It’s unfair to discount Google’s early days. They DID have technical excellence. Search was leagues better than the competition. Gmail was an amazing leap from other providers. Android started as trash but improved rapidly. The Nexus line of phones was amazing. Google Maps was a huge improvement over what else existed. They did a lot right.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when the fall started. Was it when Pichai became CEO? When they removed “don’t be evil?” I remember a speech Pichai gave where he talked about “more wood behind fewer arrows” as why they were getting rid of employee child projects, so maybe it was that.
Gmail really wasn’t any better than Hotmail at first, it was just that they gave you a huge (at the time) amount of storage, when Hotmail users regularly had to delete old mail or attachments.
It’s unfair to discount Google’s early days. They DID have technical excellence. Search was leagues better than the competition. Gmail was an amazing leap from other providers. Android started as trash but improved rapidly. The Nexus line of phones was amazing. Google Maps was a huge improvement over what else existed. They did a lot right.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when the fall started. Was it when Pichai became CEO? When they removed “don’t be evil?” I remember a speech Pichai gave where he talked about “more wood behind fewer arrows” as why they were getting rid of employee child projects, so maybe it was that.
Gmail really wasn’t any better than Hotmail at first, it was just that they gave you a huge (at the time) amount of storage, when Hotmail users regularly had to delete old mail or attachments.
It started off by beating the pants off of iOS in terms of features, but was not nearly as polished.
Definitely not trash. But also not polished for the masses.