If only there were a term for being so impressed with yourselves that you felt you could just ignore the little people. Maybe "focused on Q1 revenue goals"? Seems long, though. I'd be happy if I could get it down to three syllables.
> If only there were a term for being so impressed with yourselves that you felt you could just ignore the little people.
It nothing to do with people being "little" in Google's eyes. It's about them being numerous. According to Wikipedia, Google has 46,421 employees. Here's the reported number of users of various Google products normalized to "per Googler":
Imagine you had your own B2B business. Just you, no other employees. You have 107 businesses using your product. How much time would you be able to give each of them?
Say you open up a little hand-crafted artisanal phone business. Just you. You've sold 19,387 phones in the past few years, and you sell 18 more every day. How much time would you have for support for each of those?
You make software. Just a little hobby on the side you do by yourself. You have more than 32,296 active users of it. You're still cranking away on it, adding new features. How much time do you also have to answer the phone when one of those people has a problem? Keep in mind, none of them have paid you anything.
Let's say Google decided to drop everything: no development, no new features, no new products, no vacation, no HR, no facilities, no security, no R&D, no training, no nothing. Instead, every single employee from Larry Page on down devotes their full time to tech support. Users are pretty sharp so they rarely have problems: they only need to call for help once per year. If all every Googler did was get on the phone and help people, they'd still only be able to give each person 4.82 minutes.
You say it like it has to be one or the other, but why can't it be both?
Google has chosen businesses where most of their users aren't, as you point out, their customers. They're the product.
What made them interesting in the beginning is that their behaviors were different than the economic incentives. They were engineering-focused, so they made a great search engine, and didn't worry about revenue maximization. They were, as far as I can tell, really serious about organizing the world's information, and about not being evil. That helped them crush their competitors.
But as far as I can tell, they've become just another large company. Many thousands of people, interacting mostly with fellow employees. So the people, always numerous, have also become little. Which I think is always the seed of a company's downfall. E.g., Microsoft, which has floundered for how long now? Cut off the roots and the whole plant eventually dies.
