I don’t think Google is evil. I also don’t think they were ever “good”. I think they are mostly just caught in a world where they have become the worlds largest advertising company but their primary platform is turning out to be less valuable. Yet because they are an advertising company they struggle to sell any products that aren’t advertisement.
I spent a long time in the Danish public sector, and if you don’t know this, the EU public sector is a billion dollar industry in terms of selling cloud services, and Google was never really an option. Which is sort of silly when you look at the tech. They had Office365 before it was cool, but because they couldn’t/wouldn’t guarantee privacy concerns they were never really able to sell it outside of education. So Microsoft casually strolled along and now dominate the market completely. Google has firebase (I think it’s called) which is arguably one of the best backends for 95% or the applications that I’ve seen build in the Danish public sector, and it’s used for 0% of them because Google never understood that what Microsoft sells to IT departments in non-tech enterprise organisations isn’t tech, it’s support. When something goes wrong with Azure, your CTO can tell the organisation that they are getting hourly updates on the situation directly from Redmond. When something goes wrong with Google Cloud, your CTO can use the same chat-bot you and I can, despite the multi-million budget difference. I think the most interesting part was how Amazon entered the market with a Google mentality, but then when AWS kept loosing to Azure they figured out why and are now even more compliant to what EU enterprise wants than even Microsoft. I mean, Azure still can’t completely live up to every aspect of the GDPR in terms of who services Azure global, AWS has been compliant since around 2020. I still remember how around 2018-2019 we went from taking with whatever Amazon support you and I probably talk to, to having a sales representative call us and get us hooked up with all sorts of compliance officers. Mean while Google sort of got even worse.
I mean, Google actually managed to do really well in education. At least here in Denmark, but “big Google” once again got in the way. This wasn’t for lack of trying by Google education, they have this really great team of people, and I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be for them to have “big Google” stomp on all their decade long efforts by not giving things like Chromebooks and Google education better privacy tools for kids.
I think it’s the same story for search. Search is a business for them and over the years the MBAs have focused too much on profits and too little on products. Fair enough, things like social media has made things harder. I mean, the reason you and I type “Reddit” in to our google searches isn’t only because Google got played by SEO, it’s also because people started putting their thoughts into social media instead of running blog wheels and using smaller forums.
I hope Google pulls around. I don’t think they are more evil than Microsoft. As an enterprise worker I love Microsoft, they sell you support and they listen to your business needs, and all those privacy invasive tools they are pushing these days are disabled in enterprise. But they aren’t doing it because they are “good” they are doing it because that is how you sell licenses. I do think their cloud dominance may get challenged as Azure pricing a keep rising and alternative options get cheaper, but who’s going to compete with Microsoft on Office365? But as a personal user, have you used the basic windows 11? It literally has commercials in your operating system, and since Windows 10 they have been “pre-installing” stuff like Minecraft and whatever that popular mobile game they own is called. And that is in their paid product, at least google search doesn’t charge you money on top of their advertising.
As an anecdote I think it was also interesting to see how Apple became very enterprise “unfriendly”. They owned education before google swooped in, and one of the primary reasons Apple lost initially was because they wouldn’t let IT departments “enroll” (sorry I’m not sure what “owning” the device and OS is called in Operations terms) their devices, which meant schools couldn’t block students from doing what they wanted. That’s since been fixed, but Apple is still what I’d call enterprise “unfriendly”. That works for Apple though, they obviously have a business strategy that’s doing well. But Google doesn’t similarly have one now that the floor is sort of falling out from under a lot of these “pay with your privacy” services.