Leaving aside the merits of the ban for a moment...
This is politically beneficial because Google and Facebook squandered historically broad and strong goodwill, and they made themselves a target in the culture wars.
Google would have survived just fine with its historically light touch on ads.
Both would have been ok without monetizing data collected from users.
Both would be successful allowing users to pick aspects they wanted (e.g., shorts or not), rather than coercing them.
Unfortunately, there's no market feedback for missed future opportunities, and weak positive benefits from PR that dampens and side-steps negative sentiment, so there's no correction.
Had Google taken the privacy tack that Apple did, we might all be storing our most critical data on their servers (given their high data center standards), and thus inclined to do most business on Google cloud.
Both companies have founders still directing a majority of shares. There's no excuse of corruption by short-sighted shareholders.
Page and Brin have consistently escaped blame for things that Zuckerberg and Musk are excoriated for. It turns out that you just have to lie low, instead of jumping up and down for attention in the press or on social media, and people will obligingly forget that you exist and have effectively full control over your giant, society-dominating company.
This is it 100%. Zuckerberg and Musk aren't doing anything more awful than Page or Brin, but they're smart enough to understand that it's WAY easier to get away with sketchy stuff when you're not someone that the average person knows about. There's a huge amount of value in keeping your mouth shut.
I think there's a lot of wishful thinking in your post. Alphabet is the 5th biggest and richest company in the world. From a capitalistic perspective, they made everything right and the point you bring are negligible.
Perhaps. A hypothesis that their business would be bigger could be seen as a wish. But Alphabet's stock multiples are below comparable companies. From a capitalist perspective, that means they're being poorly run.
So I think you can do more than minimize ("wishful", "negligible"). Also, what you seem to be saying is that being among the biggest makes everything they did right, so one should just accept that.
If I were a Google principal hiring any leader, I'd want to select candidates who had concrete plans for improvement -- opportunities to grow the business or to correct mistakes. Isn't that a better approach?
If instead Google principals and managers were hiring for those who accept their decisions - loyalty -- I'd run in the opposite direction.
This is politically beneficial because Google and Facebook squandered historically broad and strong goodwill, and they made themselves a target in the culture wars.
Google would have survived just fine with its historically light touch on ads.
Both would have been ok without monetizing data collected from users.
Both would be successful allowing users to pick aspects they wanted (e.g., shorts or not), rather than coercing them.
Unfortunately, there's no market feedback for missed future opportunities, and weak positive benefits from PR that dampens and side-steps negative sentiment, so there's no correction.
Had Google taken the privacy tack that Apple did, we might all be storing our most critical data on their servers (given their high data center standards), and thus inclined to do most business on Google cloud.
Both companies have founders still directing a majority of shares. There's no excuse of corruption by short-sighted shareholders.