Re:Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
by ethbr1 on Sunday August 18, 2024 @11:19AM
(#41282878)
I'd disagree with parent a smidge and say Google turned evil when it became a platform.
When it was a disparate group of products... incentives were generally aligned with the users of those products.
When they began to look at themselves as a platform company (Google search-on-everything, Android, Chrome), that fundamentally broke and they started making sound-platform-business but user-hostile decisions.
So I guess the moral of that story is that platforms will make you rich, but you have to be very careful to enunciate your value priorities clearly to users. (E.g. Apple: "privacy"; Google: "openness"?)
When it was a disparate group of products... incentives were generally aligned with the users of those products.
When they began to look at themselves as a platform company (Google search-on-everything, Android, Chrome), that fundamentally broke and they started making sound-platform-business but user-hostile decisions.
So I guess the moral of that story is that platforms will make you rich, but you have to be very careful to enunciate your value priorities clearly to users. (E.g. Apple: "privacy"; Google: "openness"?)