Where would you want to work today?

Let’s take it on the timeline:

• In the late seventies-start of the eighties, the place to be was at Apple. Working on the cool new thing named Mac. Pretty cool. Everybody was raving about the smart kids in Sillicon Valley, the starters of a revolution.
• In the late-eighties-beginning of the nineties the place to be was Microsoft. It was hip, it was the buzzword, and it was small enough not to resemble an institution. Guys working on the new operating systems to be used worldwide, and on the everyday apps that change the way people use their computers. Neat.
  

• In the second half of the 90’s, Internet came over. The places to be became the dot-coms that promissed to change the world. Looking back, I think it must have been pretty cool to be in the Netscape team, the Altavista, Yahoo or Excite ones. Or, even better, in the crews over Amazon and Ebay. Perhaps it still is, but nevertheless they lost their hipness factor.
• When I got to college, at the end of the 90’s, there were two companies I fancied I’d work at: Microsoft because of its giant power, and Sun because of all the innovation going in and around Java

What about the last few years?

Sun got out of the picture while Java becoming too bloated and entreprise-oriented, Microsoft is the new evil empire, but Google looked fresher than ever. Google rocks, we all said, and dreamt to work there. They had a great caffeteria, they had all this “hacker” mentality, they had those smart scientists working on cool things such as statistic automated translation, or genetic algorithms, neural networks and ant colonies, and they used Python and Open Source. Google was an elitistic company based on technological superiority. And it provided the fastest and most relevant search results from the vast Internet. Plus, an ever-growing webmail. Plus, a free blogging hosting. Plus, a free photo organizer. Plus….

What about now?
Google is still in the buzz. So is Apple. So is Yahoo. But Google starts to lose its edge. It starts to become “more evil” with every penny going into the adwords and every splog poping into existence onto blogger, and every googletoolbar it sponsors. No, don’t get me wrong: Google is still good. Well.. at least better (in the sense of not evil) than its competitors. But for how long?

What about tomorrow?
Google will probably become an advertising giant instead of a technological company. In a not so different sense than Gator(and Bonzo Buddy or whatever that spyware monkey was called) was an advertising company rather than a “personal companion” one. In the same sense Disney is not anymore about making cartoons or Sony about making quality hi-fi gadets.

For me, Google stopped being the place to be for a couple of months already.

So… where would you want to work today? What about tomorrow?

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