My dad frequently says that sooner or later the finance guys get in charge of the company and then they cut the fat and keep cutting into the product. Sooner or later they go too far. Seems fairly inevitable, seems to happen a lot. I assume that what happens is that the product matures, so the obvious thing to do is make things more financially efficient. Problem is, the company sells a product and the finance CEO's core competency is reducing costs, and reducing costs isn't something that customers actually buy.

I don't think that's analogous: you'd have to argue that Amazon spent a ton of time and effort on keeping cheap knockoff products off their marketplace and then did a sudden u-turn and decided not to do that anymore. Even then, I don't think the analogy holds, because the quality of Amazon's marketplace listings isn't anywhere near as synonymous with Amazon as the quality of Google's search results is with Google.

>Even then, I don't think the analogy holds, because the quality of Amazon's marketplace listings isn't anywhere near as synonymous with Amazon as the quality of Google's search results is with Google.

What? Why not, and anyway Amazon I'm giving money. I'd think that quality there would be more deeply linked than anywhere I'm just giving some time.