<Rant>

ITA was founded from a bunch of guys at MIT. Nerds. Brilliant guys. Revolutionized the way the world searched for airfare. Hacker culture.

Google too was once a company of nerds. The smartest guys in the field. They recruited by putting up posters on the T (specifically the Red Line, for obvious reasons) with challenging (impossible?) puzzles on them. You sent your answers to their HR department. They really wanted to get the smartest people to solve the hardest problems.

So what happened? Did the lawyers and MBA's get in the way of producing really cool stuff? Is Google succoming to the Groupon-ization of the world where everything has to exist in big type, with shiny colors, and use AJAX or some other stupid web technology just because everyone else does it?

The new matrix makes me sick. Suck a step backward.

</Rant>