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Google figured out how to create a classless suite of internet services for anyone on Earth with an internet connection to use. I struggle to see how this didn't meet their original goals, what people celebrated about Google, and what made Google such an attractive place for people like the author to work.
What's fascinating is that Google gets virtually zero recognition for this (Google services are largely taken for granted), and beyond that, Google is one of the most hated corporations for it.
So if we use Google as a case study for "progressive business", having mostly succeeded at giving the poorest people one Earth an equal product to the richest people on Earth, what is the takeaway?
> What's fascinating is that Google gets virtually zero recognition for this, and beyond that, Google is one of the most hated corporations for it.
You can both love and hate something at the same time. Humans have complexity and nuance, don't dismiss that.
It's also worth noting that complaints are more vocal than complements. If things are working well then it's usually quiet. Nothing to say. But when shit goes wrong people talk because they want it fixed. Don't let this bias fool you into thinking that appreciation isn't happening. Appreciation is generally silent while hatred is vocal. That's not isolated to the internet either
Well, they aren't hated for the tech they built, that is cool and easily appreciated.
People don't like google because they turned it into a way to sell people to others for a profit in essence. Over time more and more intrusive to the point where they are no longer worth any of the services they offer. Like a creepy stalker following you every where you go, at some point you need a restraining order.
Most people don't even realize the creepy stalker exists though.
In general, this is just the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics combined with armchair quarterbacking. Google’s services, like Amazon’s, create unbelievably large amounts of value for people of which these companies capture a tiny fraction.
However, these are fairly popular brands with positive associations for the majority of people. Online commentary is from a self-selected group and cynicism stands in as the poor man’s substitute for analysis.
Yes, both rich and poor people will use Google's free services. It's sort of like how a can of Coke is the same no matter who you are.
But also, Google sells plenty of "premium" products to people who are willing to pay, starting with YouTube premium. And I'm getting lots of upsells when using Google Meet these days.
They de-facto created a monopoly. You can reason that its services
are useful, but without also pointing out that they established a
de-facto monopoly, this "analysis" is very incomplete.
> what people celebrated about Google
When exactly? Google initially was not anywhere near as problematic as it is today. I don't see many celebrate Google these days.
> what made Google such an attractive place for people like the author to work.
Was it ever? It also feels it used to be more attractive in the past. Nowadays you do not see any such yubilant posts about Google anymore. People complain a lot more about Google.
> What's fascinating is that Google gets virtually zero recognition for this (Google services are largely taken for granted), and beyond that, Google is one of the most hated corporations for it.
That's also not true. Some of Google's service are still popular such as Google Maps. You see very little criticism about it. But in other parts, Google revealed how truly evil it is. Be it the fight against ublock origin or Google locking down Android or dominating the www via abusing adChromium. Nope, sorry, the criticism against Google is totally warranted. Years ago I did not understand the de-google movement. Now I am of the opposite opinion and even more extreme. I think Google has to be removed from this planet as entity. Someone needs to chop it up. The US courts are too corrupt and bribed to change anything. I think the people need to fix Google, by no longer using it. This is difficult, I get it; I am still using Google, such as youtube. That's actually my biggest use case of Google. The browser (thorium) is the second loophole here but in theory I could use firefox.
> So if we use Google as a case study for "progressive business", having mostly succeeded at giving the poorest people one Earth an equal product to the richest people on Earth, what is the takeaway?
That's like saying Al Capone is a saint. You try to connect evil with good. There is no connection here. Google remains an evil corporation even if it makes useful services. But it also kills existing services - look at the Google graveyard. Look how they crippled its search engine. Google pisses off people - why do you not see this? You basically wrote an eulogy for Google here. No specific criticism at all.
Google is loved for the things they built that cause people to love Google (GMail, Search, Drive, K8s, Android, Patents, Books, Nest, Wave, Workspace, YouTube) and Google is hated for the things they built that cause people to hate Google (the targeted advertising money machine, Google+, the many negative second-order effects of their loved products). I don't see these two things being mutually exclusive. On balance, I think more people have a positive opinion of Google than do for Microsoft, Amazon, or Facebook.
Also, humans are a pretty tough audience when it comes to utilities, with that hedonistic adaptation and all. You don't see many people walking around waxing lyrical about the wonders of modern sanitation, water purification, and plumbing -- but people do complain about water bills.
> Google is one of the most hated corporations for it.
This is such a terminally online take. It's important to not look at the bubble you're in and get fooled into thinking it's a representative microcosm when it almost never is.
I'm reminded of when Quora was hyped up on HN and in Silicon Valley in general. VCs were waxing lyrical about how "everyone" they knew was using it but "everyone" here was "everyone they knew", which is a subset of "everyone in the VC/SV space".
Google is not hated by the general public. My basis for this is the 2025 Harris poll on company reputation [1].
[1]: https://www.axios.com/2025/05/20/axios-harris-poll-company-r...
Love Google for what it once was, hate it for what it became.
What’s also fascinating is that such a company has zero provision for human-involved tech support…
If you can’t login, you’re screwed.
My library is free (to me), but I can still get someone to help me if the card doesn’t work…
Nobody hated Google for making search, they hated Google for converting search from search into a money grab.
> So if we use Google as a case study for "progressive business", having mostly succeeded at giving the poorest people one Earth an equal product to the richest people on Earth, what is the takeaway?
How should the people of Gaza thank Google for Google's Project Nimbus etc. targeting them for blockade starvation and bombings?
As Anatole France said - they have to work before the laws' majestic equality, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
This is how I feel about excel whenever someone dismisses msft. The ultimate software for the anyman.
> What's fascinating is that Google gets virtually zero recognition for this (Google services are largely taken for granted), and beyond that, Google is one of the most hated corporations for it.
I feel like this is some majorly false revisionist history. At least in my circles, Google was revered and lauded up until 2010-2012 or so, whenever enshittification started in earnest. And this isn't just some outsider opinion. Look at some of the original early Google communication where they highlighted how their ads were always separate and easily identifiable from organic results, and how that eroded over the years. Heck, there was a front page article today on NYTimes, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/technology/google-ai-open..., talking about how Google used to be an "open Internet champion" and is now an "AI gatekeeper". Google's corporate ethos from their early years is basically unrecognizable today, and that's why people hate them.
The hate towards Google only started picking up steam as they snowballed into deciding (like pretty much all corporate enterprises) that growth at all costs is the only purpose of corporations, and when they became the poster child (rightfully so IMO) for surveillance capitalism.
1. Vocal minority will be, by definition, the loudest. And complainers/haters tend to be more vocal. Studies have looked at which emotions lead people to share, and outrage tops the list; satisfaction barely ranks.
2. Speaking of satisfaction, there is hedonic adaption to consider. None of us walk around day to day screaming, "Oh my god, airplanes! Computers! Tropical fruit! WiFi! Indoor plumbing!" We just acclimate, and it becomes background noise.
3. I think, culturally, there is just massive distrust for corporations. Look at any Hollywood movie or popular work of fiction. If there's a corporation, it's inherently evil, and helmed by some sort of sociopath who wants to harm as many people as possible.
I think google hate is summarised nicely by their removal of the "do no evil" slogan.
I suppose the takeaway for me is: don't serve up SEO shit.
Which product(s) are equal to the products richest people on earth use?
Well, maybe because of the two ungrateful college students who dared to write in their essay the following notorious statement:
> We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.
I highly recommend you to blame these two guys for their lack of recognition of how great Google is, here is their name: Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page.
You do realize
> having mostly succeeded at giving the poorest people one Earth an equal product to the richest people on Earth
is equivalent in this scenario of saying:
> having mostly succeeded at exploiting the poorest people one Earth an equal amount to the richest people on Earth.
While the poorest people have less already, right?
When claire stopped writing the tgif emails I was very sad, among others I talked to. When I heard, years later, about all this bs she went through, it helped crack the illusion for me. So sad.
I can't help but see most of this as Claire using her gift of elegant prose and crafting narratives to retell a story of a prodigy that had a great product-market fit in the beginning then was unable to maintain relevancy while becoming bitter at the people around her. It must be so difficult to start out as a shining star then watch something you helped shape grow away from you. It looks like some powerful people at Google tried very hard to keep her with all these dramatic job changes. I always thought the walk-out seemed more dramatic and showy than people actually working for positive change (virtue signaling for their careers/to get their 5min), but I was very much on the outside. Seems hard all around.
Not sure it's still virtue signaling when you sacrifice your job. That might actually be virtue.
I wonder though, what counts as actual virtue for some people.
The main bitterness is pretty clearly directed at Google's handling of internal sexism and sexual misconduct, culminating at what seems to be pretty direct (but underhanded) retaliation at the organizers of the walkout during a time when they gathered sustained internal and external publicity, leading to her immediate departure. Are you claiming the real spark of that conflict was her "being bitter at the people around her due to being unable to maintain relevancy" and not any real convictions she held regarding the known misconduct at the company? Seems like a dubious accusation to me in that case.
I didn't get that vibe from this piece at all. Claire sounds disillusioned more than she sounds bitter, and I really don't see too much supporting the narrative about her becoming upset because of her lack of relevancy.
I was there 06-25, and this matches my recollection. Honestly, it's a very restrained document.
Agreed. From firsthand experience, it's accurate, captures the feeling of being there at that time, and is more restrained than I would have been.
This story naturally ends after Claire's departure, but "that the era of sanctioned dissent was over" did not mean that dissent was over. The lesson for many was that "asking nicely" wasn't working. I believe that realization that real power was needed to in order to make change was a big part of why the Alphabet Workers Union was able to get off the ground. Of course it hasn't gotten the numbers to actually build much power, sadly.
Hasn't yet. No need to be defeatist about organizing. All of the other things tech workers have to be defeatist about (pointless hype cycles, layoffs, etc.) show no signs of stopping and will effectuate more organizing over time.
It wasn't over at that time. The real shift was after those people broke into Thomas Kurian's office. Right after, they permanently cracked down hard on various forms of employee expression, including posting flyers.
FYI: this is an excerpt from https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Be-Evil-Bosses-Promises/dp/00634...
Fun easter egg: the barcode on the cover (the one on the left at least) is for the book's ISBN.
I actually enjoyed the first hand experience of an early-ish Google described at the beginning. For those with enough tenure in tech, was this ethos unique (at the time)? Or was it typical of successful, tech-heavy startups? I could believe an early Sun might've felt similar but I don't know.
I don't know where else to express gratitude for the delightful read that this was.
I wish to hope that more and more people are seeing the hollowness of all that these corporations posture and profess.
I remember this period of Google very vividly, it felt absolutely surreal to see everything about the company immediately leaked to the press and getting insane media coverage. Younger me was very skeptical and it was hard for me to reconcile what the truth was given the broader political climate and my own anecdata that none of the women I worked with empathized with or shared the experiences of the internal activists.
At the time, I had a gutt feeling that all of the stories I read on internal threads and that the loudest voices, largely came from women in non-engineering/product roles, and this article (+book) has somewhat confirmed that for me. Even Sergei cheated on his wife with a woman in marketing in 2013.
Since the majority of Google is engineers, I believe Claire's movement ultimately failed because most of the company (again, engineers), looked to their peers and didn't see any of the systemic issues the movement espoused.
I'm glad James Damore's arguments were correctly strawmanned
James Damore won, we're living in his world. Or the Gamergate world. It makes me wonder why though, it's not as if half the country and many of the engineers don't still have the same progressive values. Honestly I think it's just the power of the rich men with all the money. SWE's labor power has been slipping away ever since Elon's "let that sink in" and this will only continue to accelerate.
I'm struck at how brutal it is to be a woman in even pseudo-progressive tech spaces at times. How talking the talk does nothing if HR and leadership quickly and quietly work to undermine at all and make life hell. The HR line of "we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing" always feels surreal.
Google, Apple, Amazon, MS etc don't seem to be the default place for top EECS grads anymore. Maybe middling candidates and H1b prisoners but 4.0 GPA grads with personal projects end up at NVIDIA, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. And Meta, because they still pay insane.
> “We need moon shots,” Larry would say, big, world-changing ideas and initiatives, to make employees excited about innovating again. (Curing cancer wasn’t necessarily a moon shot, he once suggested, since it would only extend the average human life span by about three years.)
And yet I'd much prefer to have one kid with cancer be saved and allowed to live an average lifespan than to have thousands of old rich people extend their extractive existences for decades.
> One recounted a tragicomic anecdote from a T.G.I.F. meeting on International Women’s Day, when a Googler had asked Larry and Sergey to name some of their personal female heroes.
..and they couldn’t just say “Grace Hopper”? These people have used computers before, right?
> in 2023, Google laid off some twelve thousand people, representing around six per cent of its workforce, and, in the years that followed, an estimated four hundred thousand jobs were eliminated across tech
This right here, ooh you're so close! Those 400k people were fired because white collar workers, as a bloc, became powerful, and started making demands of management, demands like "you should do something about social inequality." During the height of the pandemic, most of that energy was focused on race. And those demands were met! C-suite executives and board members were forced by their white collar employees to implement DEI initiatives at work, put pronouns in their email signatures, have complex conversations about social power and race and gender at company all-hands. These same people are now sitting behind Donald Trump at his inauguration.
Did they do those DEI things in 2021 because they wanted to, or because they had to? And if they had to, what power compelled them? Remember: these people gave 90 million dollars to someone who coerced one of his own employees to do oral sex on him in a hotel room!
The way I read this is that a company will sacrifice everything (in this case, incredible corporate culture) to maintain the balance of power between management and employee. As soon as I started reading about internal organizing, I knew exactly where this story was going to end.
Your job description re-written at the drop of a hat, sudden re-org and alienation from coworkers, feeling like an interloper at your own job, sudden gaslighting - that is what real power looks like. The only reason she was not immediately fired is because of actual labor laws, which H.R. knows inside and out. Were those laws not on the books every single one of those googler moms in that group chat would be fired within 24 hours. They probably were all pushed out in a manner exactly like Claire within the span of a few months. With a paper trail to CYA in case of a suit.
TGIF at my non-Google startup, founded by xooglers, reeked of the same brototypical sweaty odor alluded to in this story.
The Voice of Google - should be silenced. I don't want to hear any more Google propaganda in general. From "acceptable ads" to trying to kill ublock origin - enough is enough.