Can someone explain what happened to google. I mean, it was once a company so many of us looked up to and now little by little its becoming the "evil" in their own mantra "don't be evil".
Pretty much every company in the world makes choices, little by little.
Some set of people pretty much always disagree with those choices.
If you make enough choices in a enough of a period of time, over a wide enough area, congratulations, you've now annoyed a lot of people :)
(IE even if Google was to do literally everything that hacker news people want, in the optimal order and way, it would just be some other forum where people are complaining.).
As companies become larger in scope, the number of choices they make, and the likelihood those choices will upset distinct groups of people, grows.
Sadly, pretty much the only thing you can really change is how long the cycle really is.
IE even if you make PR-optimal (for lack of a better term, i mean the choices that upset the smallest set of people) choices, you'll probably just upset 3-5% of people instead of 10-15%.
So you get 15 or 20 years instead of 5.
At some point, people become upset enough, go to the next thing, and the cycle repeats.
You can see this happen in pretty much any group of people, not just companies. Companies are just larger so the timescale is smaller.
All of this is also compounded by the fact that larger companies deal with positive and negative PR campaigns for and against them, which helps change opinion faster one way or the other.
People love to blame shareholders, governments, or whatever, but truthfully, that is just about them disagreeing with the decisions. Look at it from the other perspective - if you did the opposite thing, now those currently-happy people would just be the people who are annoyed. It doesn't change anything, just swaps the set of people. Maybe that set is smaller, but again, that just changes the timeframe.
It's pretty much impossible to be universally loved and large, for any serious length of time, unless you aren't doing anything (again, applies to more than just companies)
Oh give me a break. This isn't some inevitable outcome of physics. They purposefully chose growth at the expense of customer support because it enabled them to accomplish more things that they wanted to do. They looked at the nearly infinite margin of their developed product and figured, hey, even if they lose 5% of that due to shitty customer support, 5% approaching infinity is nothing. And they moved on.
Google chose this route because it was the easiest route to take.
The larger and more successful a company becomes, the greater the distance between senior management and the hierarchy underneath. Once the spotlight of fairness and corporate values is removed, psychopaths amongst middle management are free to rule their minor fiefdoms as they see fit, wreaking havoc along the way until challenged.
True, but I've worked at quite a few large companies now and I haven't once been proven wrong. Conversely, there can be pockets of light dotted throughout the company but the bad departments have the ability to turn the company into a curate's egg.
Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks "I'm going to do some evil today." Everyone has their own definition of the word. And trusting a corporation is never a good idea.
Most of the changes started around 2011, when Larry Page took over as CEO. That's when Google switched from developing open standards to developing walled gardens, killed Google Labs, started disincentivizing 20% time, etc.
(Check out the 10 year stock history for Google, draw a line at April 2011, when Larry Page took over, and notice you have effectively marked the line between Google being a company worth praising, and a company with a meteoric stock price rise.)
Pretty much every company in the world makes choices, little by little. Some set of people pretty much always disagree with those choices. If you make enough choices in a enough of a period of time, over a wide enough area, congratulations, you've now annoyed a lot of people :)
(IE even if Google was to do literally everything that hacker news people want, in the optimal order and way, it would just be some other forum where people are complaining.).
As companies become larger in scope, the number of choices they make, and the likelihood those choices will upset distinct groups of people, grows.
Sadly, pretty much the only thing you can really change is how long the cycle really is.
IE even if you make PR-optimal (for lack of a better term, i mean the choices that upset the smallest set of people) choices, you'll probably just upset 3-5% of people instead of 10-15%. So you get 15 or 20 years instead of 5.
At some point, people become upset enough, go to the next thing, and the cycle repeats.
You can see this happen in pretty much any group of people, not just companies. Companies are just larger so the timescale is smaller.
All of this is also compounded by the fact that larger companies deal with positive and negative PR campaigns for and against them, which helps change opinion faster one way or the other.
People love to blame shareholders, governments, or whatever, but truthfully, that is just about them disagreeing with the decisions. Look at it from the other perspective - if you did the opposite thing, now those currently-happy people would just be the people who are annoyed. It doesn't change anything, just swaps the set of people. Maybe that set is smaller, but again, that just changes the timeframe.
It's pretty much impossible to be universally loved and large, for any serious length of time, unless you aren't doing anything (again, applies to more than just companies)