In a Tuesday-posted blog post, ex-Google employee James Whittaker - who quit the Internet search company earlier this year to re-join his previous employer Microsoft - said that he had left Googleplex because of a change, for the worse, in the company's corporate culture, especially since Larry Page took over as the CEO last year.

In his blog post, Whittaker said that while Google was earlier "a technology company first and foremost", and it encouraged its engineers to innovate - with the business model of selling ads essentially in the background -; it has now become primarily an advertising firm which has "a single corporate-mandated focus."

The key focus area for Google, according to Whittaker, is to beat the popular social network Facebook; an attempt for which the Internet search giant is giving an increasingly `social' edge to all its products.

Noting that Page himself mandated the social angle to every other Google product, tying it back to Google+ social network, Whittaker said that such a move resulted in the discontinuation of experimental projects like Google Labs; thereby slashing the legendary "20% time" during which Googlers were egged on to experiment and invent.

Meanwhile, expressing a similar opinion to the one voiced by Whittaker, another Googler who departed from the company last year had said that Google was "wagering way way more than people think on Google+", which he said had now become the "#1 product" inside the company.