Google's Decline Really Bugs Me

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Even Google Hangout with screen share helped our distributed team a lot.

5 years ago, what did Google offer? GWT?

And, of course, the search engine, we developers probably use it more than many other groups users. I hardly heard anyone use alternative search engine for day-to-day software development related search.

All these are of zero cost to us.

I can speak firsthand to seeing what happens when a company tries to maximize profit -- actually two companies.

One was a life insurance company with about 1,300 employees; another a tech company with around 500. The life insurance company was bought out by a large conglomerate and then a "management consulting / efficiency" company was brought in to "help". What really happened was the consulting company decided who was going to get laid off and who wasn't. While there was some dead weight in the company, many of the people laid off were not the dead weight - not sure how they really decided, but the outcome was not good from a personnel standpoint - it might have been from a profit standpoint initially. After that, morale was destroyed as well as the management culture becoming poisonous. Example: IT director charging departments for new computers and then keeping them for his area and giving the other departments his old ones. Basically it became a dog-eat-dog company that was eventually purchased by AIG - and most of us can remember what happened to that company.

The other company was a software and consulting company that was run by one of the founders until he decided to step back from the day to day operations (after he made a boatload of money) and have his accountant friend run the company. Prior to this, the company was one of the best to work for in the area. Its consultants were considered top-notch and the benefits were incredible. Since the accountant took over, morale is horrible and benefits are way down. I could go into detail, but you can find examples of bad cost cutting and morale busting decisions all over the internet - it seemed like this company did a lot of them.

The point is, maximizing profit often comes at the expense of the people who work for the company; and isn't good in the long run for the people or the company.

What you're seeing here is not the shattering of a dream, but of an illusion -- Google hasn't been a scrappy, idealistic startup for many years. It's a fine company, but it's a big company -- a collection of tens of thousands of people, all motivated by different hopes and dreams. No institution of that size behaves consistently, let alone consistently benevolently.

In other words: stop setting up false idols, and your reality won't be shattered when they disappoint you.

Now, those terrible managers might have thought that they were maximizing profits, but like you said, they eventually failed.