Oh wow. Ars Technica has not one but two posts about high-ranking employees leaving Google, and the first one – dealing with/about Praveen Seshadri – reminded me so much about my own experiences with working for American companies… both at Compunet, which was gobbled up and later spit out by GE Capital, and also at IBM, I had quite the same experiences like him. Once you’re working for a company listed in the stocks of this world, the only remaining “customers” are the shareholders, the only important measures are quarterly figures, and good ideas in a bright pool of employees? fuggedaboutit…
The second one is even higher ranking, it’s longtime Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki – and her problem is described as “TikTok”. Well think of it what you will, but my thoughts are that management decisions at Youtube were bad since years, and being different than/from TikTok is still one of its greatest assets – they should never try to mimick it. But well, who am I, and I know that the Chinese market might be much bigger and more important than we’d like to think it is – only recently I’ve learnt through a German-Speaking podcast partially run by a friend that the automobile market of China is the biggest in the world, there’s also the biggest battery maker(s), and a NIO isn’t worse (or much less expensive) than a Mercedes S-class. And BYD (“Build Your Dream”) might be *the* next big auto maker, maybe it’s only a question of time (or lack of knowledge on our Western side) until it surpasses Toyota and Volkswagen… much like the Korean Hyundai group seems to have surpassed “us” on quality.
But I digress. The main point of this article should be what former Waze CEO Noam Bardin wrote, citing Seshadri’s post on LinkedIn: “The problem is that no one cares as long as the stock is going up.” – and as the last paragraph in Ars’ article from above shows, Android might be the best part of Google right now. And to support that, and not Google, I’d suggest to make use of AOSP, with installing any of its free variants like LineageOS or others (or make your own if you can). This way at least, you’d help using your device(s) much longer, without supporting the ad-selling behemoth of this world…
Like always, thanks for reading.