The reaction to the layoffs is a good example of this.

Lots of CEOs in the past have conducted layoffs pretty much the same way-- notify everyone at the same time (per local laws) and write an email blaming themselves as the cause.

Yet the media ran article after article for almost 2 weeks with personal stories about how people felt particularly slighted by Google, when they did it pretty much the same way as other companies.

Amongst 12,000 people at any point in time, they will be doing normal life things-- like feeding their baby at 2am-- when they got the email. Yet somehow this became the basis of so many "Google doesn't care about its employees" stories.

This is because Google immediately cut access to those people and treated them like personas non grata. It was a pretty bad layoff.

Immediately turning off access is common practice in a layoff

Not the way Google did it.

Aftermath of a poor period for Google overall. From the outside, Pichai's Google looks very much like Ballmer's Microsoft: a company still milking profits generated by yesterday's innovation, but unable to produce genuinely-new stuff.