Ex-Google Engineer Slams Former Employer On Microsoft Blog

Just one day before a Goldman Sachs executive resigned by skewering the firm in an op-ed, a former Google engineer offered his own very public critique of his former employer. Now at Microsoft, James Whittaker wrote on the company blog that Google went from an "innovation factory" to "an advertising company," which was jealously obsessed with competing with Facebook.

Whittaker, who left Microsoft to join Google in 2009, claims that he drank the Kool-Aid at the beginning, and eagerly fed it to the other engineers he was tasked with recruiting. "No one had to ask me twice to promote Google," he writes, "and no one was more surprised than me when I could no longer do so."