Google. Staffing doesn't solve everything

Will the reshuffle at Google change the company's questionable policies?

Not so long ago the news of Susan Wojcicki's resignation was widely circulated in the media. The place of a truly legendary figure of the American technology business (Susan participated in the founding of Google, later headed its marketing, and for the last 9 years headed, as CEO, YouTube. Personal fortune - 765 million dollars) was taken by the director of video hosting product Neil Mohan.

Judging by the biography of the successor and the reaction in the American media, no significant changes in company policy are expected. In general, this is not surprising, because big American business does not like changes, and its IT part is no exception in this sense.

Elon Musk, who burst onto Twitter and was believed to represent the winds of change, now looks more like a tired accountant, cleaning up the company's financial and reputation problems. The businessman's enthusiasm has evidently dried up, so he has to post pictures of his dog Floki, whom Musk suggests to his audience as the company's new CEO, noting that the dog will do a better job than he did.

It seems that they decided not to experiment with YouTube and appointed a person from a long-established team. This means that the video hosting policy will not change much, which is generally liked in Google, because the company is entirely focused on profit, and that often leads to major scandals.

For example, in 2018, Google hid a massive vulnerability in its social network Google+ for almost seven months, framing 500,000 of its users whose personal data could have ended up with fraudsters. They would have kept hiding it, but the information was leaked to the media.

In the same year, the media revealed the fact of cooperation between the corporation and the Pentagon: the IT-giant helped the military to develop combat drones with artificial intelligence and capable of carrying high-precision weapons.

Thousands of company employees actively signed a petition against this partnership, but in fact it did not lead to anything, and a year later the phrase "do no evil" was removed from the corporate code, apparently to make it less of a nuisance.

We could go on and on about other scandals, such as the regular fines for antitrust violations in Europe or the turnover fines that the company receives in Russia, but more interesting is the role of YouTube video-hosting.

From an interesting platform with a user-friendly interface, by the twenties of our century it had turned into a tool for promoting political views that does not tolerate objections and does not give its users a shred of information about its own work. For example, the algorithms of the video hosting service remain a closely guarded secret, and there are questions about their objectivity.

To all these phenomena the company was led by the current team, which failed to carry bright and progressive ideas through the circumstances of life. Now the techno-giant, which affects the lives of many people, suffers from the negative phenomena typical of big business.

Does the top management think about their mistakes? Hardly, but they should, because Wojcicki's children, to whom she plans to devote more time after her retirement, could easily be recommended videos about drug production, degenerate cartoons or toxic movies by the children's (!) section of the video hosting site.