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.”
As one month ends and another begins, I find myself performing what has become a private ritual with two pens from my unusually large collection of fountain pens. These are not the sober instruments that sign checks or pen manuscripts—those steadfast companions are already loaded with respectable blues and blacks, the colors of responsibility.
These are my fun pens. Their purpose is less defined, more whimsical. They exist to chase thoughts across paper, to write down a memorable quote or a silly tweet, to trace the outline of a remembered conversation. They capture fragments of wisdom overheard at the corner store. They are tools that follow wherever the mind meanders, ideal for doodling or simply for my scratches that pass as art.
Being the kind of person who prefers late autumn and deep winter, I’m often confused by spring and what it brings. Spring, especially in its early stages, is a season of mild confusion. Can I wear sneakers? Should I leave my sweater at home? In San Francisco, where I live, the air forgets its temperature from hour to hour.
And I, for my part, can never quite decide what colors to choose. Autumn offers easier company—russets, ambers, the comfort of things winding down. But spring is slippery, full of beginnings that don’t declare themselves. T.S. Eliot said it best: “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”
In such moments, I do what any indecisive person might do: ask for advice. Several pen friends weighed in, each with an eye for color and a fondness for naming their preferred shades. Their suggestions, while lovely, weren’t entirely helpful.
Then, almost as a joke, I asked ChatGPT.
The machine responded with alarming composure. It suggested pastel colors for April: spring bud, cherry blossom, April showers — names better suited for nursery wallpaper or scented soaps. I squinted at them. Though pleasant, they weren’t for me. I wanted a more sophisticated palette, whatever that means. So I asked for a revision.
Sam Altman’s machine returned with something sturdier: moss green, graphite, and oxblood. “Colors with boots on,” is how the machine described them. This, the machine seemed to say, was April as it actually feels—wet earth, cold sun, the stirrings of something determined. I laughed aloud, not because it was wrong but because it was projecting masculinity. I wondered if the machine was trolling me.
When asked again about April’s appearance in Northern California, where the hills transition abruptly from green to gold, the AI responded with poetic restraint. Its palette read more like a collection of moods than mere colors: Marin Hills (sage green), Pacific Fog (dusty blue), Dry Grass Under Sun (golden ochre), and Coastal Cypress (deep teal).
Above: Left: Dusty Blue (Ocean Beach.) Right: Dark Teal (Tarrif Teal.)
From that palette, I chose two inks from my collection. I chose “Ocean Beach,” a custom ink blended for me by Kiwi Inks of Los Angeles that is a dusty blue-gray that carries the weight of overcast mornings. For the deep teal, like the shade beneath cypress trees in Point Reyes, I went with Diamine’s Tarrif Teal.
What surprised me most was not the machine’s intelligence (which is easy enough to marvel at), but the quiet way it handed back a piece of the world. Its palette didn’t describe April in grand terms. Instead, it was poetic and almost literary, taking cues from the light, the soil, and the ordinary shapes of change. In doing so, it reminded me that the season is not something we wait for but something to observe and experience.
It seems a small thing to fill two pens with ink. But in the doing of it—asking, choosing, pausing—I remembered that everything arrives gradually. Though April has a sudden way of announcing itself. Or as Mark Twain reminds us: “The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.”
