14 DAY TRIAL // Google is increasingly having an image problem. It's been abandoning its ideals, one at a time, for a while now and seems determined to continue to do so. Things like access to all of the books in the world, net neutrality, no censorship were all sacrificed to, basically, make more money.
Of course, that doesn't mean that people are abandoning it in droves. Some of its moves may be unpopular, like shutting down Reader, but one billion people use YouTube alone. Certainly, Google isn't hurting.
And it won't be for years, at least not in the sense that users will start leaving. But Google's current thinking will end up hurting it, sooner than it expects, when the most talented people won't want to work for Google anymore.
Again, this isn't going to happen overnight, Google is one of the top tech companies around, it pays its people well, its perks are legendary. So it won't have a problem getting good, even brilliant people to work for it.
But it won't get the best and it won't get the high-profile hires that it has been getting so far.
Google had Ed Lu, a former NASA astronaut, working for it, it's got Vint Cerf, one of the "fathers of the internet," working for it, it's got several of the key people who put together the HTML5 spec working for it and so on and so forth. More recently, it has hired Ray Kurzweil, famous inventor and futurist.
Some of them may not do much at Google, some have very crucial roles. But they all help Google's image, its prestige, they make other brilliant people want to work there.
People like these came to Google because Google was different. They came to Google because it was the company that wanted to make the world better, that wanted an open and neutral internet, that set out to fight the status quo.
It was a company that allowed its employees to spend one day a week working on whatever they wanted. A company that supported niche or crazy ideas, even if they didn't make any money and maybe never would.
Google is not that company anymore and people are noticing. And they will start to leave, one by one. Again, it's going to take years, but it will happen. Eventually, the people that made Google unique will be gone. When that happens, the company's ability to put out the "moonshot" ideas that Larry Page is so fond of will be gone.