This is a somehow personal observation. Since years now, Google used to be the non-plus ultra cool place to work. Not that I and probably great amounts of fellow-nerds care too much about web and such, but it seemed like a genuinely cool place for people to work at since you were surrounded by great people.

They are doing tech-talks and invite students to come over and see how cool the Google offices are. And they indeed are. They send recruiting mails after checking GitHub accounts. This is more than any other company I know does. The german office of Microsoft is also around the corner from here, but they never do cool things. And the office is a normal boring corporate office, at least the part that I saw.

Google also used to do cool things, like putting up bearable free email service (remember all these crappy web mailers of ye olden days?), published SDKs for Linux users, had probably the biggest XMPP server, opensourced a decent web browser and contributed to a great browser engine. There’s really a lot of cool and some less cool stuff that Google published.

But lately, my admiration faded. Especially the last two years, where Google started to discontinue a lot of services. Now of course, they can discontinue whatever they want, but the outcry of the readercalypse was quite huge. Google often open sourced stuff after they shut it down (Etherpad, Wave), but Reader just went away. That’s not tragic, since a number of replacement services have popped up (I use NewsBlur, generous free tier, available on web and mobile, free software), but Google effectively discontinuing GTalk to push Hangouts is quite a thing.

GMail/GTalk was propably the most useful service for me since many people had it and chatting with them was very easy: no need to convince them to use XMPP in addition to whatever they already have (Facebook, Whatsapp, what-have-you), no need to tell them how to install an XMPP client. You just contacted them. This possibility is gone.

These days, I am hesistant to even try any Google service. They rolled out Google Keep, but who knows how long it will exist?

I think I preferred the non-Google+ Google, the old-skool-cool. And I am not the only one.