Long-time Google engineer Steve Yegge, who gained prominence when he wrote a rant about Google+ back in 2011, has quit the company, accusing it of no longer being able to innovate.
Yegge, who detailed his reasons for leaving in a blog post, said Google was not focused on its competitors and seemed to have forgotten about its users altogether.
He said one of the reasons contributing to the lack of innovation was because Google had become a conservative company.
"They are so focused on protecting what they’ve got, that they fear risk-taking and real innovation. Gatekeeping and risk aversion at Google are the norm rather the exception," Yegge wrote.
{loadposition sam08}"You can look at Google’s entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: Google+ (Facebook), Google Cloud (AWS), Google Home (Amazon Echo), Allo (WhatsApp), Android Instant Apps (Facebook, WeChat), Google Assistant (Apple/Siri), and on and on and on.
"They are stuck in me-too mode and have been for years. 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."
He said the company had become mired in politics; this was inevitable given its size. However, it tended to slow down processes and led to problems in execution.
The 13-year Google engineer is the second Google employee in recent times to come out openly in criticism of the company. Engineer James Damore criticised the company's diversity policy in an internal screed last year which went public; he was fired and has now filed a lawsuit against Google.
Yegge said Google was arrogant. "It has taken me years to understand that a company full of humble individuals can still be an arrogant company," he said.
"Google has the arrogance of the 'we', not the 'I'. When a company is as dramatically successful as Google has been, the organisation 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."
He said the worst thing about the company was that it was totally focused on its competitors and had lost sight of any customer focus.
"They’ve made a weak attempt to pivot from this, with their new internal slogan 'Focus on the user and all else will follow'. But unfortunately it’s just lip service," Yegge wrote.
"The problem is that their incentive structure isn’t aligned for focusing on their customers, so they wind up being too busy and it always gets deprioritised."
Yegge said there was a tendency for Google to use competitor activity as a proxy for what customers really needed.
"This is where their incentives are focused. Google incentivises successful feature and product launches, and by far the easiest, safest way to produce those is by copying competitors."