Majority of googlers wanted maven. They wanted search in China.
Biggest change to culture is people getting tired of SJW outrage. And a focus back on our users and business
Genuinely curious about this - was there a poll or something?
Of those 7k a smaller number were Google employees (it does not say the number) and among them 65% approved of censored search.
Put another way, even though the macro blind community was against. Googlers in said group were for it. Showing googlers are more likely to be for than against
You could be right, but this evidence is not conclusive.
Now, in many places, where there was one fascinating discussion, one sees only find a few remaining lonely activists talking with each other and the void. There's a certain hypersensitivity to perceived offense. Large areas of the company are now in information silos. Live questions at TGIF no longer happen. Internal social media is no longer funny or interesting. Ever discuso forum of meaningful size is getting "community standards moderation".
Yes, it looks like the activists are slowly and steadily losing the war. I wish they'd admit defeat. At this point, they're prolonging the inevitable. But still, they're going to lose, one exercise of soft power at a time.
But what's left behin? A waste. Silence. A desert where nothing grows. It's unfortunate. It's sad. But it had to be done.
The organization is a husk of itself, unable to maintain services for more than a few dozen months, with a disinterest in improving anything that doesn't make PR headlines (eg: Google Fi RMAs, IPv6 support inside GCP, worsening search results, etc). Eventually this will cause Google to join AOL & Yahoo, though Android & Search should provide sizable staying power.
I still think it had to be done. The activists wanted to turn the company into a tool for advancing a fringe political agenda, even if unprofitable No leadership group can or should tolerate that kind of hijacking.
It'd have been better for this culture war not to have started at all. But once the activists started it, it became an existential imperative for Google to finish it --- which it did.
Microsoft's still playing their old games FYI, they have not shaken their prior reputation (esp. with their abhorent behaviour at Linuxfest Northwest 3 or 4 years ago), and they've essentially scuttled QA (hence certain Win10 updates deleting your files, among other recent bugs). There was a recent push to gut the MS Partner program's benefits, which had predictable results. IMO they are using Oracle's business model currently, albeit with a few thousand extra developers.