Slight tangent: as a former longtime (2005-2020) Googler I can confirm that Google's culture-undermining decisions have been driven by fear of downside risk. But that fear was of two kinds, which can help us better understand the costs of being "on top".
Fear #1 was of leaving revenue on the table due to embarrassing mistakes. The more complex and powerful your products get, the more mistake vectors open up, and for every new one the instinctive managerial response is to add a veto point to check for that kind of mistake... which ends in extreme vetocracy. I used to serve on a "launch committee" where engineers would come in supplication to get the >10 different approvals they needed to make any significant change to anything.
Fear #2 was that a prospective competitor would find a new superpower that would take all our revenue, or all our revenue growth potential, away. This led to costly decisions like launching Google Plus (out of fear that otherwise Facebook would take all our search traffic) and secretly internally developing a censored search engine for China called Dragonfly (out of fear that otherwise Baidu would take all our growth potential).
So the lesson is a bit broader than "monopolists lose their souls": it's more like "alpha dogs lose their souls" or "uneasy lies the head that wears the crown". To keep your integrity when you've achieved extreme success, whether monopolistic or not, requires a stringent discipline of avoiding hedonic adaptation and focusing on your own strengths. A sincerely held service-oriented mission can help with this; Google used to have that but largely abandoned it, despite having set up its stock ownership structure to prevent short-term investor greed from pushing it away from the founders' vision. That should be a sobering lesson on how hard this sort of discipline can be.
Slight tangent: as a former longtime (2005-2020) Googler I can confirm that Google's culture-undermining decisions have been driven by fear of downside risk. But that fear was of two kinds, which can help us better understand the costs of being "on top".
Fear #1 was of leaving revenue on the table due to embarrassing mistakes. The more complex and powerful your products get, the more mistake vectors open up, and for every new one the instinctive managerial response is to add a veto point to check for that kind of mistake... which ends in extreme vetocracy. I used to serve on a "launch committee" where engineers would come in supplication to get the >10 different approvals they needed to make any significant change to anything.
Fear #2 was that a prospective competitor would find a new superpower that would take all our revenue, or all our revenue growth potential, away. This led to costly decisions like launching Google Plus (out of fear that otherwise Facebook would take all our search traffic) and secretly internally developing a censored search engine for China called Dragonfly (out of fear that otherwise Baidu would take all our growth potential).
So the lesson is a bit broader than "monopolists lose their souls": it's more like "alpha dogs lose their souls" or "uneasy lies the head that wears the crown". To keep your integrity when you've achieved extreme success, whether monopolistic or not, requires a stringent discipline of avoiding hedonic adaptation and focusing on your own strengths. A sincerely held service-oriented mission can help with this; Google used to have that but largely abandoned it, despite having set up its stock ownership structure to prevent short-term investor greed from pushing it away from the founders' vision. That should be a sobering lesson on how hard this sort of discipline can be.
God is ALL that is. Anything else is illusion.