Ex-Google engineer says the company is boring. Is the same true of Apple?

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Google Apple
Google isn't innovating and Apple is "meh" claims a departing Google exec.
Photo illustration: Google/Apple

Google can no longer innovate, claims departing 13-year company vet Steve Yegge in a long Medium post this week.

Yegge puts Google on blast for what he perceives as the four biggest problems facing the company today. How many of them hold true for Apple as well?

Four big problems for Google

Yegge, who is joining Singapore-based Uber competitor Grab, lists Google’s problems as follows. First up, he says, is their conservative approach to innovation. “They are so focused on protecting what they’ve got, that they fear risk-taking and real innovation,” he writes. “Gatekeeping and risk aversion at Google are the norm rather the exception.”

Secondly, he argues that Google has become, “mired in politics.” While inevitable in any large organization, he argues that, “politics is a cumbersome process, and it slows you down and leads to execution problems.”

Thirdly, Yegge says that Google is arrogant. “It has taken me years to understand that a company full of humble individuals can still be an arrogant company,” he suggests. “Google has the arrogance of the ‘we’, not the ‘I’. When a company is as dramatically successful as Google has been, the organization can become afflicted with a sense of invincibility and almost manifest destiny, which leads to tragic outcomes: complacency, not-invented-here syndrome, loss of touch with customers, poor strategic decision-making.”

Finally, he writes that Google is now “100% competitor-focused rather than customer focused.” With the exception of a few projects such as Google’s Cloud Spanner, BigQuery, TensorFlow and Waymo, he says that all Google’s main ventures are copies of competitors. He singles out Google+ as a Facebook rival, Google Cloud as a rival to Amazon Web Services, Google Home as a rival to Amazon Echo, Allo as Google’s WhatsApp, Android Instant Apps as a rival to Facebook and WeChat, and Google Assistant as the search giant’s answer to Siri.

“They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years,” he writes. “They simply don’t have innovation in their DNA any more. And it’s because their eyes are fixed on their competitors, not their customers … In short, Google just isn’t a very inspiring place to work anymore. I love being fired up by my work, but Google had gradually beaten it out of me.”

How about Apple — and the rest of the tech industry?

To be fair, Google’s not the only company that suffers the wrath of Steve Yegge. He says that he looked for a company that was innovating, but found the giants — including Oracle, Twitter, Apple, eBay, Microsoft, Adobe, and SalesForce — to be “kinda meh.”

While some will no doubt put the criticisms down to burnout, they’re an interesting assessment of tech companies, once nimble startups, as they become giant titans of industry. Certainly, some of the criticisms he levels at Google (such as the obsession with politics and lobbying, the copycatting of rivals, and the sometimes conservative approach to business) could also be applied to 2018-era Apple to varying degrees.

Apple hasn’t been exempt from this kind of criticism. Last year, ex-Apple employee Bob Burrough unleashed a tweetstorm in which he claimed that Tim Cook’s Apple was a “boring operations company,” compared to Apple under Steve Jobs. Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson has also suggested that Apple is kind of dull, while founder Steve Wozniak has offered decidedly “meh” reviews of some of Apple’s new products.

Of course, both companies remain insanely profitable. Google and Apple are two of the four tech giants (Facebook and Amazon being the other two), which could well become the first companies in history to hit $1 trillion. Still, it’s pretty damning to hear that an innovation powerhouse like Google is no longer innovating — and from a person who has seen the inside of the company over an extended period of time.

Do Yegge’s criticisms ring true? Do you think they also apply to Apple and, if so, is there anything different that can be done in a world increasingly operated by giant tech platforms looking to own it all? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Source: Medium

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