of confidence, mostly me-too products like GCP or Bard.

Apple was never particularly loved by developers. Respected yes, tolerated yes. But they were always a bit aloof, separate, never bought into the 2010s era of free love and open source. And that's exactly the way they still are today. Apple has been remarkably stable over time, culturally speaking. It consistently meets people expectations for how it behaves, both good and bad. So there's nothing really to be disappointed about there. It is what it is.

Even outside technology, Google went from that cool "don't be evil" company, to suppressing search results so that people would vote the way Google wanted.

Add a few cases of Glassholes[1], killing products people loved, and it eventually piles up.

I will add though, that just because the company has lost its lustre, doesn't mean the people working there are any less talented. I just think that on a long enough timeline, Google becomes IBM[2].

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[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Glasshole

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/hitlers...

Great analysis. Stability of culture means no room to disappoint like Google.

I think the sentiment is more complex than that. In general, I think the sentiment is against large corporate interests, and in favor of small, focused technical improvements. And improvement here is not the same as change. Often, sentiment is pretty negative towards changes made by large corporations which could be interpreted as strategic decisions made to control an ecosystem.

In this specific case, things are high level and generic, so at this point the framing is closer to big corporation than it is to anything specific or technical.

It's because I'm here.