- Learning that they had 100K+ employees

- Seeing resumes from people who had spent 5+ years at Google and had a project list with what I would expect from <1 year at a hedge fund or <3 years at a bank

- Learning about the "I want to just serve 5 Terabytes" video/story [0]

- Hiring people away from Google who were, for example, network engineers who turned out to be great SREs with good programming skills

- They just kill off greats apps that people enjoy with little to no notice (granted, keeping stuff around forever ala AWS is its own issue)

In other words, they became a big corporate behemoth and lost a lot of their "spark". Which is sad b/c I remember the early days of using Google search, Google maps etc where it felt like we were all living in the future.

Sure, they are breaking ground in the AI space but 100% agree that it feels like they are on the downward trajectory.

(although other firms have been here and come back so let's see...)

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI

The monopolization by modern Google is more like it. They're not competitive because they don't have to be.