"The company remains trapped in its “10 blue links” jail, even as the world moves toward direct, conversational AI interfaces."<p>I don't want conversational AI interfaces. I like search.<p>If I lose that because it's a losing model, then so be it. But I don't see the point in telling Google to follow somebody else's trend.<p>They suck in so many ways, but this doesn't add to it. I find this kind of "what have you done for me lately" just a little weird. They have done zillions of crappy things and a dozen earth shaking ones. If the next earth shaking one comes from someone else I don't see any point in waggling my finger at Google over it.
A couple of things have struck me about Google as an outsider:<p>- Learning that they had 100K+ employees<p>- Seeing resumes from people who had spent 5+ years at Google and had a project list with what I would expect from <1 year at a hedge fund or <3 years at a bank<p>- Learning about the "I want to just serve 5 Terabytes" video/story [0]<p>- Hiring people away from Google who were, for example, network engineers who turned out to be great SREs with good programming skills<p>- They just kill off greats apps that people enjoy with little to no notice (granted, keeping stuff around forever ala AWS is its own issue)<p>In other words, they became a big corporate behemoth and lost a lot of their "spark". Which is sad b/c I remember the early days of using Google search, Google maps etc where it felt like we were all living in the future.<p>Sure, they are breaking ground in the AI space but 100% agree that it feels like they are on the downward trajectory.<p>(although other firms have been here and come back so let's see...)<p>0 - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI</a>
What is this dumb article? Gemini pro 2.5 is getting talked a lot about in AI circles. AI Studio team is cracked and has been able to avoid the committee virus.
Google has problems but this piece is written by someone who is not knowledgeable about this company and the space at all.
Google Maps is just a live traffic data set now. I use it during my commute, and its ability to tell me the speed limit of a road segment is deteriorating over time. Google doesn't need any fancy machine learning algorithms to work out what the speed limit of a road is; they just need to work with local governments to get their databases of speed limits. The whole product increasingly reeks of issues that couldn't be replicated in an open-plan office in Mountain View, so probably aren't real.
Does anyone use Google for search any more? My browser default for five years has been duckduckgo. More recently, for any factual question (as opposed to just finding some organization's website given its name, which DDG does fine) I use perplexity. Or on my phone, Claude.
If Google would have been broken up because of anti-trust regulations all of the individual parts would be hyper-focused. And wouldn't shutter from one day to another.
> "I was an early Webpass customer. Back then, before Google acquired it"<p>The monopolization by modern Google is more like it. They're not competitive because they don't have to be.
> The company that once represented the pinnacle of innovation has devolved into a symbol of corporate indifference<p>Although they may have been slow to publicly launch anything worthwile in AI, Gemini 2.5 Pro is SOTA.<p>I mean: AI is the hot topic atm ang Google arrived and are already owning everybody on many metrics.<p>I wouldn't discount yet a company which powers 70% of the world's smartphones and which knows how runs millions of servers.<p>They just proved with Gemini 2.5 Pro that the old dog can still learn a new trick. And then teach some to other dogs.