I Fired Google

worthwhile rant on the death of utilitarian software through featuritis. google home’s degradation from simple q&a to verbose, hedged gemini is a concrete example of optimization theater—committees adding guardrails and verbosity that actively harm the original use case. the pattern recurs: when quarterly targets drive product decisions instead of user needs, you get regression disguised as progress. alexa isn’t better; it’s just not broken yet. touches on real tradeoffs (liability concerns driving over-cautious responses) without dismissing them, but argues correctly that a tool optimized for not-being-sued beats one optimized for not-being-useful. worth sharing with anyone shipping feature bloat.