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Comment by tanilama | Hacker News Reader

Why would not having a CTO symbolize Google's strategy shift from tech? Google has more than enough talented tech visionaries at high levels in each of its sub organizations, probably overpopulated with such.

I don't think Google lacks tech direction, quite on the contrary, they still excel and way ahead of the crowds. But they don't have a strategy to make money off from those technologies, other than limited venues like advertising/play store. But that is nothing CTO can solve.

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I'd say Google is showing signs of too many captains on the ship when it comes to tech. I'm not going to bore you with all the examples that are being cited elsewhere in this thread but there are plenty of things where people are raising eyebrows lately.

A CTO's role is to provide clarity internally and externally on what a company is doing technically. In absence of a CTO, that role is for the CEO. Pichar is not enough of a credible leader on this front.

E.g. Steve Jobs was a clear visionary leader. Bill Gates was a clear technical founder CEO. They did not need CTOs. Amazon has an effective business oriented CEO that defers to a very strong CTO (Werner Vogels) for technical things.

AWS is no accident; that requires technical leadership (Vogels) and long term strategic thinking (Bezos). Google just got leapfrogged by MS in the same space. I'd argue lack of leadership is a big reason.

Thank you for your clear critique, would you mind clarifying the Google leapfrogged by MS statement? I don’t keep close tabs on Azure.

There have been a bunch of reports citing MS as being second in terms of market share and growing nicely (hence the MS valuations going up), for cloud based deployments rather than third after Google. That's a failure of Google to beat Amazon and not to get beaten by someone else. That happened on Pichar's watch. That's just a small part of Google's business and a huge part of Amazon's business. Puts the whole ads are all there is point of view a bit in in perspective. They are all ballpark in the trillion dollar valuation range so I think the comparison is fair.

Google has been doing not so well in cloud for a very long time, long before Pichai became CEO.

And Microsoft has got some very unique strengths when it comes to Enterprise IT and developer tools.

For example a CTO could say unilaterally "no, we won't help build the great search firewall for China".

For example a CTO could say unilaterally "no, we won't help build the great search firewall for China".

That would be absurd, as such decision has no technical merit.

>That would be absurd, as such decision has no technical merit.

You think a CTO's job is only to decide which technologies to use?

I don't think you have any interest in discussion. CTO's role is of course not just technology related but he can't just veto the management without reason. There are pros and cons to both side for google, and I will be damned if moral reason was not considered when the decision was made, even when there is no CTO.

Yeah, this is my point. CEOs are often too detached from the technology to understand the moral/privacy implications of practically anything.

How is technology at all related to moral implication? That is like too simplistic view of Google CEO that he does not understand privacy implication.

No but that's not a CTO decision.

Or could say the opposite and fire anybody who refused to do their job ...

That’s not a CTO decision.

You are right in your views of them having enough technical leadership.

The main difference I can assume is when you look to 1 or 2 (founders)equal leaders to set vision it’s easier to get behind than however many VPs they have(today).

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