[crazygringo]

Well, I don't need to trust Google's employees, I trust its shareholders wanting to make money, which will never stop.

Since Google's popular products all contribute to making money in the end, they're not going to stop. Shareholders just wouldn't let it happen. There's a chain of accountability here that goes employees > C suite > board > shareholders.

So I don't quite see what situation you're worried about here.

[lonelappde]

Google's shareholders don't hold substantial voting power. Accountability practically ends at CEO.

[crazygringo]

That's just so factually untrue it's hard to know what to tell you.

Do you understand how corporate boards work? How large shareholders get their own board seats? How boards hire and fire members of the management team?

The idea of a toothless board is a complete fiction. I don't know where you got the idea, but it couldn't be more wrong.

(Perhaps you're confusing it with boards where a single shareholder has more than 50% of shares, thus making the board largely irrelevant because the shareholder controls it. But even in that case, the CEO effectively reports to that shareholder, and there have been many, many, many cases of underperforming CEO's being fired. It happens all the time.)

[johannes1234321]

Point here is that in Alphabet the voting power is for the largest part within the founders. Other shareholders can't do much against them.

[judge2020]

if by some magical event Alphabet/Google is able to shut down their free versions of their Office apps and rely solely on G Suite/YouTube/Waymo/etc without losing money, I don't doubt they would do it. If that event will ever happen is still a mystery and is probably unlikely to happen within my/our lifetimes.