Jason B
Chicago, IL

MS & Yahoo - they reached a plateau in which they felt comfortable and were happy to mantain a growing market share (and revenues) due to a lack of competition. How long has it taken for them to improve their solutions? FireFox took a leap over IE in just about a year. They quickly gained over 15% market share and only then did MS react with IE 7.0.

The Browser War is not over..

The comment on which company would you rather work for is ironic in this context. Guess where a lot of the NetScape folks have landed? Hint - Seattle is a bit far from Mountain View and Palo Alto!

As far as recruiting talented engineers, Google has demonstrated that “The Valley” is still the place to find that premier talent. Too much history, too much experience and innovation. No place comes even close to it. Also, I have been at MS HQs in Seattle and found it to be an sterile environment, unlike the general “work hard but here is all this to play with in between breaks” culture that prevails in the Silicon Valley.

It’s interesting how MS went from a humble culture to an IBM (their behemoth at one point) style culture. Another irony..

MS deserves what it is getting but getting into that requires writing a book.

I haven’t even gotten into the subject of Linux and REAL Talent..

No, I don’t work for any of the companies mentioned though I worked as a consultant for one of them at one point, and no it’s not Google.

Why the misrepresentation of Mr. Ballmer’s quote?

if they werent seo hell-bent on implementing the whole thing on their own proprietary OS/server products and languages, and stopped jacking up their salaries to try to coax developers away from the ‘cooler’ google, they could save a lot of money.

thankfully, ubuntu will praobily drop the bottom out of their OS/Office income over the next 5 years. and theyll start a slow unwinding until they are as remembered as Banyan Vines of Novell, and currency inflation will relegate their sizable cash position to pocket change.

what i wonder though is whats the big deal about any of these 3 companies. sure ive used google’s search since 1998 after switching off AltaVista, but havent even clicked on a single ad banner in all that time. i could definitely do without a centralized search engine, just finding sites via word-of-mouth and embedded links..i think most people could, unless theyre trying to find stuff to copy/paste into their high-school homework

i mean, unless you want to work on photosharing or online office suite at one of these behemoths, and endure a 1 hour bus ride to a suburban hell-hole of multi-million dollar homes, youre pretty much SOL and broke. i know i’m in that category. the market was more interesting when these behemoths hadnt sucked up all the talent and interesting companies , usually never to be heard from again..

in fact the only thing i think any of these companies could provide to me that would be any use would be a way to pay my rent. and the only way they could do that is if i go work for them. kind of orwellian, huh?

http://www.googlestore.com/

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That’s not a store dumbass. I wanna hop in my car, and go to this place; watch fat white trash compare prices on shampoo and get stared at by toothless women. I’m not a Wal-Mart fan but, you know you go sometimes just to look at the people and don’t really buy anything. Just sitting on a chair and shopping for something that won’t arrive for another 24 hours to three days isn’t a fucking store.

And who*s saying that google is everybodys darling? In fact they are not that beloved little search engine company we’ve used to know, but a global player in the internet business. And I dont have so much sympathy for that…

They wanted my trust and I gave it - I have used GMail in fact my entire office at Socialtext uses GMail instead of using an exchange server - the idea here being we are also part of Office 2.0 and should support others out there that are part of our group - an office with out Microsoft exchange.

I was in love with my Gmail, I set it up to pop serv into my email client on my Mac iBook - is was easy to set up and I was living the email life, it didn’t even feel like I didn’t have an exchange server. This was really working - they had me - a fan forever, and a product champion convincing others to do the same as I had.

And then it all came crashing down - Monday afternoon at 1:15pm my fantasy with google ended - I got error message after error message my password did not match my email client said - I reset everything, I even reinstalled the F*&(%$@ Software - I sent in a bug report detailing what I had done. I read the help pages, I called my friend who works on Macs, I joined a google group to ask for help. NOTHING- I sent another bug report - NOTHING.

It was determined by those smarter than I that it was not my computer, not my email client - it was GOOGLE - and they were not responding - I sent at least 3 bug reports none where responded to. When I worked at Amazon we had a company standard of getting back to people within 24 hrs. I live via my email as I am sure we all do. And to be honest it’s not just the lost email. It’s the fact that I spent all of Tuesday trying to work out how to fix it. Google once again proves the fact that THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH - pay with your duckets or pay with your time. So as of today at 10:30 am on Wednesday I have not heard back from Google - and they want me to trust them with documents - forget it. I will never and I encourage you all to refuse.

There is a great point that is at debate here - we heard about it at my Office 2.0 conference - is Software as a Service a must have? I would rather pay 40 bucks a month to have my gmail work - then to have it not work and to not even receive a reply - I want my Software but I want the service, I want to be able to have someone troubleshoot in a timely fashion when something does not work and I can not fix it.

And if you work at Google and are reading this - please HELP…….

On a serious note, don’t be fooled by Google image from the late 90’s or how they want you to think they are now. They are a public company and shareholders come frist. Open source, mopen sourse … cretive, shreative … it’s a place to work like Yahoo! and Microsoft. They’re making the same mistakes Yahoo! & Microsoft have made, so the halo will be gone (if no already) and they won’t stay a darling forever.

When the social stigma against people who leave Google is gone (I bet you would question the sanity of anyone leaving that place, regardless of the reason, right?), you will see the reverse migration.

When giants go down, they go down hard.