DeveloperZen.com - Google

Dare has written a post that claims there's an exodus from Google to Microsoft. The post is driven by his own observations and a post entitled Back to Microsoft from Sergey Solanik detailing his departure to Microsoft.
Sergey's post contains some very interesting observations:

So why did I leave?

There are many things about Google that are not great, and merit improvement. There are plenty of silly politics, underperformance, inefficiencies and ineffectiveness, and things that are plain stupid. I will not write about these things here because they are immaterial. I did not leave because of them. No company has achieved the status of the perfect workplace, and no one ever will.

I left because Microsoft turned out to be the right place for me.

First, I love multiple aspects of the software development process. I like engineering, but I love the business aspects no less. I can't write code for the sake of the technology alone - I need to know that the code is useful for others, and the only way to measure the usefulness is by the amount of money that the people are willing to part with to have access to my work.

Sorry open source fanatics, your world is not for me!

Google software business is divided between producing the "eye candy" - web properties that are designed to amuse and attract people - and the infrastructure required to support them.

And some observations of Google's culture (bolding was done by me):

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On the other hand, I was using Google software - a lot of it - in the last year, and slick as it is, there's just too much of it that is regularly broken. It seems like every week 10% of all the features are broken in one or the other browser. And it's a different 10% every week - the old bugs are getting fixed, the new ones introduced. This across Blogger, Gmail, Google Docs, Maps, and more.

This is probably fine for free software, but I always laugh when people tell me that Google Docs is viable competition to Microsoft Office. If it is, that is only true for the occasional users who would not buy Office anyway. Google as an organization is not geared - culturally - to delivering enterprise class reliability to its user applications.

The culture part is very important here - you can spend more time fixing bugs, you can introduce processes to improve things, but it is very, very hard to change the culture. And the culture at Google values "coolness" tremendously, and the quality of service not as much. At least in the places where I worked.

Since I've been an infrastructure person for most of my life, I value reliability far, far more than "coolness", so I could never really learn to love the technical work I was doing at Google.

Dare also quotes Svetlin Nakov that also have some interesting things to say about the Google culture:

"Google interview were not professional. It was like Olympiad in Informatics. Google asked me only about algorithms and data structures, nothing about software technologies and software engineering. It was obvious that they do not care that I had 12 years software engineering experience. They just ignored this. The only think Google wants to know about their candidates are their algorithms and analytical thinking skills. Nothing about technology, nothing about engineering."

"Google employ everybody as junior developer, ignoring the existing experience. It is nice to work in Google if it is your first job, really nice, but if you have 12 years of experience with lots of languages, technologies and platforms, at lots of senior positions, you should expect higher position in Google, right?"

This just demonstrates another cultural problem - Google doesn't hire the right people for the job.
Granted, young, enthusiastic developers, with string academic background (and probably several degrees) can do some cool innovative stuff. These are exactly the type of guys you would want in your R&D department.
But it also the type that tends to loose interest when the research phase ends and the projects has goes to scaling and maintenance phases where you have to deal with stuff like support, maintenance (Google doesn't even provide a roadmap for its products), localization, scalability, ...

The bottom line is, as Dare concluded, is that Google isn't a small startup anymore but it still thinks and acts like it is - in its hiring policies, internal processes and culture.
When measuring it up against other software giants it simply seems to lack...

As Fortune sums it up:

Think about that. Google recently made headlines by bidding almost $5 billion in a government auction of wireless spectrum, even though the company had no plan for using it. Some of its more peculiar products include Google Sky, Google Mars, and Google Ride Finder. It has become a significant investor in alternative-energy projects. Yes, alternative energy. And its founders fret that its risk-taking days are over? Then again, Google's biggest risk may be recreating the magic it enjoyed as a startup- that intangible quality that makes Silicon Valley tick. Paul Buchheit, the former Google engineer who is on to his second startup now, recalls what he loved about Google's early days. "I was always so excited at Google, because I didn't know what would happen next," he says. "Then I knew what would happen next." Predictability is a virtue in the world of big business. It's just not particularly Googley.

Maybe some of us in the industry were writing off Microsoft and crowning Google a little bit too soon...

When asked about Microsoft last week at the GarageGeeks event, Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, answered that "Microsoft has a monopoly on being the bad guy".
Well, I guess Evil is subjective as we're seeing more and more news items like this from Google:

Google kills Anonymous AdSense account

How Scientology funded the anti-Scientology movement

By Cade Metz in San Francisco → More by this author

Published Wednesday 14th May 2008 18:52 GMT

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Exclusive Google has murdered the AdSense account run by one of the web's most influential anti-Scientology sites.

Yesterday, the search giant cut off all ads served to Enturbulation, a fledgling site dedicated to promoting activism against the Church of Scientology and all its related organizations. This could have something do with the nature of the ads Google was serving. Many of the Google-driven ads funding the anti-Scientology site were paid for by the Church of Scientology.

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About half a year ago, just before my lengthy travels to Bangalore and Seattle I came to the conclusion that its about time to take my emails online so that they'll be accessible from anywhere, not just the Outlook client on my personal machine.

Google Applications for your Domains seemed like exactly what I needed:

• I could keep my ekampf.com email address
• 5GB of online storage - no need to take care of backups etc.
• GMail's spam filter
• GMail's web interface which is a lot better than the interface my domain host had to offer
• Online Calendar and Address Book

Included Services:

• Email (obviously)
• Calendar
• Start Page

"The personalized start page is a syndicated version of iGoogle, allowing you to set up dynamic homepages for your users that bring together your content, Google services, and the best of the web."

• Chat - GTalk integrated with the Email service
• Web Pages - Allows you to create web pages for your domain using the Google Page Creator.
• Sites

"Google Sites is an online application that makes creating a team web site as easy as editing a document. With Google Sites, people can quickly gather a variety of information in one place - including videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and text - and easily share it for viewing or editing with a small group, an entire organization, or the world."

So, how do Google Apps stand up to the expectations?

The Good

Setup

Setting up my Google Apps for Domains account and configuring my domain was quick, smooth and simple.

Migration from Another Online Service via POP

GMail supports getting mail from other accounts via POP3. Simply go to your Google Apps mailbox, click Settings|Accounts and you can add a POP3 account for Google to fetch information from. I fetched all the information from my old email account without any problems.

When I wanted to import the mail items from my gmail.com account I got a message saying that GMail for Apps can't import from a Gmail mailbox via POP.
You have to use Outlook\Thu8nderbird as an alternative...

Migration from Outlook

Since I was using Outlook as my main email client before switching I had lots of emails on a local PST file (and several backup PST).
In order to move all these emails to Google I used Google's IMAP support in Outlook and drag-and-dropped all my items from the PST into Google's IMAP folder.

Note #1: that the Outlook 2007 support for IMAP sucks. It simply hangs when trying to move a large amount of items, so you have to perform this operation on small item batches....

Note #2: You can use this method to migrate mail items from any online service that Outlook can connect to. I used it to migrate my gmail.com account too...

Mobile Support

Google's mobile HTML interface for GMail works great. They've also got a GMail Mobile application that I've installed on my E65.
Now I can really access my mailbox from anywhere...

The Bad

Migration from GMail accounts

As noted in the previous section, Google Apps do not support fetching items via POP from Gmail mailboxes. I'd expect Google to make migration from GMail to Google Apps smoother, allowing me to merge my accounts.
This leads us to the second point which I find most annoying...

Severity: Bad.

Google Accounts CHAOS - Google Apps Accounts ARE NOT Google Accounts

So far, that's the most annoying issue with Google Apps.
I expected Google to support identity federation but they don't. My Google Apps account can only be used for logging into my Google Apps (mail, calendar, docs, etc.). In order to access any other services Google has to offer (Google Reader, Google Code, Analytics, Adsense...) I have to keep a gmail.com account (which means another mailbox etc.).

I can't tell you how annoying it is that in order to use the new friends feature of Google Reader I have to add all my contacts to the gmail.com address book and GTalk. I have to maintain two identities to be able to work with Google...

Severity: Awful.

Different Codebase Than Regular Google Services

It seems that the Google Apps codebase branched out of the main Google development code.
This is most noticeable when looking at iGoogle vs. Google Apps Homepage.
Google Apps users do not get the latest features and Google is in communication blackout as to its plans for Google Apps.
There's no Google Apps Blog, no roadmap describing Google's plan for this service and I haven't noticed any enhancement in the service so far.

Seems like Google just came up with an initial beta for a bunch of services, branched out from its main codebase and just left the project hanging in mid-air.

Severity: Awful.

Google APIs are not Compatible with Google Apps

I'm using Plaxo to sync my Address Book and Calendar between all my devices, computers and online accounts.
From all the services out there, only Google's calendar sync was buggy until not long ago (seems to work fine now) and Address Book sync doesn't work at all (it supposed to work one way only according to Plaxo but I was never actually able to get that work at all).

There seems to be all sorts of compatibility issues between Google services APIs and Google Apps.

Seems like I'm not the only one suffering here as Zoli posted about his Google Apps troubles too...

Severity: Bad.

Google Start Page

Simply doesn't measure up to its iGoogle brother and the other competitors. It looks bad and there enough good content available to make it usable...

Severity: Bad.

The Summary - Google Apps Chaos

For the simple use of online email, Google Apps deliver what is expected of it.
However, it seems like Google is in chaos with its services strategy:

• You have to maintain several identities to use different Google services.
• No clear roadmap for Google Apps. As a customer, I hate the uncertainty...
• Google Apps are branched out from Google. Again no word from Google on feature parity or integration efforts...

Google Apps could have been a great service for individuals and small businesses, but (as usual) Google seems to be missing it and yet again
providing us with a functionality impaired "beta" and no vision...

Maybe its time to look for alternatives. Microsoft Live seem to handle most of the mentioned issues so its worth to take a look...

 

I've mentioned before my Google Reader Links Blog.
I can easily share links from blogs I read on Google Reader instead of filling my blog with link posts.

Today, the Google Reader team added social networking features!
Here's the help page describing how to use the feature: http://www.google.com/support/reader/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83041

So join up! My Google name is ekampf AT gmail.com.
Add me as a friend, particularly if you are also sharing items in Google Reader.
Still link blogging the old fashion way? Time for you to seriously consider switching to Google Reader too...

Too bad this doesn't integrate with my Google Apps account which kind of makes me own a GMail account in addition to my Google Apps mail.

Update (via Scoble):

Apparently, the new Friends feature in Google Reader doesn't handle duplicate posts.
Kinda make it useless doesn't it? Oh well...

Anyway, I probably don't have as many "Reader Friends" as Scoble has, and it doesn't create more clatter than subscribing to my friends shared feeds - which I do anyway.
Therefore, my call remains the same: share good stuff and add me as your friend

Update #2: Workaround for Google Reader's Suckage

Google is just another big (Evil?) cooperate entity like the rest of them.

Check out this post from the founders of Dodgeball that was acquired by Google.

It's no real secret that Google wasn't supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn't convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space. And while it was a tough decision (and really disappointing) to walk away from dodgeball, I'm actually looking forward to getting to work on other projects again.

...

ps: Clear your calendar for this Saturday (April 21). A whole crew of us are dj'ing to celebrate our escape. (details + invite coming soon!)

is this a tipping point in how Google is perceived?

Growing up is hard... It seems that Google's management are trying to get a handle on the chaos that is Google but in doing so it is killing some of its own innovation and what made it attractive to entrepreneurial developers.
Big companies have some trouble getting small new ideas. The challenge is to maintain a company culture that tries to avoid this as much as possible...

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