Yep, it does feel like you had a front row seat to witness those fateful choices.

This is a philosophical question in its core anyway — if all humans disappear tomorrow, all that we have been doing in tech becomes totally pointless. So everything we are doing is for the people. Considering other people’s thoughts and feelings, communicating with them, putting himself/herself in their shoes is something generally difficult for engineering type people. So its understandable how Google created and cultivated a culture in which the org was like an extension of the earlier academic environment from which the people who created Google came from. Except, in the real world there is no guarantee of government-backed funding flowing in due to an excellent engineering track record like there is in academia. People decide what prospers and what does not. Its not a safe, protected environment in which engineering can exist largely in a vacuum, where projects can be started and axed without great concern about those who may be the users of those projects, in contrast to the ‘real world’.

In any case, if Google ends up being unable to cultivate the understanding that it exists along with its users and that they together constitute a community, and that either both sides prosper, or Google loses. And it may be its undoing. In the latter case only Google loses, because the users can just choose to go with some other org. tha actually cares about its community.

Thanks for the discussion and good evening.