Google's CEO is increasingly boxed in by regulators, critics, and employees

The big thing is, Google will not grant it's exclusive interview treatment to news sources which are heavily critical of them, which means that any news site or blog which gets interviews with Googlers isn't going to risk that revenue source by getting on the Google press folks' bad side. This is why sites like The Verge which regularly get insider treatment, and interviews with Sundar Pichai, Matias Duarte, and Astro Teller will never really write a truly critical article about Google.

It's more than that. Their behavior has changed.

Some years ago everyone was on their side because they were fighting for network neutrality and building Google Fiber and supporting Linux and providing Chilling Effects links to notify users of DMCA censorship and generally sticking it to the MPAA/Comcast/Microsoft.

These days they're not only not really doing that anymore, now they're misidentifying videos with YouTube Content ID and infecting web standards with EME and tracking everyone much more comprehensively than they used to.

People only think you're on their side as long as you continue to do things that show you're on their side.

Just like Apple, Facebook and Amazon?

Another competing factor is that Google makes most of its money in advertising - so every feature of every product has the opportunity to be compromised for the benefit of advertising. Internet advertising needs another revolution!

If not then, yes, these two things qualify as moving mountains.

Also, there's no actual facts about Google in that article.

Assuming you mean that the smaller group accomplishing half the work is "useful" and the larger group also accomplishing half the work is "not useful", it certainly doesn't mean that.

It means, very clearly, that the number of "not useful" people increases linearly with size, and the number of "useful" people increases sublinearly. But even if your definition of "size" included only useful people, x^2 is a polynomial function of x, not an exponential function of it.

For one your prospects are tied to how well your project does. Sounds reasonable right? But what this results in is many teams battling to "win" with politics often playing a large role in who is the victor, rewrites of existing code essentially to prove your technical prowess and make your promotion case and little to no valuation of team value rather than individual value, namely that teams are (or can be) greater than their sum of parts.

The last point is a key one and an area where the likes of Damore go wrong. The best team isn't one simply that's the sum of the people who individually had the highest "merit".

Put another way the cynical view is your shit never breaks no one notices but if it breaks in a big way and you fix it, well that's impact. Likewise adding a feature isn't nearly as much impact as rewriting the whole thing from scratch.

The stuff I saw:

1. People will not do easy yet impactful tasks. Everyone will try to solve a challenging problem, even if its effect on the bottom line is negligible. Folks who solve simple problems that bring in a lot of money are less likely to be promoted. At times, an easier solution was actively campaigned against by someone whose brilliant pet project would be impacted.

2. Highly valuing individual technical ability often ends up with devaluing team cohesion. In the place I worked, the people were very capable and smart. But the teams were not that effective. If something went wrong, people were less likely to see how existing policies and the organizational structure led to these problems, and instead focused more on which individuals were to blame. Everything - success or failure - was at the individual level.

So I do not think he meant that a company should not value individual technical ability. But if they value it more than effective team management, etc - I would not work there. Been there, done that.

It's a forest for the trees sort of thing. In my limited experience with former googlers and microsoft people, they came from environments that were so far removed from real customers and product feedback that their only measure of success was if they could impress their peers by using the very latest features of C++ move semantics, as opposed to architecting/building a scalable system that actually solved a customer problem.

Literally I know of a startup that basically failed because the ex-microsoft guy spent most of this time building C++ $WHATEVER to get better performance on our i/o bound app and the ex-googler spent most of his time reorganizing the repo. They never got around to delivering software that they could iterate on.

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Both of those places are big companies, if you feel the need to respond with how you work at company X and your team is great at getting things done, you really don't need to bother. We get it, companies with tends of thousands of employees probably have many different subcultures.

Chrome? Prevents Microsoft or Mozilla from strangling them at the browser.

Android? Stops Apple from strangling them at the phone.

Fiber? Was intended to stop ISPs strangling them at the premises. A rare misfire which they probably wish they'd pushed harder.

The first consequential alternative revenue stream to appear in Google's lifetime is GCP. In Google's position I'd spend just about anything to get a double-digit marketshare. I suspect they have the best technology out of the three, but don't enjoy first-mover (Amazon) or sales channels & bundling power (Microsoft).

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal, we work closely with Google. But also with Microsoft and a lot of other partners too.

Meanwhile, Google is...well, where are they? They never did give us that Linux Google Drive client they promised. They announce products then shut them down, so no one can really trust their products. Even the ones we had before Google lost its way (I miss Reader's trends feature). Aside from whoever's on the Takeout team, Google seems to have stopped caring about sharing and working with others.

After Microsoft lost it's pedestal, it didn't go anywhere remarkable until Nadella's big cloud services push, where they have changed up quite a bit and reentered the marketplace in a big way.

There may just be a point a company becomes too large to ever completely die, since they have enough cash to spend decades looking for a way to revitalize themselves. Though I say that as we've seen former giants like Sears be brought to the brink of death.