These days, whenever I think about Google, I recall a line from Madame Bovary. “She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris,” Flaubert writes, capturing Emma Bovary’s provincial reality and her romanticized dreams of escape. That is Google in a nutshell, isn’t it?

The company that once represented the pinnacle of innovation has devolved into a symbol of corporate indifference. Let me share a personal example that illustrates this decline.

I was an early Webpass customer. Back then, before Google acquired it, the service was everything you’d want from an ISP – fast, reliable, and customer-centric. And cheap. The founder himself picked up the phone whenever there was a problem. Usually, there wasn’t.

Post-acquisition? It’s a different story. While competitors like Sonic push boundaries with 10 Gbps offerings in San Francisco, Google Fiber’s Webpass feels stuck in time, content with its 1 Gbps speeds and raising prices. The service interruptions have become far too frequent. It is enough of a headache that we are talking about it on our condo complex’s internal message board. For someone who lives on the internet (like most of us do these days), this is more than an inconvenience – it’s a dealbreaker.

But Webpass is just a symptom of a larger malaise at Google. Take Search, once the company’s crown jewel. Using Google Search in 2025 feels like death by a thousand cuts – each query returning not answers, but an endless stream of AI-generated reviews and ads. Sure, this approach might please Wall Street analysts, but it’s pushing users straight into the arms of ChatGPT and its ilk.

The company’s recent Gemini announcement perfectly encapsulates this problem. Despite technically impressive benchmarks, Gemini 2.5 barely made a ripple in the broader tech conversation. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic – companies that understand how to capture both technical excellence and public imagination – continue to dominate the AI narrative. Even Microsoft, not historically known for product excitement, has managed to generate more buzz around its AI initiatives.

I’m particularly struck by Google’s AI Studio — one of the most important products the company has launched. From a user stand point it is reflective of the company’s corporate identity crisis.

Here was a chance to follow OpenAI’s proven playbook – create a simple, elegant interface for developers to access state-of-the-art AI models. Instead, we got something that feels like it was designed by committee, buried under layers of unnecessary complexity. This from a company that has more product managers than some unicorns have total employees.

What’s particularly ironic is that today’s Google has become exactly what its founders warned against in their 1998 paper: an advertising company whose business model fundamentally conflicts with serving users’ needs. I remember when Sergey Brin and Larry Page first articulated their vision. I was introduced to them by one of their professors. Their clarity of purpose then makes today’s muddle all the more striking.

The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. … we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. … But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, 1998

Back in 2011, I wrote a piece titled “Can Google Save Itself From Google?” where I outlined the three phases of tech company growth. In phase one, the company is focused on “developing technology and figuring out a business model.” The next phase is about revving up its revenue machine. In doing so, it goes on hiring binge to support its growth. In phase three, companies start to look for new areas of growth. They become even bigger and bulkier.

Google is now deep in Phase Three, where internal politics and process management have overshadowed product innovation. The company has turned inward, focusing more on managing its bureaucracy than pushing technological boundaries.

But here’s the thing about tech – and I’ve been saying this for years – technology’s self-obsolescence is a more effective regulator than any government agency. Google, despite its trillion-dollar market cap and infrastructure advantages, risks becoming the first of the mega-caps to fade into irrelevance as the internet evolves beyond the “10 blue links” paradigm that made it a giant.

As for me? I’ve voted with my wallet. I now use Kagi for search (and pay for it gladly), and T-Mobile’s 5G Home service ($35/month) handles my internet needs. In today’s world, you simply can’t rely on Google to do its job anymore.

The signs are clear for those willing to see them. Like Microsoft in the late ’90s and IBM before that, Google is proving ill-equipped to respond to fundamental shifts in user behavior. The company remains trapped in its “10 blue links” jail, even as the world moves toward direct, conversational AI interfaces. Despite helping pioneer the technologies that enabled this transition, Google seems unable to break free from its advertising-driven business model.

I’ve watched Google since its inception, and perhaps that’s why its current state of middle-aged mediocrity feels particularly painful. The company that once promised to organize the world’s information has become a cautionary tale about the perils of corporate success and the inevitable entropy that follows.

Somewhat like Emma Bovary. “But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, with its door at the end shut tight.”

March 29, 2025. San Francisco

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