As an ex fanboy (or fanboy lite) who has circled into hater section of recent, I can give you MY reasoning.

For starters theres the whole "we're not evil", and slowly becoming evil with obsessive data mining. But it's a huge company, so only strike 1.

They haven't released any useful innovation in my eyes, despite hoarding all the smartest people. Strike 2.

And the biggest strike to me is the significant decrease in product quality that I use. My google searches suck now, maps has become bloated with ads, and I don't even know what happened to messenger, but its pretty unusable for my friends and I that even the ones that work at google now text. Maybe a lot of this is the fault of companies aggressively marketing irrelevant things to get clicks, but to me, it's a platform problem. Strike 3, I'm a hater.

Again YMMV, but this is my reasoning.

Mainly because of wasted potential, in my case. They revolutionized the internet (repeatedly) with a great product and found a reasonably unobtrusive method to monetize it, then moved into creating replacements for Microsoft products (browser, calendar, email, documents) and I thought they would then pivot into cloud as a good competitor to AWS, whilst also spending their copious profits on long-term scientific research projects and helping bring ML advances to the larger community.

It's even worse for me because I worked there for over a decade, was successful beyond my wildest dreams, helped leadership build and launch products, produced papers and intellectual property with my computing heros, and finally, couldn't really work in any of the parts of the company it made sense to, because of gatekeepers and assholes, and repeatedly had to explain to my managers how everything they were asking for (to make the VPs happy) were making Google's products worse. What's really sad is that there is a technical core of people there I truly enjoyed working with and learning from, and few of them get to do the stuff they know would help google, and instead spend most of their time fighting bureaucracy to get even the simplest changes pushed.

I think it stems for their beginning. The Google search page was innovative, in showing that you didn't need to be flashy, just good at what you do. The same for Gmail, which was an awesome product and completely changed how people use email. Even the original Google ads where viewed extremely favorable, as it showed that you could make money on ads, without them being obnoxious.

Google was, for a long time, viewed as the answer to everything that was wrong with search, emails, ads, office work and much more. Rather than changing the world, Google adopted all the things we had hoped they'd save us from, just so they could make more money.

That being said, I just ignore anything coming from Google these days. The only two Google products I use are Google Maps and YouTube. Oh, three maybe as I do like Go.

They turned evil when they started putting ads inline with search results. The main utility of that is to trick unsophisticated or unwary users, so basically they're preying on the elderly (among others), but it made the line go up and to the right, so they don't care.

Plus any company with a core business model of "being a super-creepy stalker... but at scale and with an eternal memory" is inherently terrible and shouldn't exist.

They have/had incredible potential. Imagine what a company with Google's resources could do. They have simultaneously the sharpest minds on the planet and a vast treasure chest of unprecedented proportions at their disposal.

What do they do? They invent ever more insidious ways of extract more money from advertising. Yes there are plenty of side shows and feel good projects, but everything is drowned out by systematically abusive behavior in the ad business and a seeming inability to deliver any other product and keep it functioning.

It feels like a terrible misallocation of resources. Maybe it isn't, but it certainly feels like it.

Because in the 2000, many of use got fooled believing "do no evil" and their hacker heart, only to see unfold the next 2 decades with sadness.

I am not a fanboy, have never been a fanboy and never cared about the "do no evil" marketing motto or any other Google crap. I am bitter against Google because it plainly sucks. Their products suck, they have "soft monopolies" and they have used them to Embrace Extend and Extinguish any alternatives. They are what Microsoft was in the 1990s-2000s. If you are young enough to remember the 90s and 00s Microsoft you will understand.

Note that I not only hate Google, I hate Google, Apple, Facebook and the current state of the web. I guess that makes me an old fart.

Because they started out good ("dont be evil" and all), providing an exceptional yet fundamental internet service but somewhere along the way they lost the plot. They now hoard enormous wealth by shoving ads to our faces yet have done nothing with the money. Not to mention their engineering culture goes directly against the spirit of this site (rest'n vest vs startup's hustle culture). They're the hero turned villain all start ups fear they'll become

They have by far the most awful customer service of any big tech company. One or two experiences of dealing with issues (in my case Google Fi) turns you into a life long hater.

It’s not just Google, but the cause for embarrassment at other formerly prestigious places is different and not relevant.

I used to dream of working on the Windows experience, but I can’t imagine how awful those roles must be. And having to tell someone I had a hand in creating the Windows 11 UI cluster**. I think I’d rather say I work at Oracle.

I imagine everyone here has had at least one beloved service end up on this list - https://killedbygoogle.com

When they literally had to remove "don't be evil" as their company slogan, on account of how evil they are, that did it for me.