Go fuck yourself, Google!

This has been coming for a long time…

Shares in Google parent Alphabet plunged more than eight per cent overnight Wednesday after Apple executive Eddy Cue testified in federal court that Google’s search traffic on Apple devices declined last month for the first time in over two decades.

Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, told the Washington antitrust trial that Google was losing ground to AI alternatives like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

His revelation that this decline “has never happened in 22 years” sent shockwaves through Wall Street, wiping more than $265 billion (AUD) from Google’s market capitalisation in a single trading session.

Back in early 2024 I looked into the debacle that was the release of Google’s AI, It’s not the AI, it’s the toxic minds driving it, which you may remember produced hilarious images like this when asked to portray German soldiers in 1943…

… or the Founding Fathers and the Pope…

A couple of months later it turned out that the reason for Gemini AI going, “White People, Ick!” was simple and, based on what had been seen with the rest of the company in other situations, entirely predictable, Google’s Gemini AI was done in by DIE:

Google is a runaway, cash-printing search monopoly with no vision, no leadership, and, due to its incredibly siloed culture, no real sense of what is going on from team to team. The only thing connecting employees is a powerful, sprawling HR bureaucracy that, yes, is totally obsessed with left-wing political dogma. 

I had wondered how a company that rich, able to hire the smartest people, could fuck up so badly, but that article in PirateWires – Google’s Culture of Fear – from which that quote is taken, went on to explain the basic, day-to-day effects of such a setup:

The phrase “culture of fear” was used by almost everyone I spoke with, and not only to explain the dearth of resistance to the company’s craziest DEI excesses, but to explain the dearth of innovation from what might be the highest concentration of talented technologists in the world. Employees, at every level, and for almost every reason, are afraid to challenge the many processes which have crippled the company — and outside of promotion season, most are afraid to be noticed. In the words of one senior engineer, “I think it’s impossible to ship good products at Google.”

Even though I had kept track of the company, the number of failures in recent years was still surprising.

  • They lost Cloud infrastructure to AWS (Amazon Web Servers) and Azure.
  • Google’s Moonshot Factory to combat X-Twitter, the “secret crazy technology development” strategy appears to pretty much be fake.
  • It lost Social Media (R.I.P. Google+).
  • It lost Augmented Reality (R.I.P. Glass).

As I said then, they have to win AI because the failure to deliver on that could strike at the heart of Google since that heart is being a search engine linked with advertising and AI could kill such search engines, just as search engines killed older forms of information seeking like phone books and the Yellow Pages. That’s why Google has been going after AI, to stay ahead of the competition.

And now they’re failing even faster.