This viewpoint completely ignores the internal consequences of doing what you suggest. It's in fact, very strange to me to simply assert "they got it wrong" without even knowing the internal state of affairs well enough, which, from what i can tell, you wouldn't (I googled and linkedin searched pretty hard, so if you do work there, my apologies!).
There was also clearly no winning externally no matter what they did. It would not have been dead and gone as long as their was a narrative to be used by someone!
People who are admitted to jobs or universities via affirmative action but don't think this raises questions in the minds of people they work with are living in a fantasy land.
Having said that yeah people mostly live in fantasy lands and this guy disrupted that suspension of disbelief at least in his one case which makes him a tough commodity to deal with internally. But firing him wasn't required and was grossly unethical. They should have just let him sleep in the bed he shit in and he probably would have been gone within a few weeks anyway.
Now the guy is a goddamn martyr to the butthurt-white-male party.
"But firing him wasn't required and was grossly unethical. "
Gonna leave this one alone, but ...
"hey should have just let him sleep in the bed he shit in and he probably would have been gone within a few weeks anyway."
Again, this assumes a lot about what would have happened internally in that time period.
If, for example, 1000 good engineers quit out of frustration with lack of response, ...
Somehow, I have a distinct feeling, based on what you've written in this thread, that your response would be "fuck'em, let them go whine elsewhere"
I used to work at Google. I still know many people who work there and am still a shareholder.
If 1000 good engineers quit the users wouldn't even notice. Google is grossly overstaffed and pointless rewrites that achieve nothing at all are rampant. Promotion-oriented development is the order of the day.
Google reached a fork in the road with this event. The Google I remember being a part of many years ago had strong, firm commitments to freedom of speech. It left China rather than continue to accept the PRCs bullshit, despite the business consensus being that leaving the world's largest market was commercial suicide. That sort of action defined who the company was. It led to a globally trusted brand.
Pichai is clearly nothing like the men Brin and Page were. He just set fire to the trust of the Google brand to avoid pissing off a bunch of staff who are very likely mostly recent grads churning crap from C++ to Go somewhere deep inside the bowels of an undifferentiated product, and thus the least experienced and most trivially expendable. Losing a bunch of engineers who throw a hissy fit because someone wrote a blog post with lots of references to scientific research would, if anything, do Google a world of good.
The consequences of this will be felt for a long time. Who can really trust Google's results for political queries now? There will always be a nagging suspicion that certain results ("lies") liberals would rather people not see might have quietly gone missing.
This is what happens when you allow bad culture to fester for too long. There is no easy way out and debts will have to be paid on one side or the other. This will hurt google's hiring and they will lose people over this either way. The real question is what is the culture they want to have after the dust settles? Currently they have chosen one of PC orthodoxy and suppression of alternative views.
There was also clearly no winning externally no matter what they did. It would not have been dead and gone as long as their was a narrative to be used by someone!