Alphabet Inc (GOOGL) is a company that I have been slowly losing interest in. Over the past ten years, I have felt the company shift from being a company focused on having the best engineers working that wouldn’t shy away from a challenge into something that is much less appealing to me.
Here is a message that I sent to the fastai community in December of 2023 that wrap up my feelings about Google fairly completely:
Has anybody else been very underwhelmed by Google recently? I have had three separate events that have frustrated me recently:
- Google has been “releasing” things into the ML ecosystem, but not actually giving people access to them. This seems to be a trend that keeps happening. Why even announce something if you aren’t going to give people the ability to use it.
- Google has created icons that are very popular for developers to use, but they refuse to publish their library to npm (which is a pretty major package manager to ignore) and the github package they maintain says they are “low on time and resources”. relavant github issue On top of that, the actual source of these icons is an internal google repository so they won’t even take PRs to help add new icons to the library (technically this one is a continued issue from 2020)
- I have been noticing more half-baked features on popular google apps like maps. They have a comment feature on saved lists that lets you add a little note, but it tries to save after each character and makes it really difficult to type because it will save over your text unless you type one character at a time…
I’m just curious if other people have had similar frustrations with Google at the moment or if I’m running into more issues than most people. I know Google is a huge company and I know they have contributed a lot of research into the ML community so maybe I am just expecting too much from them. If you had asked me 6 months ago, I would have definitely considered Google a better open source steward than IBM, but recently I think my sentiment on this has flipped.