"You can't measure geek cred. You can't measure the second-order effect of services like Code Search."
And so as a publicly owned, regulated, billion dollar corporation, it no longer make sense to commit unmeasured resources to support unmeasurable benefits.
The funny thing is that the supposedly mature "we're a public, billion dollar grown up corporation now" approach almost always ends up robbing the company of its ability to lead and innovate.
Google is neglecting products it's great at (eg GAE) to focus on areas it's completely clueless about (like Google+). There's no real risk here, the ads are going to continue pumping cash in, but it's slowly becoming a big dumb company.
My bet is that within 2 years they will buy someone like Twitter or FourSquare for n*$100m, and you'll know the new AOL has arrived.
I probably agree with your first paragraph. That might be the inevitable consequence of big, or it might be too tight a focus on explicit shareholder value in the regulations, or ...
Every day companies like Google and Yahoo do things which don't have a directly measurable benefit.
Why does Yahoo put out YUI, Hadoop, YTS for free? Why does Google give out protobufs, GWT for free? Why are there public tech talks at these companies? Can you quantify the benefit of such activities?
Look, I admit that you can't make good business decisions on Google's scale without using the data. That, however, is not Google's problem. It's also important to have vision and principles that everyone in the company understands, otherwise it's impossible to keep thousands of employees moving in the same direction. It would be very easy for Larry to make a decision like:
"One of our core values is to put engineering first, this makes us a place where the smartest engineers want to work, and keeping Google Code around is a strong external indicator of this, therefore we should spend $1,000,000/year maintaining it regardless of profits."
Despite the lack of data you could not fault a CEO for making a gut call like that. Just because you can't measure something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Ah, sorry, I had saurik's comment in mind when I wrote that.
"2) I don't think Google even tries to make things sustainable. During all of these "Google shuts down X" that have been happened recently, some posts here by ex-Google people indicated that Google internally didn't even have reporting on per-project costs... hopefully now that they see how much certain things cost they will cause less market-level problems going forward."
Well, by that rationale, every company should just zero out their advertising budgets.
Seriously though, I see what you're saying, but there isn't always a direct metric for everything. No one fully understands a variety of drug interactions within the body, but does that mean everyone should stop taking their pills? Likewise, when technology companies stop caring about the community that develops software for their product(s), although it doesn't immediately affect their bottom line, one can usually point to it as a contributing cause for their slow decline (think IBM, Microsoft, Oracle).
And so as a publicly owned, regulated, billion dollar corporation, it no longer make sense to commit unmeasured resources to support unmeasurable benefits.
What's the point of making a billion dollars if it doesn't let you work on interesting things that don't offer any obvious immediate payoffs?
I believe as a public company, the only point of making a billion dollars is shareholder value, by law. Before they went public they could indulge their geek kink until they went blind.
I'm not saying Code Search doesn't (necessarily) contribute to shareholder value. But it sure has to be easier to make the case for something that can be measured, as opposed to "geek goodwill."
And so as a publicly owned, regulated, billion dollar corporation, it no longer make sense to commit unmeasured resources to support unmeasurable benefits.