1) Save most of the Google bucks rather than spending them on bloating your org to at least 3x the size it has any reason to be, 2) Invest your saved Google bu

1) Save most of the Google bucks rather than spending them on bloating your org to at least 3x the size it has any reason to be, 2) Invest your saved Google bucks, 3) After a few years you can drop Google for a decade or two and coast entirely on savings + investment income while being beholden to no-one. Maybe indefinitely, depending on how well it goes and how lean you keep your spending. The alternative would have been putting all that extra staff to work on paid products that didn't suck and were in demand. Firefox could have built an open-source Slack alternative with optional, slick, easy-onboarding paid hosting, for instance. Not that big a stretch. And that's on the boring-and-safe side of things they might have done. Truly, they might have done anything worthwhile with the time and huge amounts of money they had, to gain future independence. Instead, they did... the stuff they did.