In 2009, working at Yahoo, I oversaw Ad Marketplaces - which included management of the PPC advertising system. We had a terrible set of options. @Google had a better search engine, and was consistently eating our share of consumer search. The monetization load on Google search at that time was remarkably low - 1 ad per search max, often zero ads. Wall Street wanted revenue growth. Consumers wanted better search results. Advertisers wanted quality clicks. We chose Wall Street. There were times where we had so many ads on the page that zero organic search results showed above the fold. We sacrificed the search experience for revenue growth, in the face of a competitor whose experience was virtually un-monetized and clearly superior. We grew revenue from search at double digits rate, while share of search queries was steadily negative. There was another path, but the company lacked the fortitude to put the search experience and advertisers first. @Google @sundarpichai find themselves in a comparable situation today. @ChatGPT @claudeai @GeminiApp all provide better search experiences today with very light or zero ad load. And at the same time, @Google is making decisions that drive revenue growth at the expense of both the user experience AND the trust of advertisers - just at the moment where those constituents trust will be most important. Google was the company that always played the long game. In moments like these, we learn whether that’s because a monopoly on the best ad business ever built made it easy to do that, or if they’re really willing to make the hard tradeoffs that we weren’t at Yahoo back in 2009.