Money became more important. The amount of money to be made in the dot com boom attracted people for whom $ was the primary driver, and that changed the conversation. It changed the kinds of things that are worked on, and changed day to day life.
Pre dotcom Palo Alto wanted to help the homeless, promotes section 8 housing, SRO for the homeless, and accepts a sometimes weird culture. Had a lower medium income than some neighboring towns.
Today’s Palo Alto: “fuck off jack, I’ve got mine.”
There’s no way the next Grateful Dead, Joan Baez, or Grace Slick would emerge from today’s Silicon Valley.
The former is likely harder to achieve now, much like how games development is now an affair involving large teams whereas games developed in the 1980s may have been single-person affairs. The act of making a computer and all related silicon is a much more complex affair, the last CPU design you could probably feasibly keep in your head may be the MC68000 .
The latter too is now still a thing, but much less open, and either rent-seeking through patent, or pure profit with lower tolerance for wild ideas (less risk tolerated for an obvious cost-centre).
In particular I watched as a lot of the people I respected the most and identified as having made Google great, drifted away and left the firm. Most obviously all 3 leader/CEOs left. The complaining really started to ramp up after that. Larry/Sergey had ways to put those people back in their place in ways that weren't particularly aggressive but worked well (e.g. just mocking them at TGIF when a stupid question was asked). Culture needs to be renewed and cultivated. What remains now seems like a sort of hollowed out version of the culture that continues along its prior path through inertia, whilst slowly rotting away.
You've just made me realise how rarely I find myself needing to add a !g to my searches on DDG these days. That used to be a multiple times a day thing. I can't remember the last time I did it.
The current set of Googlers that are complaining aren't the ones that built the company though. Google's success was built in the late 90's and early 2000s when they really revolutionized internet search and then email. I would argue that since 2010 they have lost this edge - even Bing and DuckDuckGo give better results now for many searches. Many of their interesting projects today are acquisitions.
I'm curious if SV's culture has changed in the last 15 years, and what future impact this may have - at least from the outside it seems like some of the brutal meritocracy attitude that made SV great has died off.