How did Google go so wrong so quickly?

I'd say Larry Page set the seeds for this when he was CEO for the second time and chose Sundar to be his successor while also forcing the company into a disastrous social platform when they should have focused on cloud while shutting down all the fantasy projects. Larry picked Sundar because he was a consolidator who got the other execs to stop fighting and was smart enough to know how to "grow" google's market share over the next decade (which he did). But that growth came at the expense of most of the things that made google great, and now that the profits aren't growing rapidly any more, all the stuff that was fun simply because there was a lot of money floating around are gone.

For me, it it began to end when a director stole my project from me and forced me out, then bad-talked me at perf calibration, and finally ended when I realized my new management was just "night school MBAs with a little bit of technical knowledge and no management skills other than ass kissing the VP".

Google being a very young company - it ain't like the Good Old Days(tm), when a big company used to have lots of people who'd been there for 25 to 40+ years, to say "WHOA!" if the company's culture started going sour. Plus the whole "everything is 10X faster in the internet age". And the Jack Welsh "screw honor and the common good, I'm gaming it for ME" ethos.

Also - Google's core business being pretty much a Monopoly Money Farm, there's little sense of "we gotta be careful and keep this a tightly-run and well-managed ship, or else our competition will watch us crash and burn".