Someone here asserted that DoubleClick bought Google with Google’s money. But that was 2008 and that timeline doesn’t sound particularly convincing to me. But something changed for sure.
Afaik, it wasn't McDonnell Douglas/Boeing, where DoubleClick executives metastisized their culture in Google.
It's just... Google realized it's way more profitable to serve ads to the entire internet than do anything else.
Advertising is the black hole at the center of the Google galaxy, and over time all businesses bend towards profit centers.
And so absent strong leadership to the contrary, Google has slid inch by inch, small decision by small decision, closer to it.
People find it really easy to say money isn't the important thing when they are rich. But see that wealth challenged and their behavior changes very quickly (with some exceptions, of course).
Google may have had ideals, but they were still a company filled with directors and managers and employees who weren't rich (enough) yet. They weren't paid off from the initial rainfall of money. They were going to use all tools at their disposal. It is no surprise it happened, even if the founders weren't too concerned with money (which I don't believe).
What this meant culturally is that Google became a company where technical merit alone is what was rewarded. In my 15+ years of working for the company, not once did I touch a budget. The teams that did handle that sort of stuff were always made to plead their cases to engineering instead of it being the other way around.
idk, i've definitely heard from people with low employee ids that larry & sergy had the idea of ads from before day 1.
Perhaps they didn't realize how much money it would be but they didn't develop pagerank and spend years _wondering_ how it could be monetized.
I think somebody submitted a blog year ago to HN that goes into this. Maybe somebody from doubleclick side that turned down an offer from Larry?
I remember PG quipping words to the effect of "google searches are like scientology, what's true, is what's true for you" so the trend was clear even at that time (maybe 10-ish years ago?)
It’s kind of funny how impactful a decision that was for Google and it’s almost memory holed. Most people don’t even seem to remember it.
Google+ was when Google stated that the goal of products wasn’t to be a good product but to drive traffic to Google+.