[hn_throwaway_99]

I think this kinda misses the point. Any one, or even most, of these cutbacks can be seen as reasonable - the details are almost unimportant. It's just that whenever (and I mean like 100% of the time) I've seen this focus on cost cutting minutia (and by "focus" I don't mean there was a board meeting about it, just that it had reason to bubble up to a widely-distributed memo), it's the beginning of the end for the company: they've jumped the shark from the "innovation" stage of a company to purely the "financialization" stage.

Now, one could argue that Google has been going down this path for a while, but I still think it's a sad sign. What I think is even sadder is that I haven't seen anything come out of Google in the past couple years that clearly and clear-headedly addresses some of their well-known cultural problems (that are often discussed on HN). For example, if Google senior management said they were totally overhauling their "promotion-oriented development" style, or that they were finally deciding on a better way to handle "Killed by Google" products so that customers aren't scared to try their new stuff in the first place, or that they were becoming more forthcoming in their roadmap visibility, I'd be thrilled. But instead we get the oldest-of-old-school "cost cutting will continue until morale improves" MBA spiel.