Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet
blog.google
blog.google
Slightly more organized info in the intro bullets.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the CEO and President, respectively, of Alphabet, have decided to leave these roles. They will continue their involvement as co-founders, shareholders and members of Alphabet’s Board of Directors.
For a while after Bill Gates stepped down as CEO, there was this awkward tension where Steve Balmer was CEO, but people still treated Bill like he was the one in control -- because he was.
Bill was simply playing politics.
Bill Gates is probably a good example to look to. He also stayed on the board (as chair) and remained a large shareholder, and was looked up to as the cofounder. So I'd imagine “like Bill Gates but with less active interest and involvement”.
Page and Brin, combined, are currently the majority shareholders of alphabet. Each controls 27% of the voting power ( 54% combined ). They are still in charge. They just won't be involved in the day-to-day operation of the company. Sundar will still report to Page/Brin and the board of directors.
They're 100% still in control of direction and people will always treat them as the boss (esp voting power), but the dynamic will not have nearly as much friction.
But a half-decade later, it's still 99.9% Google, so just double-up the Google guy to lead both tiers. Same as it ever was.
Can you break out revenue in a single company? Sure. But you can also easily do it with the structure Alphabet adopted. And, this structure also lends itself to easier valuations of entire units, useful if acquisition of a unit is something being considered.
Self driving cars is indeed a cool technical problem to solve if you asked an engineer, but if you asked society what it needed I doubt self driving cars would be the answer.
Flagstaff, AZ (pop. ~70,000, and double that in the metro area) has colder average lows than NYC during the winter, and several times more snow.
It's the closest major(-ish) town to the Grand Canyon, which is about 75 miles away.
Las Vegas (Aptiv), Pittsburgh (Aptiv, Aurora, Ford, Uber ATG), Dearborn MI (Ford), Miami (Ford), Washington (Ford). There's also a retirement community in Florida that Voyage is testing in.
By now even companies like Tesla and Volvo can do most of what any one can do. And they actually have usable cars.
Google inventing AGI will be a great deal though.
Congress is already whispering about the Ascension deal and how it affects the Fitbit buyout with regards to them intervening.
Google might not respect the desire for an open internet without ads and no single large player.
But i believe they fully respect their users privacy, comply with most of the law around privacy already, and have the strong desire to fully comply with it in the future.
Maybe I'm naive that way. But painting them as not respecting privacy at all is a bit blunt and not nuanced enough.
They are a huge company with thousands of teams pursuing their own agendas and made up of people of varying degree of scruples and viewpoints with regards to privacy.
I've worked for large companies that handle sensitive user data, and they all have at least some teams of people trying to figure out how they can respect the letter of privacy laws just enough, while ignoring the spirit of those laws, in order to profit from the personal data they hold, regardless of the potential side effects or long-term impact on the data subject.
Google is probably no different.
I'm not trying to say larger companies are innocent. Saying they don't respect privacy insinuates to me that they intentionally violate the law, and i don't think that that's true.
Technology moves faster than the law, we all know this.. What we need are ethical companies who not only respect the law but also respect the data owners.
We need a company with a motto like "don't be evil" or something like that.. if only, right? ;-)
The data shows they do not.
Google Is Fined $57 Million Under Europe’s Data Privacy Law: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/technology/google-europe-...
Google Is Fined $170 Million for Violating Children’s Privacy on YouTube: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/technology/google-youtube...
There is even a Wikipedia page about Google VS users privacy
Privacy concerns regarding Google: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_concerns_regarding_Goo...
There's a case to be made that Google is trying to do the right thing.
Google of course cares a lot that your data doesn't get into the hands of other companies, after all, it's THEIR data. That's were their care ends.
They're still fundamentally one org sharing data with itself. If anything, I would think the company segregation would make it more complicated and difficult, wrt logistics, legality, and internal politics.
I think some of the reasons could be they no longer see a risk of anti Monopoly regulation targeting them so they don't need to keep everything so divided. they genuinely want to give Sundar a go. They need a process to gradually fade out The original founders, but also importantly ensure those founders isolate their risk from any future missteps the companies take, and vice versa.
maybe the two co-founders were simply getting in the way.
Sure, I wouldn't disappear completely, but I'd work on low-stress things where I have a lot of free time and don't have so much responsibility under me.
Or children ;) John Lennon famously quit music for 5 years to raise his second child, after failing his first marriage.
I guess only time will tell how much I like this arrangement, but I'm pretty optimistic about it, and am tired of hearing the usual "oh but you'll be bored and want to work again" tropes. There's a lot more to life than work...
Personally I feel most strongly about Google, because I really believed the marketing back in the day. Took me a long time to get disillusioned, and when I did I felt all the worse for having been a supporter for so long.
Facebook is different. It's pretty hard to avoid using Facebook without being an outcast in a way, if all your friends and family are on there and they use it to communicate, schedule events, etc. There's also Facebook Marketplace which seems to have taken over for Craigslist for selling stuff locally. I'm one of those people who has an account there, but never actually posts anything, but I keep it because I have a few people who insist on using it to communicate; I've met lots of people like this.
Twitter just isn't like this at all. I think it's dumb, but it's easy to ignore.
The lack of direction, apart from the bigger projects is noticeable.
This is often inherent in the organizational structure of big companies. To the extent that there are visionaries in a big company, they're usually not anywhere on the executive team, or even anywhere that the CEO comes in direct contact with. If they were, they'd clash with the CEO's vision, which first of all would be confusing and inefficient for the organization and second is a power contest the CEO would win. So if the board wants to appoint a visionary from within, they usually need to reach several levels down in the org hierarchy, to someone who's run an innovative division semi-independently but been protected from overall company politics. If they elevate this person to CEO, everyone above them in the org chart will quit, as they've now been passed over for the top job.
By making a group of companies, you can have many CEO's, more directors, more VP's, etc. and therefore keep hold of more smart people who are after external recognition more than money.
I doubt Einstein cared very much what was on his business card. Patrick Bateman certainly did.
There's only one CEO per company, so if you want more CEOs you need more companies. Being CEO of Waymo probably isn't that different from being Manager of the Autonomous Cars Division or whatever, but it sounds more impressive.
Usually, but not always. When I was at Intel, they had two CEOs. They called it "two in a box" for some odd reason.
The image of Patrick Bateman was more important to Patrick Bateman than Einstein or his accomplishments.
Sure, there are also people who couldn't care less what their title is, but I can't help but feel that most people would find the possibility of a 'better' title at least moderately motivating.
No, the idea was that they were high risk speculative efforts and that it didn't make sense to have their branding mixed up with Google, which is a stable, established industry leader.
In this case, I dont see anything else coming out of non-Google alphabet of meaningful significance, and this org change kind of highlights that.
In my personal opinion, the Google founders probably still DO have some radical plans, but I bet with the increased scrutiny in Congress and abroad they are thinking the Google vrand is more of a liability than an asset.
YouTube. But in general I agree with you.
I have both Netflix and HBO-Now as well, but I'm thinking about canceling them, as 90% of my viewing time is spent on YouTube.
No, separating branding and separating management are substantively different ideas, not a matter of semantics.
> All major corporations have highly speculative projects that they aren't certain will succeed. With (relatively) minor investments most don't form an umbrella corporation to distinguish them.
That doesn't support your argument that it's a semantic distinction, it instead seems to be an unrelated argument with some implicit premises that argues that most corporations wouldn't have done what Google did to separate Alphabet in similar circumstances, which may or may not be true but is irrelevant to what the point was of Google doing it.
Some companies like Chevron and Texas Instruments have even committed in writing to "returning 100% of all cash flow in perpetuity" to buybacks and dividends. So yes, they have legal contracts saying they won't agree to invest in future growth or investments or research no matter how much money they make, they are so committed to this buyback first model.
Google is a true leader in the buyback wars, they were the first company to commit to $25B in buybacks per quarter, which used to be a shockingly large number for these programs. Lots of other companies have followed that pattern since.
Maybe they should just rename the whole thing to "AdWords" then...
This isn't entirely true. A major consideration was fear of anti-trust litigation. If all of these are the same company/orgs/departments, then you could reasonably say that this "search company" is far too powerful. If there's a search company and a youtube company and a self-driving car company (etc.) then you can make a (specious) argument that you're not vertically and horizontally a monopoly.
I am both cautious enough of Google that I've started avoiding using some of their products, and still have an opinion on how they should organize themselves that has very little to do with those feelings.
I was sort of hoping Alphabet would be a spot they could stick all of the projects that aren't going to make a billion a year. I think it still makes sense to maintain projects that 'only' clear $20+ million a year in another division. That would cover a lot of projects that are getting cancelled and causing them serious PR problems (like accusations of being a group of spoiled man-children who can't be relied upon to stick with anything for longer than four years).
Basically there's a lot of space to make money and products that they won't touch, and I don't think it has anything to do with Wall Street. It's just an artificial limitation they've imposed upon themselves.
If the two of them leave (have fun sipping pina coladas on the beach!) I am not sure (from the outside) what difference will be made. This may sound like great corporate succession planning - but I feel without a goal there will be little to stop business plans that boil down to "squeeze every dollar from everyone everywhere"
(Was there a glimmer of light in "unbiased free information to all" - is that a mission for the new decade?)
Edit: Just to emphasise - I hope they have fun spending their billions.
It would be nice to see a focused mission from El Goog. From the outside it feels like they incubate a bunch of random semi-competing products which are arbitrarily terminated or boosted. There's a lot of talent that could be marshaled.
All their 'random' stuff makes sense in that context.
Injecting Google intro the interface for brick and mortar businesses is why Maps and Android exist.
The company mission is just one of the Sillicon Valley tropes, another one is the idea of "changing the world".
Having a mission might be useful for focus and clarity in thinking but if it's taken as something more than that, it's just an artificial constraint. If you can use the company capital more effectively in a completely different market, you should do that, regardless the mission.
I feel that the mission is often constructed backwards from the products. I.e. at Google they looked at their products and came up with a broad description of the user need (organizing the world's information).
It's "Do No Evil," ethos/mission was important and having one & sticking to it is equally important vs. swiping it under the carpet for the sake of profits. Further it's mission was important to all the women and men they inspired to start up and to get into tech. Yet once they brushed their mission under the rug & focused on money many who they inspired became shocked to learn that many times they do 'Evil," prompting disenchantment. You can see that disenchantment with Google everyday here on Hacker News with the various negative stories and comments about Google. Something I bet if you go back more then five or six years you'd never see here.
Maybe you think of it this way because of how much its abused. At its core, I do sincerely believe (still) that Silicon Valley does represent a unique force of change in this world unlike any we've seen before.
Semiconductors and then Software: it has changed the world (for better or worse, that's another question).
They, like Apple and Microsoft, also need some consumer experience advocates, who take a step back and ask how the consumers entire experience is across the whole suite. All of them have products that are often less than the sum of their parts.
Or just fixing the search engine that they do have. It really has become shockingly poor.
It is.
That page is awful with a hood that keeps flapping around up and down and text that is trying to be true to italics for quotes instead of lots of diacritics and ends up looking badly diseased. Then the letter sidesteps into a memo, which is equally odd and awkward. It's all a bit odd.
S and B (in my very opinionated ... opinion) did create a great thing in Google. I can't fault people trying to make a living and running with the ball to the point where the playing field is not just paved with gold but it nearly redefines what the concept of gold is.
I think they should have retired before "do no evil" was ditched. That would have cemented their status as internet demi-gods. Instead I think their legacy will be
<i>wierdos whot spy on you</i>
LOL. I agree with a lot of your points but this one really hit home. On this one, the spying, I always wondered how odd or awkward it had to be internally to push new methods, techniques, or initiatives for "improving user experience" (I.e., spying). I interviewed for some Technical Solutions Engineer role at Google a long time ago. I really wanted the job but when asked a couple questions about how I'd technically achieve some goal related to spying on users and I always found myself hesitating, looking at the interviewer, and thinking, "is it ethically okay if I say this?" I can't imagine how the work environment transitioned at Google over the years from "do no evil" to actively fostering spying on users. I have to imagine it happened because there were few if any laws around user privacy while Google was up and coming. But I know Google has good internal controls for privacy, but I have to imagine there were many unethical or borderline conversations in the name of better spying on users data. I'm still trying to get away from Gmail because I know everything I send/receive is parses but the struggle is real. This is in addition to Chrome and an Android phone, not to mention Google search results. What's the risk of all this spying? In sum, what is at risk is the loss of free will. People who don't care because "they have nothing to hide" cannot see the forest for the trees. Then again, I need to make some changes myself. As an ancient Chinese proverb says, "To know, and not to do, is in fact not to know."
Googler, opinions are my own.
So looking for evidence of ethics in an interview is just looking for a smooth talking hypocrite, even if you think you really want to.
There's the spying, but then there are also the numerous instances where Google simply terminated someone's account for completely random reasons that their automated system picked up. And you literally cannot ever get a human to talk to you at that company unless you manage to create a social media circus. Just semi-recently a bunch of people got permanently banned (that includes gmail, gdrive, everything) because they spammed emotes on a YouTube stream (something that is fairly commonplace on Twitch, at most you'll get a small timeout on that stream). I think most of them got unbanned eventually, but it took like a week and the streamer trying to raise awareness on social media. If something like this happens to you and you're alone, your account is just dust.
Using gmail or google drive isn't just giving Google your data to look at, it also means that everything you don't have a local backup for might be completely inaccessible to you on a whim, forever.
> And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
The problem was that it was moved from near the top to being near the bottom (though it's own paragraph). Sadly there were lots of very inaccurate headlines like this:
> Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct
https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...
The problem with the phrase is that it is very relative depending on your meaning of evil. It's a shifting over time and varies by person.
At the same time it provides a good guiding principle for Google as a whole. You need to think about users in different parts of the world with different ideas of what is good and evil, and try to cater to all of them. It's a really hard problem.
That code have conduct I linked tries to explain how evil is defined and give more concrete principles to follow.
From my experience, no one tries to be evil within Google, and we try to do right by our users. But when you're dealing with products like YouTube and Search with massive amounts of user-generated data, suggesting good answers that satisfy everyone and doesn't generate news headlines is impossible. We do what we can, but when you have billion user products, some people are always going to be pissed at you.
You don't need to define evil for us. Small children know evil when they see it. People are quite capable of gleaning a person's or group of people's intent from their actions.
When you start needing to define what evil is, you've lost the debate entirely.
To me, the minuta having to be written down was a symptom of the complexity making the simplistic and guiding principle don't be evil useless, which I think mainly was caused by scale and the way the ad industry and personal data practices everywhere have evolved. No need to dig in there, but basically, I think that the fact it's still there doesn't really say much. This isn't to say the problems and scale of Google are easy, for the record. Also not impossible either of course.
Curious, in your 100% personal opinion, do you disagree that the company has more or less "deprecated" it?
And I agree that I've never known any individual Googler to be evil, or intend to be evil (Although I've seen questionable decision making at times).
But whilst no one Googler is evil, the larger body that is "Google" has turned slightly further towards evil (In my personal definition of the word evil).
It's still nowhere near what I would consider true evil, I would probably go back to Google one day if the opportunity presents itself. But I would argue the Google I see today is less "good" than the Google I saw 5 years ago.
The problem with this narrative (which has been the official line for almost 7-8 years now) is it doesn't cause exaptation or adaptation. It is good enough to hold on to, if the goal is stagnation (which is what has happened with Search - you can point at things like wolframalpha, alpha go, stackexchange, quora, wikipedia, elasticsearch etc etc and ask why if the goal was to organize the worlds info, these things failed to develop internally - Similarly with Youtube - why did they missed being netflix or twitch, how did they not become the default platform for disney). The answer is the Scale has worked against that goal. So you stagnate.
The initial goal was to scale globally. That goal was achieved. After that new goals had to be defined. That did not happen because its hard to define achievable goals at that scale. The only default goal was empire defense - i.e. hold on to scale by hook or crook. For what? Well no great answer to that has been found. Which is hinting that global scale is counter productive to innovation whether technical or moral.
Its kind of like a football team winning the game and then staying on the pitch. Not playing any new games or restarting play. Then saying but guys we won leave us alone now.
I don't blame Google. But I expect Google to lead not to react and be defensive. And to do that the narrative requires honesty.
I'd say not Global Scale per se, but achieving own goals without further goals to work towards. I.E you've achieved everything there is to achieve, what can do you do more?
Bill Gates reinvented himself by tackling humanitarian causes. Googlers set up further missions, e.g. self driving cars or health improvement, but those seem unimpressive comparing to world dominance.
Evil to most people is obvious. But where money is concerned few "Googler" could do the right thing even if they wanted out of fear of biting the hand that feeds six-figure salaries in exchange for obstinate servitude.
Implementing censored search for an oppressive regime or providing research to killer drone programs is quite a different ball than "pissing off a few users".
Megacorps are only driven by one goal: growth. And Google has certainly proven that a lot is flying under the radar way on the wrong side of the good vs. evil dichtonomy.
How does this fit in the narrative, when the ones speaking up (right or wrong, that's not the issue here) are being fired?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/technology/Google-union-c...
Internet search existed before Google, but they came up with a newer and much better way of implementing it. Internet email existed before Gmail, but they vastly improved the offering. The iPhone already existed, but they came up with an alternative in Android. Same story repeats with GSuite, Chrome, Chrome OS.
YouTube was sort of new, but it was an acquisition, so I don't know if it counts.
When they do have ideas for innovative products, they fail to deliver.
I forgot about the Chromecast, that's a good point.
Stadia is close to being new, though there have been similar efforts for some time now. However, it is by no means successful so far, most reviews I have seen from the gaming press have seen it as impressive, but ultimately not a great way of playing games, and Microsoft's offering is likely to quickly outshine it by sheer force of games catalog.
Stadia is at best an incremental improvement to PS Now or OnLive afaik. Other companies, notably MSFT and Sony, have been developing this same stuff for years, and Nvidia even has their own version I think.
A good example would be if Google's Stadia succeeds. Even though there have been attempts in the past (e.g. OnLive), the mind-share is so low that they are almost irrelevant. If Stadia gets anywhere near console-level market penetration, I would consider it an innovative product that Google created. I don't expect it to succeed, though, based on the track record.
I think that's way overstating it. Long before iPhone people were asking for more software features out of their phones. Browsing, email, music, etc.
Even the touchscreen and the development model were things tried in the past with many attempts by various companies to make the PDA a success.
Apple did exactly what you say. They took a few ideas whose time had come, ideas that just happened to be in their wheel house from the work they did on iPod and presented them better than anyone had before.
Why spend their own money on a risky capital intensive venture when their cash engine let them do it unopposed?
(yes of course they and I would get bored of a life of endless luxury - but I would like to at least try it and see how long I can hold out ;-)
That still feels like at least a 100yr mission.
They got sued, prevailed in court, but by then the 10 year battle sapped energy out of the project. With antitrust and other scrutiny, I doubt Google will attempt other massive forms of digitization that need it like academic journals. My personal opinion.
There's nothing wrong with its stock price and revenue and I'm sure from that angle a lot of financial people are pretty happy with the status quo of just milking that cow perpetually. However, looking at it from the technical angle, I see a company that is asleep at the wheel and showing a distinct lack of vision, leadership, and direction across the board of its product portfolio. Perhaps a bit like MS under Balmer ramming out increasingly less popular iterations of windows and office. MS turned things around under Nadella. Google perhaps hasn't sunken far enough that it needs that kind of leadership change yet but it seems in my eyes to be going down that same path slowly.
IMHO all the money making units worth mentioning in Google have their origin in a brief period of the early 2000s perhaps up to the 2006-2008 time frame (i.e. the Android launch) when it was smaller, more creative, nimble, and definitely more capable of translating vision into execution. That includes things like google docs, hangouts, maps, photos, youtube, gmail, android, chrome, google cloud and of course the big money maker ads.
A lot of other stuff launched in the years since has simply failed to get traction or got killed early. This has actually become a meme on HN and elsewhere where people openly wonder when they will kill X at the moment of the announcement where X is a long list of stuff Google tried and failed to deliver or just walked away from despite internal and external enthusiasm (e.g Google Inbox). The list of stuff that they announced in the last decade or so that actually didn't get killed is worryingly short.
There actually is very little of significance that I can name that emerged out of Google in the recent decade that is worthy of being added to that list and only some stuff under the Alphabet umbrella that comes close (i.e. Waymo would be the main success story there that has yet to prove itself as a long term money maker).
In other words, I think of Sundar as a caretaker, not a leader. He's greasing the wheels of the money printing machine that is ads but maybe not really the best for coming up with the next big thing. Maybe now is a good moment to start looking for a real leader to replace the founders that clearly just announced their permanent retirement from the industry and any other meaningful involvement with tech (tu un-sugar coat this announcement).
But does any huge successful company that ends up having a second act really do that, go and find a visionary* to rejuvenate the company? With Nadella, wasn't it more like, Microsoft did a lot of random things, and when one of them was particularly successful, then the leader of it (cloud, Azure) rose to the top? Not that they picked him and then he decided the direction of the company.
*Jobs isn't really what I mean, because he was the original visionary, not a replacement.
Google is in a much better shape than MS just a few short years ago when they replaced Balmer (certainly financially). But yet I'm calling out that now is a good moment to prevent Google from going down that path any further. Sundar is in my view simply not the type of leader Google needs to prevent that.
Google at the same time seems to struggle to convince developers that they need to drop their fancy languages for a bastardized and outdated thing called Dart that basically can only be explained as a ginormous not invented here syndrome combined with sunk cost fallacy. Just a minor example of things Google tries that have an obvious ticking clock in terms of them killing it in favor of something else. Also what's up with having 3 operating systems for devices and dragging out picking one out for half a decade? That's Conway's law in action right there.
For the web, they thought the browser was key to the web and would be what would hold all the APIs because the browser was like the OS for the web. The most valuable thing about the web ended being the graphs and connections you can create through data rather than the browser, which is why Facebook, Google, and Amazon had the most success because of the internet.
For mobile, they released Windows Mobile in 2000 but it was just a slimmed down version of Windows on the desktop. They didn't understand that mobile required a completely new UX experience and just tried to fit what they knew (desktop UX) into mobile.
They viewed both opportunities through the lens of the desktop, which makes sense, that's what made them so successful. But because of their success, they weren't capable of looking at the opportunities with fresh eyes.
He feels ... reserved and safe.
Maybe that is what Google needs at this moment
Meh (time for my socialist side to come out) they could try and do the Bill Gates Foundation thing. Don’t be cynical — it is making some much needed positive change!
Money = Power = Responsibility (with wisdom).
Exponentially true if you are a super billionaire.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/technology/google-sexual-...
And relatedly:
> Charlie Ayers: Sergey’s the Google playboy. He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room. He got around.
Heather Cairns: And we didn’t have locks, so you can’t help it if you walk in on people if there’s no lock. Remember, we’re a bunch of twentysomethings except for me—ancient at 35, so there’s some hormones and they’re raging.
Charlie Ayers: H.R. told me that Sergey’s response to it was, “Why not? They’re my employees.” But you don’t have employees for fucking! That’s not what the job is.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-exc...
If your theory is correct, we should see Drummond retire soon as well. I expect it...
I strongly disagree. Alphabet is an unfocused company which seems to treat product releases as experiments that can be killed at any time without warning. There's a culture that incentivizes more experiments rather than better products.
The aimlessness is obvious in the frequent and baffling product renaming, reorganizations (like Nest joining Google), duplicated/overlapping products, and killing of acquired products.
A smart CEO knows how to focus, build on early success (rather than abandon), and tell a coherent brand story.
If they canceled a "ton of bullshit projects" and still ended up with a time when Hangouts, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Meet, Allo, Duo, Messages, and Voice are all actively used but somehow still missing important fixes/features, then he utterly failed.
No one gets credit for the things they didn't release when the things they did release are still baffling and often result in a betrayal of their loyal users.
Chrome OS and Android are a worse version of ios and macos.
I think this can be... interesting? Trying to give more power and autonomy to individual teams is nice (there were some efforts that tried explicitly to map things to some kind of free market model). Sometimes higher-ups would be like "hey we're all gonna migrate to technology X" but individual teams were like "lol nah the new thing sucks" and keep using it and nothing really ever happened. But I think that attitude also kinda opened the door for a large political/influence market. And there's not _real_ market pressures on individual teams that I think tend to keep the actual free market a little closer to ground truth.
This all reminds me of a critique I'd heard of flat organizations, which is that all groups of people are going to have power structures, and by not formalizing them, all you're doing is allowing them to opaquely evolve in strange ways on their own.
I really wish that someone could study internal Google politics and actually understand it and map it all out.
I don't. He's allowed Google to become many of the things he's long stated he was opposed to. Either he never had his stated values in the first place, or he's turned his back on them in later years.
Friendly amendment: reins
Personally, I think Sundar has been a pretty good CEO and probably a better businessman for this size of organization but I'm still not sure whether this leadership change will work better for Google though. Due to Alphabet's structure, Larry and Sergey will keep majority voting stocks but they will be away from most of the details in the company. Can they still make good business decisions without such details?
I still have a Sony Google TV, it works great as a TV but the android OS is no longer supported, so there are no more OTA updates. It's a shame because it seems like if they had thought about it they might have wondered what happens when they no longer support the product.
There was a time when Google questioned the value of managers and managers had to prove their value to the engineers. Maybe it's time to question their value again.
Has he though? I get the sense that he’s really Balmering it up in that he inherited a super successful company, and didn’t do much with it except not screw up.
The two big growth areas- social and cloud- are dead or a distant and growing third.
Google hasn’t done much new or exciting through his whole term. So no new products, the 2016 election and congressional testimony debacle, randomly firing different people with no sound reasoning.
It would be neat if someone could establish a vision beyond “10% growth forever through lots of rent seeking.” Maybe a company has to go through their Ballmer to get to their Nadella.
Maybe they can somehow convince Jeff Dean to be CEO and just write an AI that generally maximizes profit.
Discord feels more like the odd one out because it is a realtime river, not sorted or ranked like reddit. That sort of content rearranging is what makes modern social networks different from forms and chat.
Just because you have an algorithm that determines what should flow to the top of the main page, doesn't make it a social network.
> ... Going forward, Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. ...
Not knowing the internals of Google, it seems as if this is the announcement that Page and Brin are stepping down. Is this correct?
If so, what an incredibly subtle way to announce a high-profile pair of resignations.
I wouldn't really call it "incredibly subtle" - most similar announcements are wrapped in a bunch of corporate language as well. This is a pretty standard way to announce this sort of thing.
It looks like an attempt to try to distance themselves, their personal images, and their assets before it gets too ugly. I would certainly do so unless my personal financial analysts told me otherwise.
At least at the operational level. I'm sure Sundar has had much contact with them. But regular Googlers certainly have not.
They typically take years, often over a decade. I'm talking about the entire process, not just the litigation (which is the easiest and fastest part). With Microsoft, it took 19 years from start to end.
I mean, neither of them even tried the ol' "I'm stepping down to spend time with my family" thing.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/13/alphabets-larry-page-has-lar...
Now that Google Is Evil (tm), we don't seem to appreciate that behavior as much as we did in the past.
>Today, in 2019, if the company was a person, it would be a young adult of 21 and it would be time to leave the roost. While it has been a tremendous privilege to be deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the company for so long, we believe it’s time to assume the role of proud parents—offering advice and love, but not daily nagging!
By that yardstick, Google was in its young adolescence when it IPO'd (seems reasonable), was an idealistic young adult when I joined in 2009 (also reasonable), is now hitting a midlife crisis, and will die sometime around 2040.
Thank you for creating Google.
Nobody could prove that without it the web would have been a better place. You couldn’t have known what’s to come when you were raising hundreds of thousands of dollars as two students in 1998. Maybe your leadership has been one of the least evil among the possibilities in the evil world we live in.
However, we know what is it like to lose control of your company, and how it could inspire dystopian novels under your leadership now. There’re many lessons for all the entrepreneurs to take from your story.
I sincerely hope that you would prioritize the greater benefit rather than the Google’s benefit as years pass.
Sincerely, A Non-Googler, one of the 7.7 billion
But somehow, he is one of the "best type of person" that could become the richest man in our world. There are so many rich people that just look to be buried with their millions or pass it to their family.
Hopefully Sergei and Larry will try to get the same type of legacy.
I feel that was expressing a desire for more transformative change over fixing the individual problems we have now. Change the world so much that the problems are no longer an issue.
[0] http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/life-expectancy-b...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161013103132.h...
Life expectancy loss is mostly drugs and obesity. Hard to see how philanthropic billionaires are a problem on either front.
Asian Americans have a life expectancy of almost 87 years, longer than in any Asian country. Hispanic Americans have a life expectancy of almost 83 years, exceeded only by the richest Asian countries (Japan, Singapore, Macau) and Monaco and Iceland.
The difference is that do not trust the government to know what's best nor, do what's best.
slightly more philanthropic than the rest of the world which makes sense given how prosperous the US is, but overall US billionaires actually do not give much and Gates and Buffet are indeed outliers. The average billionaire donates barely more than the small fraction of a per cent annually. The average top 20 billionaire does in fact give less relatively speaking than the average American household.
https://twitter.com/gabriel_zucman/status/119842279460784537...
Survivorship bias.
A generous billionaire.
Those that don't are just greedy billionaires.
US billionaires are only philantropic because they don't want to end up either dead or stripped off of all their assets when there is any kind of revolution - no matter if a "real" revolution or an elected one, e.g. if Warren or Sanders win in 2020.
How much of his wealth does Bill Gates spend on the military industrial complex?
It's the same problem that Europe has with its defense - we have over decades relied on the US to keep us safe, without contributing our fair share.
As you put it, if there was some kind of "richness cap" (say, 1 billion) and all the rest was held as interest generator for social services and society, population wouldn't have to depend on the "goodwill" of people, but would have the basic necessities fulfilled.
Humanity will get there at some point. There is no other alternative, given population growth. But right now we humans are still quite underdeveloped as a society.
I admire Brian Acton in this respect. He regretted the decision of selling WhatsApp and publicized it. Since then he has taken on the leadership of Signal while donating money into it.
After the dotcom crash, and I don’t know if there’s any real analysis to be had around this or if it’s just sentimentality, but personally there was always a sense of hope attached to Google as they brought excitement back into bleak times in the industry.
Facebook was a sort of cheerleader in that way as well, during the 2008 credit crisis, way before the world turned sour towards the Facebook brand. Who will be the great business to drag us out of the next financial / tech-industry crisis?
So if a film crew, say, accidentally blows up a small town somehow, there's a firewall between the assets that were dedicated to making that one film and the entirety of, for example, Sony Pictures net worth and capital.
I'm not sure that firewall is well-tested in American law, but it's a well-used approach and I've always assumed the Google / Alphabet arrangement was for similar reasons (so that worst-case scenario on any 'bet is always "Alphabet cuts bait and shuts it down, liquidates it, and debtors go after the assets of the 'bet" without risking the performance numbers of the Google cash cow directly).
One of the things people were anxious to see was the financials of YouTube. Guess who's not a separate "bet"?
There's no way Sundar can give as much attention to Google and all the other bets simultaneously. Curious what side projects of Larry and Sergey get turned down now.
Personally I think a lot of their products have gotten better recently, like the experience of using voice-controlled Google Maps in my car, and Google Cloud is superior to AWS in many ways, but the company really offers so many different product lines that it's hard for personal experience to be a great representation.
It’s hard for me to say that this is because of Sundar and not just because the whole market has grown size and google already had a massive moat to capture it. Apple, MS, Facebook, Amazon all have grown massively in the past 5 years.
However Google seems to continue to be a one trick pony - GCP lags behind the competition despite the fact that Google invented cloud computing. Even Apple is weaning off its iPhone revenue with its fast growing services division.
I see a proliferation of AWS services, yes, but many seem to be replicating things that GCP has had since the start, in multiple different formats without clear direction. Bigquery covers most of the use cases of Redshift, Kineseis, Athena, EMR, and others. It is at once decoupled from and well integrated with their object storage, allowing reads and writes with clear translation when necessary. I find myself reaching for Bigquery like semantics all the time and having to cobble two or more AWS tools to get similar. I see the same pattern repeated constantly - If I click "ECS" in the Amazon Console, it wants to sell me ECS, ECR, Fargate, and EKS - All of which overlap in non-obvious ways.
Disclaimer: I'm Ex-google, and was a poweruser of dremel
There are a lot of technical refinements in GCP that makes life a lot easier than AWS, but nothing strategically compelling enough for the cost (in cash, developer time, and burning relationships) to jump ship. So I make-do with the not-as-great technology. They are pain-points but not deal-breakers.
I think if our startup were doing AI/ML, or even heavy data processing as our core technology, there's probably enough compelling reasons to invest in a move to GCP. But it isn't.
If I were greenfielding a new launch at a new startup, I'd push for GCP.
I have never worked for Google or Amazon.
Disclosure: ex-googler (left 4 years ago), own no GOOG, use GCP to run my own business. Clients use whatever they want.
AWS is just another IT vendor. The weird dependency, reminiscent of 1980s IBM thinking, is bad for any company, at some point you become more of a vassal than a customer.
But, I have always enjoyed using public GCP more that AWS.
I somehow got CC'd to an internal Google system, Buganizer, which has done nothing but leak a bunch of internal communications, including some small code patches to GCP infrastructure itself.
My support request has not been updated, but Buganizer has let me know that they supposedly updated the documentation mid-November to fix it, but the rephrased advice still was not correct based on my interpretation of the issue. The bug is still open.
Microsoft grew similarly under Ballmer, despite losing a lot of their strategic advantages and missing the boat in a handful of important ways.
Hmmm, maybe that've been for the better.
I have also been appreciating their products lately: Play Books and Movies, the Google iOS app that does a good job of showing my article that interests me, and until I retired (just writing now) I really always preferred Google Cloud over AWS. Even with potential privacy issues, YouTube, GMail, and Calendar are also good.
In the past have been I have been a vocal supporter of FSF (still am, but...) but I look at the world situation now with people in China quickly losing freedoms but excelling in AI and other tech, here in the USA corporate fascism is unstoppable. With the political problems around the globe getting crazier and with chaotic climate change, I think now that people in different countries should do two things: embrace their own culture and values, and to do what they can to make their countries competitive in AI and other tech, especially tech that will help with climate change and generally increase productivity. Those on top will get bigger and bigger pieces of the pie, so we better grow the pie rapidly so regular peoples’ share is sufficient for a good life.
I mentioned those two because they seem to be their big bets now.
When compared to Satya who is thriving with Microsoft, Sundar looks mediocre at best. I don't mean that in a bad way. Perhaps Google doesn't need to have those tectonic changes to produce value. In that case, Sundar's reserved and low-key profile makes more sense, but don't expect a high profile, exuberant and innovation-driven leadership. I think it's clear he is not that type of leader.
To be clear - I'm not criticizing this particular post or person (whoisjuan, anyways? :) ), but I think it's worth noting these little hints that outgoing and extroverted are thought to be synonymous with "good leadership" (in the US, at least)
I don't think it's synonymous, but it's required. To be a good leader, you need to enjoy being around and understanding people.
Most introverted people don't really enjoy either.
I've had many introverted managers and they all were horrible: lack of communication which went hand-in-hand with passive aggressive behavior.
People who are introverts at heart can learn to become just as good managers as those who aren't. It may come less naturally, I couldn't say, but it's definitely possible.
Ballmer wasn't competent.
I can't really blame Larry and Sergey for wanting to do something else, and leaving the company in the hands of someone that they know will maximize profits. But that doesn't change the fact that modern Google does a lot of scummy and downright evil stuff today that likely wouldn't have happened during the "old Google" days.
I’d say it was the pre-Google+ Google. That change happened under Larry Page.
Personally I thought Sundar was a very good manager (much better than Larry, who honestly sucked as a CEO) but a poor innovator. As a HN commenter you're probably looking for an innovator. The average user (who just wants Google to stay up) and the average investor (who just want to make more money) are quite happy having a good manager who can optimize operations, though.
Hah!
> It is clear that Sergey and Larry (and Eric) have been asleep at the switch in shaping Google's culture, which now looks like the campus of Evergreen State College.
By stepping out now they have no doubt made their lives easier but it puts Sundar in an fairly challenging place. I hope he is up for it.
It probably means that a number of Larry and Sergey "pet projects" will become deprioritized. Good. Self-driving cars seem like they have great potential. I think that technology has the potential to make the entire Alphabet structure worthwhile. But it also seems like it should no longer need the Alphabet structure to protect itself.
And nothing about the increasing sense of a loss of claimed ethical stance. I stress claimed, because the lack of concern at the top at its obvious demise makes it less likely it was actually held as a core belief.
the fact that 4 out of 7 of the organizers of the walkout left the company[1], some with more than 10 years working for Google, is rather telling.
I don't think your comment holds water.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/most-google-walkout-organizers-l...
You set the challenge, they exceeded it 20x, and you've not made a believable case that this shows "content is diminishing." In fact exceeding your original demands by 20x seems to thoroughly show that the basis for the claim is true.
Or maybe you want to hold Google to higher standards just because it's Google? Why exactly?
Plus this retort essentially boils down to "Google pays well and other companies are even worse so quit complaining!" Restating the compensation argument multiple different ways, and the cutting edge argument multiple times doesn't really address the actual underlying complaints being made (Google's partnership with distasteful foreign governments and other corporate immoralities).
If you want to talk corporate morals, sure, relevant. If you just want to brag that Google pays super well and is less evil than [more evil companies] this seems like a whole other discussion that sidesteps the issues. Which isn't to say it is untrue, just irrelevant.
The top question is not: will it hurt the company. The top question is: will it hurt humanity.
We liked Google because their founders did the right thing for a long time, and fended off profit-maximizing shareholders.
Will humanity benefit if, say, Comcast buys the morally pure but financially struggling Google, or if no one is challenging Baidu in China?
I also find your argument about Google becoming unprofitable unconvincing. They were very profitable while they held the standards high in the past. Maybe not maximally profitable, but very profitable.
But at the same time, a small number of employees put together a document (without public input) making "walkout demands" and ever since, this small but very vocal group of employees has been going around claiming that 20,000 people support the list of demands in this doc. Not the case. Total lies, in fact.
[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/30/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-sup...
We don't want to deal, or like/enjoy dealing with this pesky employee stuff. We don't have the time, energy, or enjoy it, and they'd rather do something else with their time and money.
They are in a position where they either crack-down on their culture to more of a corp like, and appear to go full evil, or be even more lenient, and risk small 'intolerant' groups or activists taking over and creating disruptions to the business. Whatever they do at this point, they will be either painted as the bad guys in the media (if they go full on evil corp); or the 'dysfunctional' company, if they allow even more discontent and become more 'college/academic like'.
Basically, their employees situation is becoming such a PITA for them, they'd rather not deal with it and quit the company and do something else, more interesting, instead....
They realize that they just don't enjoy dealing with the creature/organization that they created.
Basically, it is the CEO's version of: "it is not you, but it is me" line of break-up, and we all know what that line means.
Makes total sense, I'm sure they're looking forward to spending time on their yachts with their families and not in meetings 8 hours a day.
At least, that's what I learned, having worked at Google during the period where "Don't be evil" was still taken seriously, engineers could still propose & develop their own projects, the public still liked them, and Larry was just beginning to take the reins.
Take stock price obsession. Everybody knows the dangers of having quarterly earnings targets dictate the company strategy, and the moral compromises that companies make to meet those targets. Google's initial founders' letter said "If our earnings are lumpy, they'll be lumpy" (ironically, they were not - earnings went up monotonically and consistently exceeded analysts' targets until about 2013, for reasons I'm not going to get into here). And they took a lot of steps - like the dual-class share structure that gave Larry, Sergey, and Eric voting control over the company regardless of what Wall Street wanted - to avoid that.
The problem is that stock price affects a lot more than just investors' pocketbooks. When the stock was low, Google had trouble attracting talented new engineers, which is critical to making new products that are really excellent. Low stock price means negative PR cycles; the press is always happy to write glowing reviews of fast-growing rocket ships, but as soon as they start to flounder, the press will kick them when they're down. (For more recent examples of this, see Theranos, WeWork, and Facebook.) The press cycle in turn affects consumer attitudes towards the brand, which is the source of both power and revenue.
There were many other examples like this - another big one is the negative effect of company size on innovation, where once a company gets big enough new product ideas will always get killed, regardless of how good they are, because there is somebody with veto power or just enough social clout to discourage the innovator. I suspect this in particular was disheartening for Larry, who both identified with would-be innovators and had protected them when Google was smaller.
Google tried to remain an open, high-trust place well beyond the point when it became obvious that the company had attracted exactly this sort of toxic element. Now the company is paying the price.
What I am saying is that their decision makes total sense, and there is no reason to chide on them on 'why they are not dealing with the employe' problems, but quitting' as the OP did.
Really, this is just a: Peace out guys, we are moving on...
And there is nothing wrong with it, as google is not really dealing with an existential threat right now....
Same as somebody quitting their job, when it is not enjoyable anymore... and they have been doing the same thing for years. Billionares are people after-all....
Hypocrites just irk me more than people open about their intentions and motivation, and to me Larry and Sergey belong in the hypocrite category. They ultimately were billionares with total control over Google, this idea that somehow things just got out of their control is absurd. It didn't get out of their control, what happened is that whenever push came to shove on difficult issues, they always went with the decision that they felt would lead to the higher stock price. After years of telling everyone who would listen they were non-conventional leaders interested in more than just money, they always purely pursued the lucre. And why? They are literally amongst the world's richest people already.
I was at the TGIF where Sergey tried to sell the company on Maven, and then what happened was, internal google groups are a bit like public URLs, in that they were basically visible to all full time employees if you knew the link. So Sergey would say one thing on stage and then someone would stumble up on the link about the real strategy, and that what they said on stage was "messaging" to appease dissenters. It was total dishonesty, and it was all for big fat contracts, that's it. They did not care one bit about the dangers of weaponized AI or the dangers of being an international company building military technology for one company, or the general growth of the military industrial complex and how the biggest tech company becoming part of it it could snowball its size and dangerous impact on society. And Maven is just one example, but censorship in China is another, and there's many more. I do get that they struggle with some truly difficult decisions that are ethically ambiguous and they can't please everybody, but there are plenty of spots where it was abundantly clear that the only thing Larry and Sergey cared about was filling their already overfilling coffers with more gold. And when Bezos does that, at least he never pretended otherwise, but when Larry and Sergey do it, they are totally backtracking on a public image they spent years selling to people.
I think it's impossible to be cynical enough about a guy who blacklisted a company from his search engine because they used his service to show a picture of his backyard as a way of illustrating the privacy violations his company enabled.
Larry and Sergey have been obviously taking on less of a role since Sundar took over as CEO of Google. They've been at Google for more than two decades and are mega billionaires. Do people really think that this has anything to do with agitation among employees?
What do you feel they should be saying, when they make public communications?
First you heard Gates, then Jobs (Twice) and now Page and Brin. We'll see if whether if Pichai can continue this now that he has been crowned King of Alphabet and Google.
You will always end up with a text like that. It tries to reduce risk and harm and companies will nearly always want to pick that trade-off: rather sound bland and cliched instead of risking undue negative effects.
This is an ouster at worst, a forced resignation at best.
Were I to guess, the politics-at-work thing as gotten out of hand. Larry and Sergey built the company in their image, in that specific way. One can easily imagine them bristling at the notion of having to take away employee freedoms.
Because they are not willing to do what needs to be done to quell the uprising, rather than see their company spiral down to darkness, they are stepping aside so that others may do what needs to be done.
They own the web but meanwhile web became only one medium among many and a lot of companies build their own "web"
Instagram app is essentially a browser to use IG's private "web" of content google has no access to.
Same goes for twitter, even Snapchat.
So attention wise, google is loosing dominance as other companies are building their own protocols on top of web.
Speaking of data,they own search intent (via Google) and web content (via Google analytics).
However I'd say Facebook is ingesting way more data on non-content usage. They made much easier for advertisers to connect into FBs audience graphs and cross reference and retarget based on first-party visitor profiles.
Search engines are meant to index the open web. IG's public profiles are still being indexed by Google. Google is winning the data game from an ad-tech point of view but not loosing it.
Even with being locked out of that silos, I wouldn't be too worried about Google, as it seems that it barely hurt their income streams.
And to be frank: this scares me.
Having Pichai in charge is deeply disturbing to me. If he has had a public moment that demonstrated deep moral convictions that were put before the obvious market benefit of the company I haven't heard about it. (But feel free to provide links)
How is it ok to just say clear lies like this?! Without making any value judgements at all this is blatantly false. The ranking algorithms specifically encode a bias into search results. This is actually explicitly what users want, too! To be clear this is distressing to me because very powerful people can throw around words uncritically in this way for niche political points without being challenged.
EDIT: It seems people are taking this comment in a way I didn't intend for it to be taken. Another example is that they are applying biases by sorting and displaying results on news.google.com. Personally I really like how this is done, but I think we need to be honest that it is a bias so that we can move on to a more productive conversation about what is or isn't a good bias.
He meant to say "personal bias."
I get your point, and it's an important one -- but ime conversations are a lot more productive when they're about the ideas, not the words. :)
That isn't even close to the definition of "unbiased" that I use. To me, something is "unbiased" if it based on facts without being interpreted in accordance with some preexisting belief or worldview.
Tools are unbiased.
I think the real danger is actually in the notion that "bias" is something done to deceive, and I have encountered people who imply this quite a bit in real life
By way of example: I have a strong bias towards the nationalization of infrastructure. Many of my opinions and arguments are designed to support this end because, for reasons I would love to explain I believe it's the best course of action. I am, if anything, prone to never letting anyone leave my company without droning on and on about this! There is not deception involved. People certainly do hide their biases, or lie about things in order to support their arguments, but this is not something inevitable with bias.
Ultimately I think everyone needs to deal with the reality that we ALL have biases and we ALL inject them into our work. This is actually ok, because its part of how we work to build the world we want to live in.
I agree entirely. Bias is typically not something that is intentionally done in an attempt to deceive. It comes naturally to people because they look at the world through the lens of their own experiences and beliefs.
Everybody has a bias. The trick is to understand what sort of bias people (including ourselves) have, so we can properly understand what they're saying.
My understanding of Google's history is their algorithms started as providing answers that the world already knew but could not find easily.
Over time they had to handle multiple lawsuits, harassments by entrenched groups that were upended by opening up of knowledge.
These adjustments / reactions made the algorithm look biased.
This disputed quote by Cardinal Richelieu comes to mind when I think of people claiming Google is a bad actor.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him"
Sergey Brin and Larry Page were terrible to women. They engaged in, promoted, and paid for sexual harassment. Shortly after the Alphabet board is investigating misconduct, Larry and Page are "retiring". And of course, they're still worth billions.
Where’s your evidence that they’re stepping down over some personal scandal? This seems like a rather bold claim.
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees...
> Ayers said in the excerpt that when the company's human-resources department raised eyebrows at Brin's behavior, Brin suggested he was entitled to engage with his employees in whatever manner he saw fit.
> "HR told me that Sergey's response to it was, 'Why not? They're my employees,'" Ayers said. "But you don't have employees for f---ing! That's not what the job is."
The boys club at the Alphabet C-level goes to the very, very top, and it would be impossible to address Drummond without addressing Page and Brin.
And all happened a long time ago, e.g. Brin's dalliance with Hugo Barra's girlfriend, so why would he resign years after this happened?
> And Larry Page is who paid Rubin $90 million
Again, Page didn't personally pay Rubin, this was part of Rubin's exit-contract, approved by the board, and why would this cause Page to resign specifically, and not Sundar?
> The boys club at the Alphabet C-level goes to the very, very top, and it would be impossible to address Drummond without addressing Page and Brin.
Pretty much the "boys club" extends everywhere in corporate America (and politics), pretty much anytime men get a lot of money or power, they tend go off looking for lots of sex.
But you're alleging that they are both resigning simultaneously because of some scandal that's about to be unearthed related to sexual harassment. Everything you've brought up have been known for years and are not revelations and so are already 'priced in' to the board reputation.
Most Googlers know and have felt that Larry and Sergey have been 'checked out' for years and are no longer interested in the day to day direction of Alphabet as a business. They barely ever attend company events.
So what's more likely:
a) They're rich and bored and want to go off and do other things
or
b) they's suddenly resigning for behavior that was documented years ago (Brin's affair while married, Page dating Marissa, etc, or paying off C-suite execs). In fact, rank-and-file Googlers didn't even demand their resignation when the Rubin $90 million exit happened. There's no pressure on them to resign over that.
or
c) some secret scandalous sexual escapade that happens to involve both of them is about to be unearthed but yet is unsupported by anything you've linked.
I think you have to admit that your claims are both salacious and exceedingly unlikely, and this is very likely a bunch of multibillionaires long bored with management. You've made very specific claims that their resignations are being driven by some sexual harassment claim.
This claim is baseless until you present evidence.
I cited an example in response to another comment here.
Perhaps he might be asked to step in for Sundar if Sundar can't turn it around in the next 18 months.
Sundar is now the CEO of both Google and Alphabet, and Larry and Sergey have taken a seat on the backbench.
Google was fairly succesfull right from the start, they deserve a lot of credit for that, but anyone with experience knows how different the climate is when things are up vs. down; When things are up, everything is easy, when things are down, everything is hard.
As much as I kind of loathe Ellison ... at least he's there 'in the control room' the whole time.
> And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
Even without factoring in self-justifying rationalizations, people can have significantly different ideas of what counts as evil.
When a company is large, it bumps up against the problem that humanity as a whole has a difference in definitions on the subject.
> people can have significantly different ideas of what counts as evil.
And those people, who need someone to explain to them what is or isn't evil, aren't welcome.
That's why I personally loved that motto. Too bad that whole ethos got dropped like it was a recently-launched product.
If you too find it interesting, you may enjoy doing a literature search on the topic.
Do no evil seems stricter than don't be evil. How much evil can you do before you are evil? Or can you be evil while doing no evil?
Such self congratulatory nonsense.
Larry and Sergey have spent the majority of their time on Other Bets for quite some time now, and it's good to see that this is finally being solidified / recognized within Alphabet's management structure.
As I said in my original comment, Larry and Sergey have devoted the majority of their time to Other Bets for a while. Sundar's promotion here is really just recognizing the role he's effectively had for some time at this point.
Satya, on the other hand, has been outstanding. Microsoft has transformed and looks like a company that will be dominant for at least another 20 years.
Ballmer doesnt get enough credit for pivoting msft into enterprise...
Living in Seattle, a notable % of my social circle was at Amazon for the last decade, but more and more are heading across the lake as MSFT reshapes itself.
If there was a clear boundary between old and new Google I'd say it is around the time that Patrick and Alan Eustace left. Other changes in senior leadership happened in that same couple of years.
GOOG went from 550 to 1300 under Sundar's term as CEO.
contextualized a bit: GOOG did 19.4% annualized during Sundar's term, and the S&P500 did 14.3% annualized over the same time. ish.
Would you mind explaining what you mean by ‘corpspeak’ with that person’s comment? I wouldn’t be surprised if I wrote something like that in a similar tone.
Next, invest in and add features to Google Music or stop charging for it.
Last, Google News sucks. No matter how much I dislike content it keeps showing me more of the same. Reminds me of YouTube. People should get heated on Google curating propaganda.