Fourteen Years

It’s been fourteen years since I joined Google. Much has happened since then, and people think the old Google is dead. This is somewhat correct.

One way to understand what is happening is to compare and contrast the Google of yore and the present (as of late 2024) Google.

From Illegal Flower Tribute

Perhaps the most defining moment for Google around 2010 was Google Search’s exit from China. The reasons for the exit and the aftermath are many. The high level reason was due to non-capitulance to the Chinese government’s demands for censorship and compromising user data.

In addtion, Google’s hand was forced by Operation Aurora, a cyber attack on multiple US based companies including Google orchestrated by Chinese state actors.

The fascinating accounts of the events surrounding Operation Aurora is covered in a documentary called “Hacking Google”.

Amazon and Microsoft were in a similar situation as Google. But they were unwilling to turn away from access to the Chinese market. There was a palpable sense of pride that we were working for the right company.

To Project Nimbus

Time changes everything.

Eight years later Google reneged on its stance against censorship by attempting to build a censored search engine called Project Dragonfly. The seeds of capitulance was well under way by this point despite the fact that the censored search engine project was ultimately dropped.

Fast-forward a few more years and we get to Project Nimbus. Google signed the contract despite warnings by its lawyers that “Google Cloud services could be used for, or linked to, the facilitation of human rights violations…”.

One could argue that tools like Google Cloud services should be value-neutral. But even then, what matters here is that Google intentionally changed the terms-of-use for this contract to allow uses that were explicitly called out as going against Google’s values.

That’s Where We Are

And that’s where we are right now.

Google has had some rough years during which its relationship with the rest of the tech ecosystem and the world in general has changed. The old “focus on the user and all else shall follow” matra no longer applies. The company’s focus is now exclusively inwards where the fact that something benefits everyone is no longer justification to continue working on it. For example, Google laid off most of the core Python team. While it may seem like a move towards cheaper labor, it is more than that. The previous Python team were also industry veterans who were effectively in the service of the broader Python community far beyond Google. The replacements are people who are tasked with maintaining internal tooling and not much else.

Google is no longer the giant benefactor of technology for everyone. However it’s still better than the other big tech companies. I keep telling myself that.