If someone like myself, only casually acquainted with the organization, hears so many bad things about Tony, how does he still have a job? Forget his apparent management incompetence, at this point it's just bad PR for Google.
All of these are positive character traits, but they also mean that some...well...sociopathic individuals have managed to gain his trust and hold it for long periods of time, doing significant damage to the organization in the process. In the past, he has eventually fixed things, it just took years.
It's hard to say that this is wrong, per se, since the alternative is often a slash-and-burn CEO that axes executives at the first sign of trouble in their divisions. You can't do anything long-term under those conditions either.
Through the non-MBTI lens, just that he tends to be long-term oriented, inwardly-focused, and prefers to invest in long-term relationships with a few trusted people rather than gregariously flirt with many. He wanted all of his executives to pledge to commit to Google for 10 years when he became CEO in 2011 (ironically, most of them have left by now).
Certain people are gifted with the ability to "kiss up and kick down" their team, i.e., kiss up to those they need to impress, and for anyone else that is less valuable, "kick them" or treat them with less regard.
Here is a good Wikipedia article, with several case studies: John Bolton, Robert McNamara. Maybe someone can add his name to this list:
Vivek "Vic" Gundotra did serious damage to Google's corporate image and was seriously reviled within Google, yet he stuck around for years. It's possible that Google upper management thinks that Fadell might be able to pull off a bet-the-company move. Gundotra was tasked with the same thing.
Or, it's possible that Google was contractually obligated to keep Gundotra around for a period of time, and is under the same obligation with Fadell. shrug
I can't believe that they would have so much negotiating power that there's no way out for Google. Even if it's moving them to be the VP of janitor closets.
1. potential reputation and organisational damage that such a person can bring to an organisation without carefully managing the situation;
2. in a company as big as Google (and frankly, one that is doing as well as Google!) it may take quite a lot of time to truly uncover the damage that a person is doing to an organisation, especially if that person is on good terms with upper management;
3. At a high enough level of management in a big enough company, lawyers and professional negotiators can wangle some amazingly good terms into the manager's contract. This can make it exceptionally tricky to remove this person quickly, or even move them sideways (if you move someone sideways, then you change their authority on a variety of things, which almost certainly changes their job description and thus their contract. This goes double if you demote them, even for the same money).
I can't speak for anything going on at Google of course, but I guess I can speculate that it might have been a combination of all three of these things. Which is utter speculation, so feel free to duly assign it the value that you feel it is worth :-)
There is a lag between management incompetence and revenue.
Though if you scrape them for minor bits, you find some minor hints. For example, one of those fawning admiration posts about him, two years ago, mentioned that he killed the Android laptop project, because it was competing with his own project, Chromebooks.
I recently heard the 'tack Android apps onto Chrome OS' strategy described as a "trainwreck" by a Google employee, and that ship has now been righted: Android is working on multi-window views in Android 6.x, and it's looking like Android is once again looking at a single converged OS for multiple form factors.
Ubuntu and Windows, of course, have been working on this for a while. Had Pichai not interfered out of his own ego for his own pet project, Google would be leading this curve, not trailing behind. As another commenter said above, "There is a lag between management incompetence and revenue". But Android was leading this until Pichai got in the way.
Between a huge stumble like this, that the media barely even noticed, and the fact that under Pichai, Google has lost almost all consumer trust, I have a hard time believing Sundar doesn't deserve a large helping of the blame.
And considering the stumbles the ad market, their primary business, is having, being a strong device platform provider, which they've already shown they can monetize (outside of ads, Android is probably their next most profitable space), is really key.