[skybrian]

Although there were some rough areas, Google has been considered to have pretty advanced software engineering for 20 years or more. There was plenty for a new engineer to boggle at even then.

On the other hand, someone who started in 2015 missed out on the years when Google was mostly considered to be the good guys and given the benefit of the doubt. That’s about when the culture started turning against “big tech” in general (rather than specific companies like Microsoft).

[ethbr1]

> the years when Google was mostly considered to be the good guys and given the benefit of the doubt

It's been interesting to see the tech and public zeitgeist shift on this.

Lesson: if you're going to be popular for killing a king, be careful how similarly the thing you place on your head starts to look to a crown.

[zrobotics]

Serious question: what king did Google kill? They really didn't take down a big player in an existing industry, they started by being very good at search and displaced other search companies at a time when internet search wasn't a big business.

I don't have a great answer here, but one of the things that I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten. It's possible to avoid Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix, but by 2015 it started to become nearly impossible to avoid Google or their products.

Not sure if that's the reason public opinion shifted, I'd started to get worried about the same time I also dropped my Facebook account, so ~2011. I have successfully managed to avoid Facebook products and tracking, but I had to give up on avoiding Google, it's simply not possible unless one is willing to make extreme sacrifices. So i kinda gave up, it was starting to become digital masochism. There's a very bitter irony in me typing this on a pixel 8,but I've just accepted that there isn't any avoiding Google tracking my online life so I've just stopped caring as much as I used to.

[jauntywundrkind]

Google was the company that kept making the web better in every way. Amazing search, endless services each with solid json APIs, a fast multi-process web-browser, & investment in the web as a whole.

Google killed the king, and the king was the desktop. The king was apps. Microsoft seemed omnipotent & in total control, and the rise of the web isn't totally Google's but they sure did a lot and they sure rode that wave.

My personal feeling is that Google lost the ball in the g+ era. Up until then, it felt like Google understood their role was to help others create value, that they had to offer APIs and platforms to let other developers onto the platform, let other people expand the value proposition. G+ was an about face, a totalizing product push, and one that offered nothing to the world. Essentially no API offered. Google wanted to make g+, they wanted to run itz and if you wanted to use it, you needed to use their client and your account with them.

Where-as in the past, with efforts like Buzz, they we're trying to expand the protocols & value of the web as a whole. Once they gave up on platform & tried to be a product company, it was much harder to believe in the futures they were trying to sell.

[robertlagrant]

I don't really understand this. Don't you think search, mail, docs, maps, adsense, were products? What were the API platforms they were making up until G+?

To my recollection, G+ was actually pretty good at launch. It just was killed (or hobbled, for future killing) incredibly early for a network-effects, non-first mover product.

[ethbr1]

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"?)

[skybrian]

I don't see Google Cloud as "giving up on being a platform." It's a different kind of platform, though!

Early Google initiatives also had a high failure rate. (Buzz, for example.)

My guess is that there are still Googlers trying to improve the web. Young people are idealistic, so why wouldn't they? But nowadays it's unlikely to be successful unless it's relatively uncontroversial infrastructure. (Some examples might be things like certificate transparency and QUIC, which became HTTP/3.)

Higher-profile initiatives to really change things often fail because they raise deep suspicion and resistance. They're certain to be misinterpreted in the worst possible way.

Also, significant changes affect vested interests. Some of those vested interests are internal.

[eddyfromtheblok]

Wasn’t the G+ push a response to Facebook’s popularity, that they feared losing out on ad revenue?

[boringg]

That was circles

[yuliyp]

Circles was part of G+ (it was their audience selection model to contrast with Facebook's friends)

[justinclift]

> I think caused public opinion to shift is when people started realizing how truly massive they had gotten.

I'm personally more of the opinion that Google has caused enough serious issues for enough people - with famously no way to get the issues resolved - that they themselves seeded or caused the negative public opinion.

Combine that with Google behaviour of clearly doing things in their own interest even when not to their user's benefit (manifest v3 proposal is a good example), and many people are like "screw Google". ;)

[skybrian]

I don't think people understand what manifest v3 is trying to solve. It's a good example of how a worthwhile effort to make the Internet less terrible can be misinterpreted.

[jorams]

Manifest v3 is an effort to make a browser slightly better at its core feature, that it is importantly already fine at, at the cost of making it worse at serving the user. The internet is increasingly user-hostile, and manifest v3 makes it harder to fight back.

[skybrian]

Ironically the stricter permissions are because browser extensions sometimes have crap security and the Internet is a hostile place.

The browser itself might be pretty much okay, but the extensions are where the terrible code is.

[reaperman]

More explanation from you on this could help. I don’t even know where to begin - everything I search just details how v3 greatly limits the efficacy of ad blockers.

[skybrian]

The problem they’re worried about is untrustworthy browser extensions that have broad permissions to do harm. There are over 100,000 extensions and from a security standpoint, not having good-enough sandboxing is a vulnerability.

More: https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/the-asymmetry-of-nudges

> In reality, Manifest V3 was meant to solve a real problem — and to do so for the right reasons. I know this because about eight years ago, we set out to conduct a survey of the privacy practices of popular browsers extensions. We were appalled by what we uncovered. From antivirus to “privacy” tools, a considerable number of extensions hoovered up data for no discernible reason. Some went as far as sending all the URLs visited by the user — including encrypted traffic — to endpoints served over plain text. Even for well-behaved extensions, their popularity, coupled with excessive permissions, opened the doors for abuse. The compromise of a single consumer account could have given the bad guys access to the digital lives of untold millions of users — exposing their banking, email, and more.

Maybe they could have avoided controversy by grandfathering in a few popular extensions and watching them closely?

[Brian_K_White]

There isn't much more to explain.

Every bad thing has to have some nominal selling point as the way to get everyone to take it.

mv3 sales pitch is to remove the ability for plugins to harm users.

It does do that, but:

1: Only by also removing plugins ability to help users

2: and giving google themselves and anyone else google approves of (entities who pay google or who have other influence like government) the very same ability to work against the user that they took away from anyone else. ie they control the entire browser let alone a plugin. They literally control what you can even see at all. You search and they choose whether something is in the results. You search with not-google and they still control if the dns resolves anything. You use other dns and they still control if the ssl is valid, which it doesn't matter if 11 techies know how to overcome all that, they still controlled what 7 billion people saw, and thus what they were allowed to even think, minus a handful of impervious super geniuses like you and me.

3: There are infinite possible ways to address the supposed problem of harmful plugins, just as there are infinite possible ways to attack any problem. Even if one decides to agree that it was necessary to do something about the problem, it was not necessary to do this about the problem.

There used to be a theory that apparently doesn't exist any more, about the appearance of impropriety. The idea goes that in any situation where someone has power over another, especially over the public at large, like a judge or a politician etc, where everyone has to simply trust that they are acting with integrity, that in fact no they don't have to simply trust. The appearance of impropriety is damning enough all by itself. Since no one can prove what someone was thinking, and the position carries enough responsibility and consequence, then the office holder doesn't get to say "it just looks like I awarded this contract to my brother because he's my brother, that's just a coincidense" That might be true in the absolute term like in physics where technically anything is literally possible. But since there is no way to disprove it, and the bad effects are bad enough, we don't have to prove it. The appearance of impropriety is enough, because anyone holding a position like that also already knows that they have a responsibility to act with integrity and not allow any possible question about that. They already know that they can't just give a contract to a family member. And so doing it anyway and expecting to be able to excuse it, is it's own form of impropriety regardless what quality work the brother will do or what the alternatives were.

Google removing utility from the user and granting it to themselves is way way more than merely "the appearance of impropriety".

It doesn't matter what harms some plugins have done.

[edanm]

> Serious question: what king did Google kill? They really didn't take down a big player in an existing industry, they started by being very good at search and displaced other search companies at a time when internet search wasn't a big business.

The answer is easy - Microsoft. They didn't directly take on MS's business, but in the general understanding of what was the big tech company, the one that gobbled up the best engineers, the one that startups were afraid would decide to compete with them - that was Microsoft in the late 1980s and 1990s, and it started shifting to Google.

And even though they didn't directly compete with them on being everyone's OS, they indirectly competed with them by turning the browser itself into, effectively, the OS everyone uses. They killed IE with Chrome, they made which OS you use far less relevant, they took over Mobile OS (shared with Apple, of course), and they are now competing on Cloud.

There is no question that what Google was from 2005ish to 2020ish, Microsoft was before that. You can even read pg articles about this exact thing.

[jononor]

"kill" is not a good metaphor in tech/markets, because established things and companies actually goes away. "Dethrone" is better, as the newer thing at some point becomes equal, and then dominant. But the old still exists, potentially staying in terms of absolute market value, but minority in terms of relative market value.

During the lifetime of Google: mobile has dethroned PC, video streaming has dethroned TV, SaaS over pay-once software, online advertising over physical, etc. Google has been a force in all of these (and more) - though not alone of course.

[jononor]

EDIT: because established.... rarely actually goes away

[fasa99]

google didn't so much kill a king as it maimed 6 billion peasants

[tinco]

No, that culture started turning against big tech when Microsoft and Oracle started very brazenly abusing their market domination in the late 90s.

The culture turned on Google around the same time Google lost their innocence and dropped the "Don't be evil" clause (note the dropping of that clause was not the cause, just one of the symptoms).

[ben_w]

Back in the 90s, at least in the UK, it wasn't called "big tech"; and it wasn't a major part of our direct culture as a family home might have one personal computer if they were well off but it wasn't all that important.

I suspect that even today you'd have a hard time finding a random person on the street who even knows that Oracle is a company and not a character from The Matrix or ancient Greek mythology. And if you tell them they bought Sun they'll think you mean the newspaper, if you talk about Java they'll either think you mean the island or are talking about a brand of coffee.

[thaumasiotes]

> around the same time Google lost their innocence and dropped the "Don't be evil" clause

When did that happen? It's still there.

[pfsalter]

Back in 2018 [1], at a similar time that there was a lot of moving about and restructuring. I think this is about the time that Google search started going downhill as well

[1] https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...

[thaumasiotes]

Again, the phrase was not dropped. You might notice that your link is titled "Google removes nearly all mentions of don't be evil from its code of conduct". (By which they mean 3 mentions.)

But as that article notes, they didn't drop the phrase. It's there now. It's always been there. There was never a time when they dropped it.