Google services have lately seemed like something Ralph Nader warned you about.

Lately I've found that many Google services (like Google Groups) don't work entirely right with IE or Firefox and they only work right with chrome.

Today I logged into my Google Analytics for the first time, and Google wanted to verify my phone by sending me an SMS. Well, my house is outside the GSM service footprint except when there's a strong temperature inversion, so I get in my car and drive 2 miles, park at the school, don't get the message, I reboot my phone, the message finally comes, then I drive home, and by that time I guess my session timed out because after I typed in my verification code into my computer, it asked me for my password and wanted me to verify again.

I canceled and then Google Analytics in years came up (after about three minutes loading) and locked my browser (Google Chrome) up, until I discovered there was some dialog box that wound up off my main screen that was locking it up.

And then they came out with the new gmail which seems to be yet another scheme to shove Google+ down my throat.

Try doing a search for a programming related query and instead of getting the relevant documentation you get something in broken English that tells you what a loser you are because you are trying to do what you're trying to do and gives you ten incoherent reasons why you shouldn't do what you're doing.

Meanwhile, Matt Butts is making Youtube videos about how you'd better make sure that anybody who links to your site had better make it a nofollow link because if anybody makes you a link that's not a nofollow link you must surely be a spammer. Therefore, you should check all your links in Google Webmaster Tools and write a polite letter to anybody who links to your web site that they'd better remove the links or if they can't do that, make the links nofollow.

Speaking of Youtube, if you're in the 80% of the land area of the USA where all you can get is bad DSL and bad satellite service, it's just unwatchable. Amazon Prime, Vudu, Netflix and everybody else seem to be able to cope, but I don't find anything entertaining at all on Youtube when I have to wait 15 minutes to see a 3 minute video,.

Oh yeah, but if you get 50,000 people to plus you, maybe your site rankings will move from the third page to the second page, or maybe not.

The only organizations who can get away with being linked to today are Wikipedia and spam factories that used to be search engines, like about.com, because if Google bans them (as they should) the DoJ will be on them with an anti-trust lawsuit.

What's worst about it is that if some small competitor comes up with something better, Google buys them up, shuts them down, and then you're left with Google's offerings which just get worse every week.

I remember when I was proud to be a Google AdSense publisher because it didn't have the "one rule to a flat tummy" ads and you know what, they bought the sleazy ad networks and now AdSense is as sleazy as anything. Oh, but if you have one erotic painting from 1649 on your site out of 1,000,000 images they'll kick you out of AdSense without warning the day you are flying back from a conference in San Francisco after one of their agents watches you give a talk at a conference about your web site.

I will say I'm impressed with android, both as an end user and a developer -- it's amazing. But my understanding is that their "scalable" platform for distributed applications is getting long in the tooth and that everything takes four times longer for Googlers to do it than anybody else. Their recruiters never stop calling, never get the hint that you don't want to go work at their beehive where whatever they pay you won't go very far because unless you commute to Fresno you'll spend it all on a mortgage for a house that will be worthless in 25 years and, of all places, you know you'll be just a number to them, if you don't fit their mathematical model of what a coder or a product manager or whatever it is, you just suck.

That won't stop the recruiters from calling though, because the whole point isn't that they want your labor but they just want to kneecap their competitors by taking anybody who can pass an IQ test and wants to live around San Jose away.

Google used to be about a culture of excellence, but today Google is the new Microsoft. Because they never release versions, the press never catches on to the fact that Google's services are like Windows 8.