I vaguely remember Claire Stapleton from when I was there, as some sort of quirky marketing person. I think her comments are mostly pretty accurate. This one th

I vaguely remember Claire Stapleton from when I was there, as some sort of quirky marketing person. I think her comments are mostly pretty accurate. This one though jumped out as weird: “He always said how much Google needs to be upfront and progressive in how it handles people and processes and HR,” Stapelton recalled. “He had such an optimistic view of technology and how Google could really transform how people live and free up humanity to pursue the arts.” Was that really her interpretation of Larry Page? No wonder she's now publicly crying her disappointment. It seems like the total opposite of the Page I saw, a man who never cared about the arts at all and in fact had to be browbeaten into caring about visual design by Steve Jobs himself. Page back then was a man who cared deeply about science and anything sci-fi. The more sci-fi the better. His vision for Google was a machine that converted ad clicks into flying cars, the computer from Star Trek and so on. Amazing tech wasn't a means to an end but rather, the end itself. I never heard or saw anything in Google's mission about "freeing up humanity to pursue the arts". I can imagine why a humanities person like Stapleton might have wanted to believe that as it would have given her own interests and background an anchor in what was back then a supremely engineering oriented culture. But it wasn't true. Nobody gave a stuff about the arts, as evidenced by hiring priorities.