Why I Fired Eric Schmidt, Ex- CEO of Google

why i fired eric schmidt, ex-ceo of google

Why I Fired Eric Schmidt, Ex- CEO of Google

(That Was Joke, But I will Explain My Experience With Google Products and the Damage Eric Schmidt Has Done to Google as a Company and its Corporate Culture)

January 20^th 2011 was the very first time I had ever contacted Google by phone.  After being a loyal Adsense customer for many years (since 2006), I had decided that it was time for me to start testing the Google Adwords Product for all of the sites I have been developing ( I am a 1 man show, I work with LAMP setups and have many projects I have started, on a shoestring budget).

I never went to school for programming. I learned everything I know (which is just mainly the basics and how to edit and hack around with open source code using Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP, HTML, CSS, and hanging out for countless hours learning from professional developers and programmers on irc.freenode.net). I went to school for business, and I took just 1 computer course in college which was a requirement.  In 2006 I had begun to work on the Drupal Project and contribute my spare time in the Support room, helping newbies with problems. The satisfaction that you get from being helped, and from helping others was something that was not only addicting and felt good, but it was inspiring and gave invaluable experience.

So, back to the story. I had started some Adwords campaigns, and many of my projects are, and have been incomplete. In order to get traffic or some blood running thru the sites, to test and make other changes in the code, you need to have at least a hand full of users. I was willing to pay a few cents for clicks, nothing like the dollars that the Google salesmen of Adwords were promoting.

Running a dedicated private server costs a little bit of money. I had sat around the linux SSH line, hunched over, copying and pasting code and reading tutorials on how to start up a server from scratch. Needless to say, I did it, and I was running a small "slice" on Slicehost, that I had learned to configure myself. I also had a Dreamhost server, which was a "VPS" but it is a managed host, where there is a team of dedicated experts that can solve many of the problems quite easier than myself.

Buying domain names costs not too much per year, about $10.00 .  If you have these domains over 5 years, well you times that by 10 each. If you decide you want to get the .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, then you times that number again by 5.  The costs do add up, especially when you have 90 projects (sites) and just 1 developer/designer/business developer/database administrator/advertiser/marketer, plus all the server costs, hardware costs, software development costs, advertising costs, educational costs, etc.

To subsidize some of these costs, many developers add Adsense to their sites, because it is a way to deflect some of the traffic that comes passing along, while you are still working on developing.

I would venture to say that none of the Adwords employees have EVER started a site on their own, nor know anything about programming.  But let's get back to the issue here.

My Adwords was suspended just after 10 days of trial. I had emailed the support team, telling them to unblock me from Adwords because I was a developer and I needed this service if I was ever going to run any real traffic. At that point I thought that I absolutely needed Google if I was going to run any sort of site whatsoever, and make a business out of it.  My emails were not even answered by real people. Just some spammy reponse and pointed me to some useless FAQ weblinks.

At this point I became quite upset. Google had just alienated one of its faithful Adsense customers who had been providing links to their ads for over 5 years.  I will post a graph of the Adsense impressions, clicks, and revenue over these 5 years below.

On the morning of January 20^th, 2011, I decided that I must talk to someone live on the phone to correct this wrong.  On that day, in the morning I had talked to 4 employees at Google.  Three of them had worked in the Adwords Department, and one main operator at Google, where I left an official Complaint about the Adwords Employees that handled my account.  I also explained to the woman that the company had "NO LEADERSHIP. " I told her that the "company culture had eroded" and that it has "lost everything that had made the company once great."

Needless to say, I was NOT a happy camper.  In my formal complaint I had told the woman that Google had NO LEADERSHIP. If they were to treat developers like myself, who had been loyal GMAIL account users and loyal ADSENSE users for 5+ years, then what else is going on here?

We see horrible scammy, spammy, ads on Adsense now. We see lame GROUPON ads with pictures of hamburgers and muffins. Why are these sites allowed to advertise, when the services that they offer, offer little or arguable value to the end user? Have you ever read any reviews on Groupon? Have you ever seen some of these other "spammy" sites that are allowed to advertise on "Adwords" just because they pay a high PPC ? (price per click)?

Adwords pretty much lets anything go, if you are willing to pay a few dollars for clicks on their service. They will only critique you if you are a starving developer, trying to build out your dreams and bidding .01-05 cents a click, using lots of keywords. My Adwords account is still there, I have not deleted it, nor any of my 'test' campaigns. The campaigns are even labeled with the word "test" across them, plain as day.

I did not even try to skate around the rules by creating a new Adwords account, like 2 of the employees suggested while I was on the phone. I had nothing to hide, I did not do anything wrong, and I certainly was not going to act covertly trying to create more accounts to get around this "suspension."

I called multiple times, and I wanted my account fixed, and I was not going to accept "no" for an answer.  I did not want to see a red banner on the top of my screen that said "YOUR ACCOUNT HAS BEEN SUSPENDED FROM ADWORDS".

There was more here than just the money. I didn't care that much about the money. It was the principle of the matter that had infuriated me. I had spent countless hours learning PHP, mysql, html, css, learning the ins and outs of Drupal, building modules, helping others with support, and putting in COUNTLESS hours thinking and testing.  The whole internet is based on the concept of "TRIAL AND ERROR."  I had never known or learned any other way. For a person without the college training and expertise, I had dedicated myself to these projects and learning how the internet works.  Everything that I know and that I have learned, and will learn in the future is based upon "TRIAL and ERROR."

This is how science works. This is how evolution works. This is how learning works.  Depriving me of my learning framework was like depriving me of ultimately figuring out how advertising worked on the internet.

Enraged, and infuriated, I had cursed out several Google Employees on the phone, when my demands were not met. I had asked to talk to supervisors, and asked for them to reopen my account. One woman even started to yell at me on the phone, and that is when I yelled at the top of my lungs over the phone, "TURN MY FUCKING SITES BACK ON."  I even at that point, threatened that 50% of the whole Adwords Sales Staff should be fired.  This was the most enraged I had ever been in my whole entire life.

I am a humble, hard-working guy. Nothing, and I mean nothing, gets my blood boiling, on a day to day basis. I cannot even remember the last time I had gotten that angry.   I usually spend hours on end tinkering with things until I figure out how they work. I can spend hours doing mundane and boring things, in a very methodical manner, until I complete what I set out to do. I am patient. I am also very focused.

Later that day, Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO of GOOGLE, after a conference call, and it was said that Larry Page would come back to run the company.

Unfortunately it was too little, too late. I had already been offended and ostracized by the company by their Adwords "staff" and "sales team".  I had been ultimately alienated by the company that I had entrusted the most on the entire internet.

On a side note, the sales staff knew very little about technology. One lady looked at one of my sites and accused me of using a pop up. I never had a popup in the site. She was using IE 6, and she did not know the difference between an embedded "object" and an "iframe".   The workers here have very little experience with developing and programming. I would venture to say that none of them have ever developed a website before in their lives.  They are obviously hiring lower and lower quality people, but then again it doesn't take a genius to answer a phone and be part of the sales staff. The policies and the manipulation was obviously coming from the Top-Down, not the Bottom-Up.  This was all the work of Eric Schmidt I suspect, and it made me realize how far Google has drifted from its core values, and what made it the original company that it was.

Google also prohibited from travel affiliate data entry sites from advertising on Google Adwords.  I tried to accommodate this by replacing the affiliate search engine with a graphic and a link to another landing page which then had the search engine. This then violated some strange "landing page violation" rule that they had.  How free is this market, if they prohibit market forces from working?  The answer is, it isn't a free market. It's a controlled and manipulated market. If they can set these strange rules for the travel industry, (While they make buyouts like the ITA Software Acquisition), it makes me even more wary about their true intentions, and their ultimate control and manipulation of the online-travel industry as a whole. Just as Microsoft was slapped on the wrist in the 1990's, the Department of Justice will also spank Google , for its Anti-Trust violations.  Whether it is under the Obama Administration, or the next Administration; it will happen.  We haven't even begun to talk about "Net Neutrality" and the F.C.C.  This should be saved for a different article.

This is when I discovered AdCenter.  Up until this point, I had only heard very little about Microsoft's advertising solution and I knew that Yahoo also had a program for advertising.  Since I was a loyal Google supporter up until this point, I had little incentive to try this.  Adwords was something that I did have an incentive because I was given a promo code, in which I would conduct my beta testing with.

I have used Microsoft products my entire life, starting at the PC JR. which was an IBM machine, and cost about 5,000 dollars in 1980's money. I was never that much of an Apple fan, in fact I never have used an Apple computer, other than in school when I was very young, at one of the computer labs. I was always a RPG Sierra game player, and other educational software programs that I had used growing up. In first grade, I was exposed to the program "Logo" which was quite fascinating and I was captivated by computers ever since.  I was a computer user, not a programmer.

I don't own a cell phone. Its not that I don't want to be bothered, or pay for the bill. I don't know the exact reasons why I do not own a cell phone, actually. I may just be anti-social, and I probably don't want to be bothered when I am at the library or bookstore. A land line will suffice, and people have been living for decades without cell phones, so there is really no sense of urgency when it comes to participating in that form of communication.

After being alienated as a Google product user, I realized that my initial suspicions about some of the Google products that I never participated in were indeed coming to fruition.  I had never signed up, nor participated in Google Analytics, although when you introduce Adsense to your sites, you pretty much automatically are participating in this program indirectly.  I never tried Adwords, up until a few weeks prior to Eric Schmidt being fired from Google.  I never clicked on the "Google Hosting" option within my VPS DreamHost account, where it would let Google host the site instead of paying monthly for hosting it with my own virtual server.  I never wanted to use the Google Email service either, and use the option that was offered for Google to handle all the emails that went through my sites. I was always skeptical of these services, and would prefer to use a info@mysite.com address instead, because I knew that all the mail that came through would be mine and nobody elses.

I was so pleased when I dealt with the employees at Adcenter.  Their attitudes were genuine, they called me back after opening tickets and they were a real pleasure to work with.  When I signed up for the AdCenter service, I was so pleasantly surprised at how robust the platform was.  It was like I was experiencing heaven on earth. The employees were fantastic and they called me back many times, asking me if I had any questions and giving me updates about the program. What an absolute pleasure, I must say.   At the time I signed up, I remember a quote from one of the AdCenter employees saying that MSFT/BING/YHOO had 31% of search.  About a week later, the data number that was given was 33%.  About 2 weeks after that the number I was quoted was 38%.  I also went and added a Bing search tool to a few of my sites, just as a way of communicating that this is the search engine that will ultimately replace Google's role, if they are to continue these faulty practices and bad policies.

I obviously had discovered something, and that something was very special to me.   At this point I was convinced that I wanted nothing to do with Google at all going forward, so I started the painful process of removing as much Adsense as I could from some of the projects that had the most traffic.  To me, it made sense to switch most of these ads to Linkshare, and other CPA based affiliate products, because they were more targeted, more trustworthy from what I could tell, and they had phone support and sent out checks regularly.

Developers like to see checks come in the mail from as many sources as possible, regardless the dollar amount. The money really means nothing to them, and for me it was all about tracking the data and looking at the graphs and charts, not the money that it represented. I'll show an example of this with my Adsense data. (I still have Adsense on some projects, and since I have maybe 90 started projects, it is either not worth my time to remove, or I am doing it very slowly as time permits.  I am a one man show, so it would be extremely hard for me to go thru each line of code to uproot the adsense from the sites all at once. I can only just stop it on some, and change my GMAIL account.)  I am also curious to see when the "other shoe drops" and they completely alienate me from their programs.  Until then, I am starting to alienate GMAIL, and stopping the forwarding of my site mail from sites that includes my GMAIL email address. Instead I created a ROCKETMAIL address, and also a LIVE email address, because the trust there has not been broken yet, and I have not felt the alienation like I have with GOOGLE.

The truth of the matter is that the Adwords Program does not understand the needs of developers that create websites.  They do not understand technology.  I may also not understand technology to its fullest, but I do have an IQ that is in the top 99.5 percentile of the populous-- meaning that I enjoy learning and I do understand a lot of technologies.  The email address that I selected for my LIVE.com address was DevelopersDevelopersDevelopers@LIVE.com, which was based on a popular YouTube video of and enthusiastic Steve Ballmer doing a dance, speech, and with a song- over.

This highlights the very way that I felt, after putting countless hours of learning and sitting behind a computer screen, discovering a program that was in my opinion "agnostic" when it came to letting people and the market openly bid for keywords at any prices they wanted.  The free market should determine the cost of ads, and which ads work, and which keywords work, etc.   I felt happy knowing that Microsoft was waiting there for people like me to discover and to trust.

Below is a graph of the Adsense data I have collected over the years.  The numbers will now stagnate, since I have removed most of the Adsense from the sites, regardless if it was a good business decision or not, the alienation by this company forced me to do so because of principled reasons.

I am not bitter at all toward Google as a company. I don't even know what Google is anymore, and what it has become.  The corporate culture that it had when it started has been completely lost.  I cannot say the same thing for a company like Facebook, as I am agnostic when it comes to any view good or bad. We simply do not have enough data yet, and it is still young.

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/359744/september-21-2010/eric-schmidt

I do know one thing. Eric Schmidt has run Google into a brick wall ceiling.  I do not know how it will be repaired, or if it can ever be repaired. His mentality, his mindset, his reasoning, his warped justifications, and conclusions have infected the company so much, and on such a massive level, it might be impossible to uproot.  It is completely mind-boggling how they would let a guy come into a company like this and destroy its corporate culture over a painful decade of transformation, not for the better, but for the worse.