She Fired Google, Then Walked Straight Into Amazon's Arms
A blogger spends an essay rage-quitting Google's voice assistant over its Gemini makeover. Her next move: ordering an Alexa. The thread caught the punchline before she did.
The trigger isn't search or Gmail. It's the kitchen speaker that used to read back a clean snippet and now delivers a four-minute Gemini monologue, asking follow-up questions until users start shouting "cancel" and "stop."
Several readers report the same regression on Android Auto: ask for one song, get something "vaguely semantically related with no way to course correct."
But the flip is sharper than the rant: commenters note the de-Google manifesto sits on a site so buried in ads it became a live exhibit of the enshittification it protested.
The kitchen speaker that wouldn't shut up
The essay "I Fired Google" reads as a breakup letter, and the precipitating event is small: a Google Home device that, after being "upgraded" to Gemini, stopped giving short factual answers and started lecturing. The author's solution: order an Amazon Alexa instead, then dryly note, "Dear lord."
The source page (which returned a paywall-style block to our fetch) leans on a familiar wider grievance: products that get worse after each "improvement" — cars that need "IT support and 3 sub-menus to lower the air conditioning," assistants that answer with "a four-minute explanation" when you wanted a fact.
The regression is specific, and people can reproduce it
What keeps the thread from being pure venting is that readers describe the same failure mode in detail. Before Gemini, the assistant failed deterministically — you knew how the query went wrong and how to fix it.
"Hey Google, play Blackstar by Radiohead can result in playing... something vaguely semantically related with no way to course correct." — an Android Auto user describing the pre/post-Gemini change
The verbosity is the other complaint. One user's partner now fights the device to make it stop:
"It's gotten to the point where she will start yelling 'cancel' and 'stop' to get it to shut up." — a Google Home owner whose spouse uses it daily
A decade-long Hue lights user reports a stranger problem: post-Gemini, the speaker simply stopped recognizing his voice while still obeying his partner's.
The manifesto is its own counter-example
The loudest reversal isn't about Google at all. Multiple readers couldn't finish the article because of the ad load and a popup that greys out the text to ask if you'd like it emailed to you.
"It is ironic that so many articles calling out enshittification are themselves examples of the same." — a reader who hit the ad wall
One commenter also flagged a factual wobble — the piece repeats that BMW "charges a subscription for heated seats," which BMW piloted then rolled back after public outcry.
The through-line the thread exposes: there is no exit. Quit one superpower's degraded assistant and you order the other's. The complaint about a captive market is being typed into a captive market.
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