It wasn't like that in the early days. They were a scrappy garage outfit spawned from a couple of academic researchers, fighting against Yahoo and Altavista and the like. At its release, Google Search was a true technical marvel compared to its contemporaries.
For another decade after that, they (through acquihire or in house development) revolutionized office suites, online mapping, aerial imagery, email, photo search, Android, web browsers... seemingly all at once.
It wasn't until the last 8-10 years that they seeming stopped innovating and entered "hang on to our profits at any cost" mode and really increased the advertising spam everywhere.
The change seemed to come a few years earlier than that, by my reckoning; the launch of Google Plus was clearly a fear-driven reaction against the growth of Facebook, and that felt like a real departure from their previous attitude of sunny, generous optimism.
I mean, that ability of Google hasn't changed. If anything, Google has more influence than it did in those days. And yet, their corporate image has taken a nosedive.
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if i had the ability to vastly influence what people read about me everyone would think i was pretty amazing too
It wasn't like that in the early days. They were a scrappy garage outfit spawned from a couple of academic researchers, fighting against Yahoo and Altavista and the like. At its release, Google Search was a true technical marvel compared to its contemporaries.
For another decade after that, they (through acquihire or in house development) revolutionized office suites, online mapping, aerial imagery, email, photo search, Android, web browsers... seemingly all at once.
It wasn't until the last 8-10 years that they seeming stopped innovating and entered "hang on to our profits at any cost" mode and really increased the advertising spam everywhere.
The change seemed to come a few years earlier than that, by my reckoning; the launch of Google Plus was clearly a fear-driven reaction against the growth of Facebook, and that felt like a real departure from their previous attitude of sunny, generous optimism.
I mean, that ability of Google hasn't changed. If anything, Google has more influence than it did in those days. And yet, their corporate image has taken a nosedive.