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Comment by summerlight | Hacker News Reader

There are some ongoing theory-crafting in this thread, but the real reason seems pretty simple; Larry and Sergey obviously don't want to deal with all the management and operational stuffs, but only "moonshots" like autonomous vehicles or quantum computing. Yeah, this was the whole purpose of establishing a holding company, but Alphabet has grown by 2 times (both in employee count and revenue) and probably they're now facing the similar amount of bureaucratic workload again.

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?

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> I think Sundar has been a pretty good CEO and probably a better businessman

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.

YouTube and Gmail are massive social networks.

If you want to water down the definition beyond recognition then snail mail is a social network.

Snail mail is a social network. I think the OP meant online social networks, though.

It's in the nature of social networks that new social networks don't look like old ones. Youtube is definitely a social network, and so is Twitch, Discord, TikTok, etc. Youtube has the additional advantage of having persistent count, so I would count on Youtube lasting much longer than any other social network whose popularity changes generation to generation.

It is interesting that the part of "social network" that now defines something as a social network is really the feed. Its a neverending not-river of more. Chatrooms notwithstanding, a newsfeed a la facebook/youtube/reddit/, it's a mix of professional content and user generated. The actual messaging with each other, and sharing with each other is tangent to what they do. Social network is almost a misnomer because most of the interaction is person->ai. For a lurker who doesnt have friends, doesnt comment, and doesnt share; youtube and tumblr are closer to netflix than they are to anything "social." That grouping should be called something like an Autofeed Broadcaster, of which gmail is tangentially like, because people use it to consume mass marketing and newsletters.

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.

I would debate both of those are social networks. Now I will grant you that in the past I would have considered YouTube one, but today it's just content delivery with comments.

Thats exactly what the facebook newsfeed is. A streaming feed of content, posted by publishers and users alike, and through likes, shares, and comments its popularity rises and it floats its way up the algorithm. Then when it gains reach, lots of people comment on it.

Facebook still has user to user messaging, Youtube does not.

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.

I'm not sure that Sundar has been a good CEO. The constant shutdown of google services that people rely on has been troubling. The management troubles over employees lately has been troubling as well. They still own the search market, but would you worry about the lifespan of the google products you're thinking of buying?

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.

Isn't the constant shutdown a google thing before Sundar? I doubt it's an imposition from him.

Yes, Google has a chaotic culture of project incubation, which leads to over-promotion of product launches and their eventual deprecation. And this predates Sundar's tenure on CEO. I think Sundar is trying to reduce a frequency of product launches, but there's already a crazy number of product in flight or development so deprecation of certain products are inevitable IMO.

My personal prediction is that Sundar will be to Google what Ballmer was to Microsoft: He will make tons of money but will drive Google into a corner where it will be disrespected by, well, hackers (That is, people who are interested in technically open solutions, configurability, fitness of unplanned purposes, etc). But is it refreshing that Microsoft now is going back into an opposite direction.

Yeah you could say they are close to jumping the shark... it remains to be seen what former Google employees do next. If Google continues to dump money into salaries and stock then they might not have much to worry about. Personal assistants, knowledge graph, Alexa/Siri/"Ok Google" are definitely the future. Apple seems to be winning in the car but Alexa is winning at home.

Interestingly, for my family's n=1 case, we have Alexa and Google Home Mini sitting side by side and Google usually has better answers. Maybe Alexa as a standalone device has more market share, but Google has the advantage of bundling "OK Google" into every Android phone.

I don’t have a google mini so I can’t compare specifically apart from the iOS app.

Google has never lived up to the "do no evil" motto but under Sundar things have only gotten much worse with no signs of getting better at any point in the future.

Sundar made a mistake in wading into politics after the 2016 elections. A good business leader knows to stay out of the forbidden topics of politics and religion; unite the troops, don't divide them. I don't think he realized how much impact his words would have on conservatives once the TGIF video got out. Anyway let's hope they learned something about remaining neutral in public, as the company "grows up".

None of the big tech companies have avoided "wading into politics" since 2016. Tech is far too big and inextricable a part of society for any competent CEO to think they could hide on the sidelines.

There's a big difference between "hiding on the sidelines" and maintaining a neutral stance in public. Apple's Tim Cook is an example of the latter.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/20/20973991/trump-tim-cook-...

https://9to5mac.com/2019/10/18/tim-cook-met-chinese-regulato...

In fact, Tim Cook has been actively engaging with politicians (including Trump) and that is a part of his magic sauce for "maintaining a neutral stance in public".

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