What happened to Google (alphabet)

[Flame]

There was a time when everything turns gold when Google touched it. Every young tech nerd wanted to work for them. They had a famous motto called "don't be evil". It creates products which cant be lived without in modern days. like Gmail, Chrome, Maps, Android. Well some products brought by the company which matured under its big resources of cash. like Youtube which was having money problems. but google saw its potential. All this from its bread and butter services like Search engine and Advertising.

but there was a time when things were quirky and different. like Nexus phones. which were tested for its OS and future Pixel phone line, at the time Nexus phones were priced at a good price point too. Google Chrome which was not only a silk web browser it was open source. Which was weird, like why are they giving the secrets to everyone else. Very anti-microsoft. plus its main two OS's was using Linux as the kernel. very very anti-microsoft.


but now when people talk about google, it's seen as a very evil company. Some of these things are true too. like Mozilla saying google slows down youtube on Firefox. it is known to give all its data to the five eyes. It is known for its anti-competitive practices. plus on top of that. it creates a new project and within months that service is killed off or turned to a new service which is nothing like what you want. An example of this is Google Play Music which was an alternative to spotify.


Whats your thoughts on Google?

irony is i used Google docs to check for spelling mistakes.

 

[User154]

For me your comment explains my thoughts on Google pretty well.

There was a time that they were truly great, and seemed to uphold the famous mantra. As you say for a while they had the midas touch and have created/developed some products and services that have gone largely unmatched by their competitors, for years in some cases. Google has been used colloquially as a verb for searching the internet for a very long time now.

I remember in the 2000s it seemed they were almost untouchable, and saw off many rivals, poor old Jeeves . I don't mind admitting in my teens I was definitely a Google fanboy and always went pretty all in on any new product/service they had to offer. As soon as I got an invite to googlemail I made it my email address for everything and closed my hotmail account. I remember being super excited to show my stepdad Google earth!

In recent years however it feels like a lot of their products are experiments. Not in the cutting edge, exciting way they were before. More in the sense that they seem to, as you say, create a service only to abandon it and push you onto something new. I can't even remeber how many different video calling apps on theirs have come and gone.

I owned a pixel 4 and the soli sensor was pointless. Obviously it was gimmick but I still expected there be some stuff that would be fun to do with it sometimes. In the end I'm not even sure if there were 20 apps that supported it.

Nowadays I find it much harder to get behind their products, let alone go all in, for fear that said product will just be abandoned.

 

[Flame]

For me your comment explains my thoughts on Google pretty well.

There was a time that they were truly great, and seemed to uphold the famous mantra. As you say for a while they had the midas touch and have created/developed some products and services that have gone largely unmatched by their competitors, for years in some cases. Google has been used colloquially as a verb for searching the internet for a very long time now.

I remember in the 2000s it seemed they were almost untouchable, and saw off many rivals, poor old Jeeves . I don't mind admitting in my teens I was definitely a Google fanboy and always went pretty all in on any new product/service they had to offer. As soon as I got an invite to googlemail I made it my email address for everything and closed my hotmail account. I remember being super excited to show my stepdad Google earth!

In recent years however it feels like a lot of their products are experiments. Not in the cutting edge, exciting way they were before. More in the sense that they seem to, as you say, create a service only to abandon it and push you onto something new. I can't even remeber how many different video calling apps on theirs have come and gone.

I owned a pixel 4 and the soli sensor was pointless. Obviously it was gimmick but I still expected there be some stuff that would be fun to do with it sometimes. In the end I'm not even sure if there were 20 apps that supported it.

Nowadays I find it much harder to get behind their products, let alone go all in, for fear that said product will just be abandoned.

Soild post. i agree 100% with what you said. they had duo, hangouts, google meet. its they going back and forth with different names and what not, im not even sure at this point if its just reskins of the same thing.

here is a website of stuff they killed over time https://killedbygoogle.com/

i mean the phase. jack of all trades master of none comes to mind.

Also on the famous mantra. i rmember they were like we wouldnt deal with China any more. we believe in freedom. blah balh blah. But at the same time, NSA and GCHQ were using google data to spy on its own people.

they must of spent millions maybe even billions on stadia at least in my opinion. But people are made to beleive that a company which is big as Google as a big master plan. closing stadia after 3 years proves thats bs and the even the managment at the top has no idea what they doing.

like the way they did stadia was wrong in every aspect. you're the new kid on the block, dont try to reinvent the wheel. 99.9% of gamers like the owning the game in digital or physical form.

 

[FAST6191]

There was a time when everything turns gold when Google touched it.

When was that? Most have held that everything they do is subsidised by the search engine. Everything else is run with and shuttered, or run at a loss so as to ensure dominance of said search engine and ecosystem.

 

[Veho]

I think that most of their products are beta tests of some hidden functionality that they will then use somewhere else.
They always have a ton of projects in the work, most of them don't even reach a public phase, some had a pilot launch but then got cancelled, then scrap it all and move on.
And yet, Google still owns half the world or something.

 

[Flame]

When was that? Most have held that everything they do is subsidised by the search engine. Everything else is run with and shuttered, or run at a loss so as to ensure dominance of said search engine and ecosystem.

in retrospect for sure. but during that time it wasnt seen like that. maybe at the time we or I was looking at the internet world through rose-tinted glasses.

I think that most of their products are beta tests of some hidden functionality that they will then use somewhere else.
They always have a ton of projects in the work, most of them don't even reach a public phase, some had a pilot launch but then got cancelled, then scrap it all and move on.
And yet, Google still owns half the world or something.

i love how capitalism is sold to the world as its about the best makes it to the top, and you need to be the best to stay they. in reality when you have monopoly you become too powerful and never lose and why Google owns half the world. it can afford to splash the cash and not worry about mistakes because it is always going to win.

 

[User154]

Soild post. i agree 100% with what you said. they had duo, hangouts, google meet. its they going back and forth with different names and what not, im not even sure at this point if its just reskins of the same thing.

here is a website of stuff they killed over time https://killedbygoogle.com/

i mean the phase. jack of all trades master of none comes to mind.

Also on the famous mantra. i rmember they were like we wouldnt deal with China any more. we believe in freedom. blah balh blah. But at the same time, NSA and GCHQ were using google data to spy on its own people.

they must of spent millions maybe even billions on stadia at least in my opinion. But people are made to beleive that a company which is big as Google as a big master plan. closing stadia after 3 years proves thats bs and the even the managment at the top has no idea what they doing.

like the way they did stadia was wrong in every aspect. you're the new kid on the block, dont try to reinvent the wheel. 99.9% of gamers like the owning the game in digital or physical form.

I forgot about Stadia when I was writing comment. Personally it makes for a pretty good example of the shift in my own opinion of Google.

Had it been something that was viable in 2007, and Google released it then I would've been on it like a fly on shit. Having every faith that it could be a well implemented, well supported service that would have decent longevity.

When it was actually released however I gave it a hard pass, because I had serious doubts over how well it would be supported, and how long for.

When was that? Most have held that everything they do is subsidised by the search engine. Everything else is run with and shuttered, or run at a loss so as to ensure dominance of said search engine and ecosystem.

For sure a lot of their products would not be commercially successful as stand alone products. I still think for a lot of people, myself included, there was a time when they were seen as some kind of 'kings of the internet'. They either created or furthered development of products that quickly became integral parts of how many people used the internet.

Looking back they were probabaly never as great as my teenage self thought they were, at the time though it genuinely felt like they were a company that actually had the potential to bring a product to the table that could end up being important for whatever reason. Nowadays its hard to imagine there will ever be anything new they do that will be as important to people as gmail, or maps, for example.

 

[ChiefReginod]

Someone snuck out in the middle of the night and added "...unless it's profitable" to their old motto with different-colored paint, but still no one noticed or cared.

I was never a big fan of google even when gmail first landed and they were the coolest company in tech. I was more of a yahoo fan myself. It's sad what's become of both companies. I miss the simpler times and I know that I'm not the only one who feels a genuine loss. The internet has become so stale and boring. Even youtube is getting old. But I don't see how things get better from here without just starting something completely new (as in something to replace the internet), but that will probably never happen, and when it does we'll probably miss the internet because the new thing will be even worse.

All of this is why I'm kind of happy about AI. There are so many negatives that come with it, but it's a wildcard that represents change.

 

[ZipMartin]

Google is an advertising company. That's what happened

 

[KleinesSinchen]

Seems to be some kind of natural law that a company becomes evil -- depending on the definition.

Google is a disappointment. The core functionality -- Google Search -- was top notch compared to other search engines that existed before. Nowadays... meh. Search results often seem heavily manipulated, maybe even politically. Depending on the search terms I have more luck with the Duck (rhyme not intended).

Other than the basic search: Google is a personal data sucking Kraken with tentacles reaching everywhere. The Android ecosystem is almost as bad as Apple.

When somebody says or writes Google, I automatically see this picture in my mind: