"I think our friends inside Google genuinely believed that. At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did. Their product and design folks made many decisions very similarly, and we learned from watching each other.
“But Google as a whole is very different than individual googlers,” Nightingale said.
“Google Chrome ads started appearing next to Firefox search terms. Gmail & [Google] Docs started to experience selective performance issues and bugs on Firefox. Demo sites would falsely block Firefox as ‘incompatible’,” he said.
"All of this is stuff you’re allowed to do to compete, of course. But we were still a search partner, so we’d say ‘hey what gives?’ And every time, they’d say, ‘oops. That was accidental. We’ll fix it in the next push in 2 weeks.’
“Over and over. Oops. Another accident. We’ll fix it soon. We want the same things. We’re on the same team. There were dozens of oopses. Hundreds maybe?”
“I’m all for ‘don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence’ but I don’t believe Google is that incompetent. I think they were running out the clock. We lost users during every oops. And we spent effort and frustration every clock tick on that instead of improving our product. We got outfoxed for a while and by the time we started calling it what it was, a lot of damage had been done,” Nightingale said.
I saw some of this chatter back in April, some of it I was aware of some of it I wasn’t.
I think it can’t be understated how much Google has done to subvert and destroy web and industry standards.
I continually feel like we are repeating the mistakes we encountered with 90s era tech monopolies.
and capitalism as a whole is very different from individual workers or even bosses. this has been the hardest piece for me to grapple with. even if i believe i can “be a founder” but also be “good,” i cannot. the system isn’t just “not set up” to allow me to be good, and not just incentivizing me to be bad. i thought i could work around those kinds of things. the system is bad. participating in a “i’m a founder” way is bad.
not allllll bad, sure you can do some “good,” and change some individuals’ economic situation, but also yes all bad.
so i’m stuck,