As a guy who inspired two top-level stories yesterday, a few speculations.

For myself, the company I once turned to to provide me useful things, save me time, respect my privacy (and certainly not pester me for personal information or publicly link my activity across entirely independent activities and sites), and get out of the way of doing things, is now proving me increasingly useless, wasting my time, disrespecting my privacy (including pestering me for personal information and publicly linking my activity across entirely independent activities and sites), and getting in the way of my doing things.

The company's interests are no longer clearly aligned with mine.

I'm not convinced the company's evil (though I'm also not convinced it's not), but it's certainly lost a certain element of the soul it exhibited when I first encountered it in the late 1990s, and it seems to me that the culture has been broken. I've speculated on why this is, and cannot know for sure. I suspect a large part of it is riding the advertising tiger (see: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070708081303AA... "He who rides the tiger is afraid to dismount"), I fear that it may be cooperating, or forced to cooperate, with intelligence and surveillance operations, and it may well be that a sense of entitlement, exceptionalism, and hubris has taken hold (Vic Gundotra's 2005 blog post against Microsoft's endorsement of a gay marriage proposal in Washington State makes for interesting reading: http://web.archive.org/web/20051119214319/http://vicgundotra...)

Google five or six years ago was still fundamentally Search. Gmail was relatively new, and it was tossing a bunch of research projects "over the wall", some of which were actually pretty neat. Somewhat disorganized, yes, but ... interesting. Most significantly: not coercive. Which, if I think about it, is the biggest change I've seen.

There's a certain lifecycle to tech companies, going from promising upstarts to early pioneers to useful workhorses. And then, too often, it's a decline into an unorganized mess, forced integration among scattered products and tools, and an increasing use of entrenched market power to coerce the response that they can no longer inspire. Microsoft and IBM certainly fit this mold, as does Oracle. I'd consider Apple a curious exception despite my other criticisms of the company.

The single factor that's changed the most for me is that when I see Google's name on some product or tool, my first though now is "nice, but where can I find similar functionality elsewhere?"

And at the same time, the company does seem to be fighting, if slightly belatedly, for increased protections from surveillance and personal data disclosure. Largely on account that it realizes its business model is directly in the crosshairs of such practices.

So, when I came home yesterday to find two G+ posts (both strongly critical of Google) directly inspiring top-of-the-list HN articles, and a third "how to delete your G+ profile" item filling out the top 3, it was pretty surreal. I wonder (and speculated earlier on HN) that there might well be some gaming of the incoming queue, Google certainly has its enemies, and Microsoft's waged a dirty-tricks campaign against the company for years. Apple, Oracle, and Facebook are hardly fast friends. But a lot of what I see written seems pretty organic, and I'm well aware of friends, some who've worked at Google, who are also increasingly disenchanted by the company and its direction. pg would know his queue and voting dynamics.

That's all I've got.