It used to make me sad. Now, I’m just cynical.

I just finished leaving a comment at a technical forum about something that, looking back, was the main highway of my life as a worker bee. First, understand that as a young man just starting out to have a career, I was passionate about what I did. (Computer programming. People use different names now for the wretched corpse of what was once a wonderful adventure.)

The post I responded to was all about how Google has turned into (in the words of the original poster) a real shit show. The original poster went on and on about all the great products that Google used to offer, but they don’t anymore. The original poster seemed confused about why this happened. He complained bitterly that all Google had to do was stay on course with the stuff they did that worked so well. Why didn’t they just do that?

I’ve seen it before. Many times before. With a very broad variety of technology innovations. They bloom into wonderful things. Then they die and rot.

The first time it happened to me, it broke my heart. Literally. When you’re passionate about what you do, that can happen. I seriously believe now that I avoided becoming one of the people you see shooting other people strictly by luck. My last employer threw me out with a small golden parachute. (Call it a “copper parachute” – not golden, but enough.) I spent a few more years day-trading in front of my PC. The only thing that could occupy my mind enough was gaining or losing more money than I could actually afford in mere minutes. It was sheer luck that I survived that episode too.

Let me describe just one instance where this happened on a global scale just to illustrate the repeating cycle. This one instance has been documented thoroughly and the same cycle happens over and over. I’m not describing anything new or unique. The surprising thing to me now is that people fail to simply see it happening when, to me, it’s so clear and obvious.

My first real job was working for IBM. At that time, IBM had crushed the competition and ruled the mainframe computer world. (Young people may not remember this. It was a global phenomenon.) Then a small, entrepreneurial division of IBM in Boca Raton, Florida invented the IBM PC. It was a wonderful thing. I still have the original IBM PC I bought with my own money. (I didn’t work for IBM by then and my employer thought PC’s “were just toys, not real computers”.) The IBM PC instantly became the overwhelming player in a new world.

But success with the PC killed IBM. Today’s IBM is a Frankenstein monster cobbled together by an outside executive hired away from a cookie company (Nabisco – an acronym from “National Biscuit Company”) when shareholders tried to salvage what they could out of the wreckage. It’s not “IBM” anymore, but Frankenstein is doing OK for a company that was brought back from the dead.

The way the salesmen who controlled IBM killed it was to take something that was working and try to squeeze as much money as they could out of it. The salesmen/executives probably thought the PC was a toy too. But they did know that there was money to be had – lots of it – and other people, like Compaq and a thousand “clone” manufacturers, were sharing in the wealth. Seeing other people make money when they thought they should be making all of it was something that the salesmen/executives could not stomach.

They ripped the PC out of the hands of the innovators who created it and moved the whole operation out of Florida and under their direct control. Next, they introduced a new variant PC – the “AT” (Advanced Technology) and a new operating system – “OS/2” – that had some engineering innovations but actually were designed to stop other people from making money – mainly Microsoft. The market spit them out like the poison fruit that they were. And since the mainframe market was dying a natural death, the IBM that I used to love died too.

It’s worth remembering (although most people probably don’t even know it) that Google’s first success – a world beating search engine – was the third or fourth search engine to “own” that market. Before there was Google, there was Gopher, Infoseek, Yahoo!, Altavista … Larry Page and Sergey Brin simply put together existing ideas (like PageRank) and did it first. But being filthy rich wasn’t good enough for them. They needed to be filthy, stinking, rotten rich. And they are.

I don’t know if it’s significant or not. Maybe it’s just a coincidence. But there are a couple of factoids that seem to make sense to me. Google’s original (unofficial but widely used) “mission statement” was “Don’t be evil.” You don’t hear that anymore. Also, Google cofounder Sergey Brin and Nicole Shanahan got divorced after several years of marriage. It was Brin’s second divorce. Shanahan is now running for Vice President alongside RFK Jr.