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I think they will regret it. Google was once a real special company. Their IPO filling, their stance on China, those were principled, courageous stands that cam

I think they will regret it. Google was once a real special company. Their IPO filling, their stance on China, those were principled, courageous stands that came straight from Larry and Sergey. To see their beautiful baby turn into another mega-corp, as hypocritical as any, colonized by activists and careerists bent on distorting the social fabric to advance ideologies and profits? Contemplating that turn of events when you had the power to stop it but chose not to? That has to suck, even when you are doing the contemplation from your yacht.

nostrademons 7y ago
I think what they learned in the intervening 15 years is that there are very strong structural forces pushing corporations towards the "traditional company" form that everybody hates, and that even as CEO, even as controlling shareholders, they were powerless to stop them. At least, that's what I learned, having worked at Google during the period where "Don't be evil" was still taken seriously, engineers could still propose & develop their own projects, the public still liked them, and Larry was just beginning to take the reins.
- zarkov99 7y ago
  Were they that powerless, really? Or maybe they got tired and had a falling out and subsequently lost hearth?
  - nostrademons 7y ago
    For the stuff that actually sucks about Google, yes, they were powerless. I think they'd still be on top if they felt they could actually make Google into the company they want it to be. Larry in particular does not give up easily. Take stock price obsession. Everybody knows the dangers of having quarterly earnings targets dictate the company strategy, and the moral compromises that companies make to meet those targets. Google's initial founders' letter said "If our earnings are lumpy, they'll be lumpy" (ironically, they were not - earnings went up monotonically and consistently exceeded analysts' targets until about 2013, for reasons I'm not going to get into here). And they took a lot of steps - like the dual-class share structure that gave Larry, Sergey, and Eric voting control over the company regardless of what Wall Street wanted - to avoid that. The problem is that stock price affects a lot more than just investors' pocketbooks. When the stock was low, Google had trouble attracting talented new engineers, which is critical to making new products that are really excellent. Low stock price means negative PR cycles; the press is always happy to write glowing reviews of fast-growing rocket ships, but as soon as they start to flounder, the press will kick them when they're down. (For more recent examples of this, see Theranos, WeWork, and Facebook.) The press cycle in turn affects consumer attitudes towards the brand, which is the source of both power and revenue. There were many other examples like this - another big one is the negative effect of company size on innovation, where once a company gets big enough new product ideas will always get killed, regardless of how good they are, because there is somebody with veto power or just enough social clout to discourage the innovator. I suspect this in particular was disheartening for Larry, who both identified with would-be innovators and had protected them when Google was smaller.
    - zarkov99 7y ago
      Thank you for the insights. That is a heart breaking story.
- quotemstr 7y ago
  You're right. One of these forces is how in a sufficiently large organization you're practically guaranteed to attract a critical mass of bad actors, people with rare but extremely harmful personality types. In an open culture, these bad actors can find each other and coordinate, creating massive problems for the whole organization. Traditional big companies are robust against these bad actors --- unfortunately at the cost of many other desirable characteristics. Smaller companies (maybe up to 10k headcount) can get without the necessary safeguards because, due to their small size, they don't attract a critical mass of rare but extremely harmful personalities. Google tried to remain an open, high-trust place well beyond the point when it became obvious that the company had attracted exactly this sort of toxic element. Now the company is paying the price.

nostrademons 7y ago

I think what they learned in the intervening 15 years is that there are very strong structural forces pushing corporations towards the "traditional company" form that everybody hates, and that even as CEO, even as controlling shareholders, they were powerless to stop them. At least, that's what I learned, having worked at Google during the period where "Don't be evil" was still taken seriously, engineers could still propose & develop their own projects, the public still liked them, and Larry was just beginning to take the reins.

zarkov99 7y ago
Were they that powerless, really? Or maybe they got tired and had a falling out and subsequently lost hearth?
- nostrademons 7y ago
  For the stuff that actually sucks about Google, yes, they were powerless. I think they'd still be on top if they felt they could actually make Google into the company they want it to be. Larry in particular does not give up easily. Take stock price obsession. Everybody knows the dangers of having quarterly earnings targets dictate the company strategy, and the moral compromises that companies make to meet those targets. Google's initial founders' letter said "If our earnings are lumpy, they'll be lumpy" (ironically, they were not - earnings went up monotonically and consistently exceeded analysts' targets until about 2013, for reasons I'm not going to get into here). And they took a lot of steps - like the dual-class share structure that gave Larry, Sergey, and Eric voting control over the company regardless of what Wall Street wanted - to avoid that. The problem is that stock price affects a lot more than just investors' pocketbooks. When the stock was low, Google had trouble attracting talented new engineers, which is critical to making new products that are really excellent. Low stock price means negative PR cycles; the press is always happy to write glowing reviews of fast-growing rocket ships, but as soon as they start to flounder, the press will kick them when they're down. (For more recent examples of this, see Theranos, WeWork, and Facebook.) The press cycle in turn affects consumer attitudes towards the brand, which is the source of both power and revenue. There were many other examples like this - another big one is the negative effect of company size on innovation, where once a company gets big enough new product ideas will always get killed, regardless of how good they are, because there is somebody with veto power or just enough social clout to discourage the innovator. I suspect this in particular was disheartening for Larry, who both identified with would-be innovators and had protected them when Google was smaller.
  - zarkov99 7y ago
    Thank you for the insights. That is a heart breaking story.
quotemstr 7y ago
You're right. One of these forces is how in a sufficiently large organization you're practically guaranteed to attract a critical mass of bad actors, people with rare but extremely harmful personality types. In an open culture, these bad actors can find each other and coordinate, creating massive problems for the whole organization. Traditional big companies are robust against these bad actors --- unfortunately at the cost of many other desirable characteristics. Smaller companies (maybe up to 10k headcount) can get without the necessary safeguards because, due to their small size, they don't attract a critical mass of rare but extremely harmful personalities. Google tried to remain an open, high-trust place well beyond the point when it became obvious that the company had attracted exactly this sort of toxic element. Now the company is paying the price.