Is it all starting to go wrong for Google?
Photo by Andréia on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Of course not - but it's the kind of rhetorical questions that brings traffic swarms to news sites, hence Preston Gralla's column on Computer World. Symptoms that this [cough] $149.41bn company is losing its mojo, according to Gralla:
• Staff grumbles over childcare facilities; the New York Times recently reported that Google had increased its child care prices by 75% and in doing so had indicated that childcare is a luxury and not and benefit. This is all very different to the free food, infinity pool and dogs-at-work atmosphere that we've been fed repeatedly - although maybe that is changing too.
• Staff are leaving. Valleywag has gleefully chronicled (though Ben Ling actually returned) the mini-exodus of employees. One departing techie, Sergey Solyanik, blogged about his departure and said too many features in Google Docs and Gmail are regularly broken, but engineers care more about what is cool than creating a quality product.
• The stock price has dropped - by 34% from November 2007 to now; over the same period the Nasdaq fell by 16% and Dow Jones by 17%.
• And the permanent 'beta'. Why is Gmail still in beta when it was launched in 2004?
A manifesto of decline for Google? Hardly. It sounds a rather more - heaven forbid - that Google is really just another company, and a fallible one at that. If the conclusion is that Microsoft could benefit if Google does start to slide in quality, credibility and market share, then there's still a very long way to slide.
