At least when I was there, the line was drawn somewhere between SVPs and normal employees. People seemed pretty okay memeing on Vic Gundotra. But there were other characters at Google who were just ordinary employees, and people felt at least a little uncomfortable when you discussed them excessively. I think the meme templates for a specific person I have in mind were removed entirely.

Ultimately, it's about the level of power that people wield. With great power comes great responsibility. Vic tied the compensation of every single employee to the success of Google+. So there is going to be some pushback, especially from one of the 75,000 people that have no control over how the social network does. There were also various circumstances that just made it feel right. One day there would be an email from Internal Comms about a day in the life of Vic Gundotra, mentioning how few hours of sleep he gets. It was then dug up that Vic did a car commercial where he talks about falling asleep at the wheel and how the lane assist feature saved his life. You have to find that kind of funny. Or maybe I'm just a terrible person and my cynicism ruined the guy's life. Either way, I was amused when people poked fun at senior leadership. It kept them honest. Every SVP thought they were Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, but really they're just coming to work a little sleepy every day controlling a machine much bigger than they can understand.

In the end, making fun of specific people was a tiny tiny part of the culture of openness at Google. I think it was worth taking the bad with the good, but it seems like that didn't scale too well. I feel like that's just part of the lifecycle of a corporation. The companies whose engineers invented computers and the Internet just aren't around in their original form anymore. Apple made it out. Microsoft is doing pretty OK. That's about it. I feel like Google is the next IBM; people will live out their careers there and keep it alive for the foreseeable future, but I am not sure that people aspire to get their first job at IBM anymore. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the culture that made Google Google has been determined to not maximize investment returns over the next quarter, and so it has to go. It worked for IBM, right?