Alternative take: when I was there he was tyrannical and constantly blocking employees from open sourcing code developed on their own weekends and evenings, purely on a personal whim. People had to fight internal battles to get like little video games and stuff put up on github. You'd think head of OSPO would do whatever it took to get code open sourced but no far from it. Loads of grumbling about how he was just an ex-Slashdot editor who couldn't even code, on a power trip abusing contract ip clauses.
That couldn’t be further from my experience of working with Chris on open source at google for the last 13 years.
They let him go??? That's... Words fail.
Google was supposed to have the capacity to stick to a long-term vision because the founders retained preferred stock with (IIRC) 10x voting rights.
By that same token, there is no one to blame but the founders now that Google has turned into another mediocre big corporation without vision.
Like Apple, they have a vision for $$$
Every for profit cares about money. The issue is that Google has struggled to try to come up with a new product that convinced people to give it money.