This response captures it perfectly. I started at Google in 2006 and the "mini kitchens" (essentially a convenience mart) were just getting "re-organized" The new CFO was out to "cut unnecessary costs."[1] While Google was banking billions of dollars in "Free Cash Flow" every QUARTER than were cutting the 'unnecessary' costs that were something like $12,000 per employee per YEAR. So with 20,000 employees, that is about 1/4 billion dollars a year, or roughly 3% of the free cash flow. I called Eric on it at a TGIF[2]. The gist was "We're going to lose all these great employees because you want to keep more of the free cash than you currently do?"
And people quit, lots of people, and the flow moved out. And people who joined had no idea it had been "better" than what it was, this was just the standard which was admittedly still better than other companies. Eventually everyone for whom this affront was to high left leaving an employee base reasonably happy with the status quo.
They continued to "downgrade" the 'lifestyle benefits' the entire time I was there and it continued to piss people off who left.
As margin pressure grew the need to monetize grew and Marissa Meyer who had been the 'brick wall' between the user experience and monetization left the company. Others who felt as she did also left for a variety of reasons. Leaving only those for whom monetization was just the cost of doing business and hey, "We're Google!" right?
This opens up the opportunity for disruption. There is a hysteresis effect though, everyone has a different tolerance for crap. More and more people I know are not "Google" users anymore, they are 'search' users and if their OS pre-loads Bing they use that, sometimes they switch to DDG or Kagi. Once that takes hold in the bulk of the addressable market, Google will go the way of every other tech company before them. I used to point out to people that the "GooglePlex" was the dead hulk of SGI. Like wasps Google was living inside the corpse of a formerly big player. Everyone would tell me, "We're different, we're always going to be around." And like the Zen quotes from "Charlie's War" I would say, "We'll see." :-)
[1] I believe that this statement is perhaps the single most destructive thing any CFO can do. In part because they don't define 'necessary.'
[2] He was not amused :-)
