In high school in the late 90s, I desperately wanted to be part of Google: they were the smartest people around, and seemed to be thinking 10 moves ahead of everybody else. They represented the digital utopian future our bearded elders had promised.<p>But by the time I got out of grad school in 2007, I was like "meh, it's mostly an ad platform, not so exciting; maybe someday". Now, there is almost nothing you do to get me to work at what I see as a company whose capacity for destruction is only limited by its manifest lack of any coherent vision. Fortunately, they seem to be tripping on their own feet recently, but if they ever get it together, it could be bad for everybody.<p>Some of that is probably down to my own changing priorities and increasing cynicism about our industry's effect on the world. But most of it is, I think, attributable to a change in Google. But what changed? Was there a specific moment when Google stopped being "cool", for lack of a better word? Or was it an accumulation of small problems? Were they never actually cool, and they just lucked into a couple neat products?