If you are a technology news addict then you have probably already come across this article called “Why I Left Google” by James Whittaker. It is a very telling tale with some prize quotes about the industry, Google, and social media.
I encourage you to read his article. There are a lot of great insights there. My favorite paragraph was this one:
As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.
Indeed. There was a time when Google was improving the web. Those days have past, hopefully Google and their employees can recapture that vision. Time will tell but I will hold the breadth of my opinion until Google IO.