When a company loses its passion, when it tosses employee morale in the sink, it’s time to walk away.
I dumped my Alphabet (Google) stock last week.
Google began losing its way the day co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin left. They’re now the 6th and 7th richest people in the world. Their fortunes, taken together, would rank them 1st, by a huge margin.
What are they doing? Not much. Page “invests in start-ups” and “life extension.” Brin has hosted a baby shower where adults wore diapers. These are no longer serious people. Yet both retain their voting stock meaning they, and in time their kids, will be absolute rulers of all Google domains.
Ruth Porat, a former Morgan Stanley banker, stepped into the vacuum. She has made CEO Sundar Pichai a billionaire but he has hollowed out the company.
Have you tried Microsoft Edge lately? How about Bing and Co-Pilot? I have, and they’re miles ahead of Google.
Google knows this. But it’s not responding, because it pays Apple and others for its traffic. That’s the subject of an antitrust trial, now nearing its climax, which could hit Google as hard as Microsoft was hit a generation ago.
Wall Street Leadership
Under Porat’s Wall Street leadership, Pichai is laying off core developers, sending the work to Mexico and India. He fired employees who protested Google’s dealings with Israel and told the rest to keep their mouths shut.
This is what happens when you let Wall Street run a tech business. It dies, first slowly, and eventually all at once. Tech leadership demands a wide variety of voices. It demands that smart people be heard. It demands passion and everyone’s best effort. Because change is constantly accelerating, this is not optional.
But that’s not the way Wall Street looks at things. They think tech is just another business. Wall Street thinks a tech company is like a manufacturing business, or an oil business, or a utility. They squeeze out everything that’s not going into their own pockets. They’ve killed hundreds of good companies as a result.
They’re killing Google now.
Porat and Pichai aren’t worried about the antitrust case. They figure they’ll appeal the ruling, line up politicians against it, bribe a few judges, and go on their merry way. Maybe they will.
But that’s not the point.
The point is that you commit financial suicide by focusing only on yourself, rather than the customers and employees, destroying the goodwill and morale that made you what you are. This is not unique to our time. It has always been true.
Google has been at it for nearly a decade, and they’re about to reap the whirlwind from it.
