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You may be right about the husk-ness. Sometimes companies can recover from this kind of cultural damage --- look at Microsoft's renaissance. But this kind of damage frequently causes talent flight and a death spiral.

I still think it had to be done. The activists wanted to turn the company into a tool for advancing a fringe political agenda, even if unprofitable No leadership group can or should tolerate that kind of hijacking.

It'd have been better for this culture war not to have started at all. But once the activists started it, it became an existential imperative for Google to finish it --- which it did.

[metildaa]

Not abusing workers and not turning Google into an extension of the DoD & Chinese Surveillance Infrastructure is a fringe political agenda? That seems fundamentally baked into Google's old motto, "Do no evil".

Microsoft's still playing their old games FYI, they have not shaken their prior reputation (esp. with their abhorent behaviour at Linuxfest Northwest 3 or 4 years ago), and they've essentially scuttled QA (hence certain Win10 updates deleting your files, among other recent bugs). There was a recent push to gut the MS Partner program's benefits, which had predictable results. IMO they are using Oracle's business model currently, albeit with a few thousand extra developers.