Where Google’s downfall began

While Google is clearly still a huge and impactful company, it appears things are heading in the wrong direction. If that’s true, it’s easy to point to where the slide began.

Back in 2018 Jeff Bezos told his employees that one day Amazon will fail. He’s not wrong, but his intent was inspiration to keep them on the right track. Going a bit deeper, here is the exact part of that talk that stood out to me:

“If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end. We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible.”

That’s clearly where Google has failed. They focused on their customers for 20 years, but over the last five they’ve becoming heavily inward-focused. If you look at the four items on my recent post about why Google is failing, all of them are things that they’ve turned from customer benefits to internal money-saving.

On one hand, it’s understandable. Things get a little tighter, so you work to raise the bottom line a bit. The problem is that when you do things at the expense of your customers, you have no choice but to keep tightening things up and it becomes a death spiral.

Media Play

It reminds me of one of the last times I bought something from Media Play, probably 20 years ago. They…