anyway, back on point, the turning point for google wasn't gradual, it was sharp. yes they danced around china before -- i'd say this was required of them, you can't properly say no if you don't assess -- but they stood up to their values. it's ok that there were other factors.

no, the turning point was when they hired ruth porat. ask any insider. that's when it became all about the benjamins.

Throws tomato

I've heard this before, but never gotten any details. Can you expand on this?

Pre-era was a bunch of elite college kids who were in the right place at the right time, in the right business, technical and social environment, to create a masterpiece. Such an intersection of factors is unlikely to occur again. (If for no other reason, that we likely have about 20 years left on this planet.) Omid Kordestani was the adult in the room at the time, and he let the kids run feral. It was probably as much his style as it was that he was already successful (in the SV sense) and relaxed.

Then you have the Eric Schmidt / George Reyes era. Reyes was from Lifelock, which tells you his caliber. But, a good team for an IPO. Lucky for Google, Hal Varian was there too.

They outgrew Reyes and hired Patrick Pichette, formerly from McKinsey and Bell Canada. I think it's often overlooked that he came from a monopoly and Google was on its way (and desire) to become a monopoly and of course sought to avoid even the light touch of the Clinton Justice Department (I refer to the MS anti-trust case).

All through this time, everyone and I mean everyone wanted to work at Google. They were big enough to be a real company but not yet big enough that beers and toys weren't a fixture around every corner of every building. It was still a work hard, play hard culture and (outside of AdWords and classism that was starting to arise out of red badge ism) technology driven and egalitarian.

Under Pichette they bought Motorola for the patent portfolio and a culture of lying to the public, and most importantly internally to employees began. To be fair, the lying was required to pull off the Motorola strategy, but it was at this time that the us (executive suite) vs them (middle mgmt and ICs) really began. It was then that the Google became IBM. BTW, if you met any Googlers of this era, you were more likely to find them to be full of themselves than googlers of previous eras which is ironic because these googlers were replaceable cogs, vs earlier googlers.

So, with IBM^H^H^HGoogle now wearing big boy pants they needed a real CFO, one that could believe his own bullshit when entertaining bankers (who believe their own bullshit). Google was now so powerful and wealthy that the compulsion for more power and more wealth was all consuming. When you're on top, you want to stay on top and you maneuver to do so. Google was already a technology powerhouse but that wouldn't be enough. Do keep in mind that Schmidt had/has aspirations of true political power, so this surely was a guiding force in this evolution. (And besides, the right move considering the goals.)

So they brought in a CFO's CFO, a true Wall Street player. Then they formed Alphabet. Why, oh why? To bring costs under control. Google doesn't care about costs. A few million here, a few million there, the technology playboy dream team don't care about such insignificant sums, but Wall Street does. So Porat maneuvered them into this awkward structure so that she could trim fat. And boy was Google fat.

Oh, and she removed don't be evil from their vocabulary. Very, very smart Wall Street move. Of course Google had always reserved the definition of evil for themselves to make, but this needlessly tied their hands or at least caused contortions when exploring the most lucrative market of all -- China. To be fair, Porat was right. Google is a megacorp. Megacorps should not have morals as such and they should indeed pursue all revenue (and tax structures etc.)

Internally, it became very hard to just start a project on a whim. Budget had before been of little concern, now it became primary.

There is still resistance and some inertia. I find it very very interesting that Google Home, a project doomed to failure from the beginning, was allowed to happen and is still allowed. And that Nest is still completely mismanaged. I believe this is because Porat is not a technologist. The obvious synergies that I see with those products, and the Google/Android ecosystem, aren't visible to Porat.

So you can see, Google is now a finance-driven company, not technology-driven. Starting in 2015.

1998-2001: Pre-history. Urs Hoezle is the adult in the room. (Remember that Google was an engineering-driven organization early in its history; sales followed easily because they had a monopoly position on a critical portion of the Internet.) Culture is very much a scrappy startup, with everybody doing everything. Employees are young, idealistic, driven, and drawn to the company primarily by curiosity.

2001-2004: Consolidation in their primary market and experiments in others. Eric Schmidt is the adult in the room. The company is largely focused on milking the Search/AdWords cash cow and scaling at this point, but this was also the period where DejaNews, Blogger, and Keyhole were acquired, and Google Groups, Orkut, GMail, and Google Maps were developed internally. This was the era when all the incredible engineering talent was hired, because it was the dot-com bust when nobody else was hiring and everyone else was getting laid off, and Google was the only place doing really technically interesting stuff. Ended with the IPO, the launch of GMail and Maps, and the start of large-scale college hiring in 2005.

2005-2011: Diversification. This was the period where whatever Internet-based market you were in, you could bet that Google was developing a competitor or 4. Eric Schmidt was still the adult in the room. Company is very open and transparent internally, with lots of freedom to build your own pet projects. Teams are bigger with many more Nooglers because of the company's rapid growth (at least until 2009, when Google stopped hiring for 2 years). Focus is on exploiting all the great infrastructure and data that had been built. This era featured the launch or acquisition of Maps, Earth, Docs, Sheets, Presentations, Chat, Street View, Universal Search, Android, Chrome, Wave, Buzz, YouTube, and many other key properties. CFO changes in 2008, but there isn't a major change in culture until 2011.

2011-2014: Social era. Larry Page is the adult in the room. Google+ and Vic Gundotra wield outsize influence on the company, with company bonuses tied to the success of Google+ and Google+ having the ability to ask for integrations with any other property and get it. This was the time when the culture & brand started decaying - more project silos, more secrecy, more management by fiat rather than by consensus, and more decisions taken that damaged user trust or harmed the user experience for "strategic" reasons. Innovation is moved over to Google X, which often starved the product teams of their most innovative employees. Many large acquisitions, including Motorola and Nest. Hiring ramps back up, but most employees hired are typical big-company employees that are paid to do a job and not look around too much.

2015-present: Financial era. Sundar Pichai & Ruth Porat are the adults in the room. Company is restructured as Alphabet and Larry moves upstairs. Google itself is more focused on meeting its bottom-line targets, and is run more for efficiency than innovation. Also a focus on monetizing some of the Google X moonshots. Cloud becomes a big moneymaker, Google+ is shut down.

I'm curious - did you ever work for Google or were otherwise an insider? Your view is very much an outsider's perspective, focused on the CFO and big mergers rather than the culture, values, and projects. I was there from 2009-2014, and worked directly with people who were there from the Stanford days, and still have friends there. In my view there was a big culture change in 2011 when Larry became CEO, but the first half of the Pichette years (09-11) were culturally the same as the period that came before, just with fewer perks and less hiring because we were in the midst of the financial crisis. All of the milestones you cite from the Pichette years were actually post-2011, and IMHO are more a consequence of Larry taking over from Eric.

> 2015-present: Cloud becomes a big moneymaker

I doubt that. Google is 4th and is trying very very very hard to catchup. Cloud is Google's "Microsoft mobile" moment[1], they let this get past them. It's because they didn't have the correct biz people at the time that first-mover advantage was to be had. Because Google is playing catch-up, they are spending lots and lots of money to catchup. They announced $1bn/quarter in revenue but what is their spend? Their growth rate (not announced) is likely not nearly as good as the top 3 either. The fact that they are being very disingenuous about their pulling out of the DoD bid is telling enough.

I think actually MS is going to win the cloud wars, say in 3 years time. They have a huge advantage.

That said, IMHO (as outsider), Cloud is the best part of google to be in, if you must work there. Besides all the other good points about it, it's not ad revenue driven. Urs is a real ball buster but no one reading this is going to be within a skip level of him anyway.

[1] vs social, which they just botched

Interesting! I work in Azure myself, but personally I'm more worried about Google than Amazon. K8s/GKE and TF were brilliant strategic moves, and they've finally figured out how to leverage their internal infrastructure with things like BigQuery and TPUs. Next battle will be serverless, and I see Google doing well there (since they're such PaaS-addicts.)

But I don't see one cloud to rule them all ever becoming likely. We'll all carve out our niches - AWS for cheap and boring, MS for nice plumbing and enterprise, Google for data science and web apps.

In particular the, "Oh shit, Facebook!" moment that resulted in a top-down pushing of Google+ everywhere was a big (and negative) shift in corporate culture.

What does this mean? Could you elaborate? Do the color of badges indicate a class?

Can you elaborate on this? You're thinking nuclear holocaust? Climate Change? Food scarcity? Astronomical event? Return of Jesus?

The reason I ask is that I don't share this same concern, or at the very least estimation of when such an event might occur.

Don't forget Diane Greene. She is the exact anti-thesis of the original Google culture.

> it's such hypocratic BS ...

You mean hypocritical. And the oath would be spelled Hippocratic.

For example, “don’t cut corners” by itself is easily lost. “Our reputation for high quality products creates loyal customers and allows us to set higher prices” will be more durable. It’s not perfect by any means, but it helps.

I don’t recall Google ever having a rationale for how “don't be evil” helped them make money, either explicitly or implicitly. It was just a fun little thing they had.

Google's success depends entirely on user trust. If users aren't comfortable having Google accounts, having Google host their email, typing their deepest desires into the search box, taking private photos on their Android phone and uploading them to Google's cloud, then there is no Google.

"Don't be evil" is about being a good enough company that users trust you.

A person's search history is a window into their very soul, it is possibly the most sensitive thing Google has on you.

This seems like a hard question for a discussion thread, what kind of answer are you looking for?

http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share Search Engine Market Share Worldwide ...

Now, I'm very far from saying we should ban corporations. They're quite useful, for all the reasons classical economics tells us. But we should stop expecting them to be moral. Instead, let's just accept that the object of a corporation is to maximally profit within the law, then use the law to constrain corporate behavior while retaining corporate benefits.

The state is the only entity powerful enough to go toe-to-toe against the profit motive and win. Activists, however well-intentioned, just don't have the firepower.

If I can proffer an opinion that's probably unpopular: I think prominent CSR activism is probably harmful on a net basis. It accrues attention to itself and deprives more serious efforts, ones that operate at the level of the law, of oxygen. If you want to change how corporations behave, change their incentives.