[brandon272]

I find it hard to imagine that today's iteration of Google is what Larry and Sergey had in mind when they initially founded the company, or what Paul Buchheit had in mind when he was working on the earliest forms of Gmail. I don't think that "Don't be evil" was tongue-in-cheek back then.

The company had a legitimate business model, was innovative, agile and profitable from early on. It rightly earned a lot of respect.

But something went wrong at some point. It's debatable when, why or how, but it happened.

[bjornnn]

The reason for Google's massive success has nothing to do with the business acumen or the innovative ideas of its founders - it's because a) in the 1990s, antitrust law in the US was pretty much dead and Google came in at just the right time to take advantage of this fact and make world domination their goal from the outset, and b) Google used their excess reserves of cash to host the worlds most popular website with no ads and no real revenue stream for many years, taking a risky and extremely expensive gamble that their slowly-cultivated vendor lock-in would eventually recoup their losses many, many times over, which it did. In other words, it was dumb luck, being in the right place at the right time. Just like Larry and Sergey, the trust fund babies born to wealthy successful parents with lucrative careers from the 80s tech boom.