Eric Schmidt was by far the most transparent CEO while knowing exactly what secrets he had to keep. He understood how important it is to have some direct communication with all engineers, even if it's just one way (here's a link to a fresh interview with him from yesterday where he talks about the old Google days: https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/).
With Sundar TGIF questions seem just like a formality: he tries to answer in a way to only tell things that are anyways available to everybody, not helping the employees to understand the strategy of the company and going together.
And in reality before I quit, all I saw was team leaders, managers and project managers fighting eachother on who's doing what project, and the engineers being victims of these fights (though still well paid victims). For me the magic of being and working at Google went away.
They retain their supervoting shares. They choose not to use that authority and choose not to attend these meetings. That choice is fair to criticise.
So the question is "Why disappear now?", just when there are so many high-profile ethical issues facing the company.
So they can lay the responsibility or blame for what comes next on someone else.
Were I still there, I would be wondering if there would be a quarterly "Alphabet LMT (Last Month, Today)" where people from all the letters could mingle and ask questions of Larry and Sergey.
It would provide both transparency for the conglomeration and a chance for people to compare notes about how things are done in the other business units.
That said, I agree. I think a wider town hall on all of Alphabet would be great, and would help employees see how all the pieces fit into a larger strategy.
Basically examples of decisions which the rank and file had a hard time with but were implemented anyway.
There is absolutely no difference until Google is no longer accounting for 99% of their profits. Until then, alphabet is nothing more than a tax strategy and an attempt to avoid anti-trust regulation against Google.
If it were arbitrary pools of shareholders, they they really wouldn't have direct and material power, only enough really to punt the CEO and influence a few things here and there.
Larry and Sergei are sitting on billions, and many more future billions as a result of the machine they have created, if they're going to live up to their own ethos they can't just punt the hard things off.
So yes, now 'it's hard' and the externalities are coming home to roost.
Larry and Sergey don't work at Google anymore. They're much more laissez-faire, working on special projects across Alphabet. They don't make most of the decisions that effect Google employees, and don't have answers to most of the questions that are asked. That was the entire point of promoting Sundar, after all: so Larry could step away from Google.
And finally, Larry and Sergey being at TGIF's undermines Sundar's authority. He's the one making decisions, and he's where the buck stops, but having the cofounders there creates an uncomfortable dynamic and makes it seem like they have a larger role than they do.
So it's not a matter of "courage" and "accountability" as much as corporate governance and priority changes. There's no drama buried here.