Ultimately, it's about the level of power that people wield. With great power comes great responsibility. Vic tied the compensation of every single employee to the success of Google+. So there is going to be some pushback, especially from one of the 75,000 people that have no control over how the social network does. There were also various circumstances that just made it feel right. One day there would be an email from Internal Comms about a day in the life of Vic Gundotra, mentioning how few hours of sleep he gets. It was then dug up that Vic did a car commercial where he talks about falling asleep at the wheel and how the lane assist feature saved his life. You have to find that kind of funny. Or maybe I'm just a terrible person and my cynicism ruined the guy's life. Either way, I was amused when people poked fun at senior leadership. It kept them honest. Every SVP thought they were Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos, but really they're just coming to work a little sleepy every day controlling a machine much bigger than they can understand.
In the end, making fun of specific people was a tiny tiny part of the culture of openness at Google. I think it was worth taking the bad with the good, but it seems like that didn't scale too well. I feel like that's just part of the lifecycle of a corporation. The companies whose engineers invented computers and the Internet just aren't around in their original form anymore. Apple made it out. Microsoft is doing pretty OK. That's about it. I feel like Google is the next IBM; people will live out their careers there and keep it alive for the foreseeable future, but I am not sure that people aspire to get their first job at IBM anymore. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the culture that made Google Google has been determined to not maximize investment returns over the next quarter, and so it has to go. It worked for IBM, right?
Ultimately, the person in question had a large volume of publicly-available writing, so I'm not sure it changed anything. But it does leave a bad taste in one's mouth because looking back, it was such a trivial thing that he was known for. In the years to come, shit got a lot more serious.
So this new rule is so broad as to be meaningless, it's sort of like making a new "no complaining" rule (which isn't as uncommon as you'd think). It demonstrates that the "chafe" was never about the rule. When we see workers purposefully making these criticisms anyway, as with this new hire or someone like James Damore, it means they've probably already understood that google won't act unless it represents a serious threat to their productivity. This is the company's first initial attempt to squash that sort of effort.
I think we’re also conflating “personal” attacks with criticisms that just happen to be about one person in particular. The meme in the article is criticizing google for exposing their relationships to key actors in child imprisonment policies in the US (connection was exposed by hiring one of them). By this standard there’s no criticism you could make of the company unless it didn’t apply to anyone, which doesn’t sound very meaningful. The same criticism could be levied (with the same picture/meme text) if they decide to hire Mike Pence next year, will that also be considered an unacceptable personal attack?
Very much not the case at Google historically. The level of criticism against execs was vicious, to the point that a lot of it was IMO in bad faith.
They should have let some bloodletting happen when hotheads threatened to leave during Damore and Project Maven times and entire company would be better off now, but they chickened out.