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Comment by sorenjan | Hacker News Reader

What's the general opinion on Sundar Pichai as CEO? I haven't been excited about Google since Eric Schmidt, but I don't know how much of that is down to the CEO, and how much is just down to a different world and larger company.

In contrast I think most people would agree that Microsoft is a much more interesting and maybe better company with Satya Nadella as boss.

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My impression is that he's not a leader but a care taker. This article kind of shows the two founders swooping in for some emergency leadership. That's not a good look. I think they've been coasting on their past glory for a decade now. Yes they make money but otherwise they are just doing more of the same and just building out the stuff they've had for more than a decade (Search, Ads, Youtube, Maps, Android, etc.). All the attempts to enter new markets seem to be a succession of failures. They are still playing catchup to AWS, and lately Azure. Stadia came and went. Youtube paid accounts are nowhere close to competing with the likes of Netflix, or Spotify. They failed to compete with Whatsapp as well repeatedly as well. And now they are taking on OpenAI.

Sure Google has smart people. But it takes more than that. MS had lots of smart people under Ballmer as well. But it took Satya Nadella to sort out the mess he left behind and make that work for MS. He put an end to the Windows on anything agenda. One of the first things he did was kill Windows Phone (dead in the water at that point) and then opened up the MS ecosystem to Linux in a big way. Fast forward a few years and they've had a successful Github acquisition, most of the OSS world runs on MS Github, they've built Github co-pilot with OpenAI, you can run MS SQl Server on Linux now, .Net runs on Linux, you can run Linux on Windows really seamlessly. See a pattern here? Gates and Ballmer pulled up their nose for OSS, Nadella made MS a leader in OSS and is reaping the rewards. That's vision and leadership. At the time Google was stealing MS' thunder. Now the roles are reversed and Google needs to call in the founders to come up with a plan because of OpenAI. Which of course has deep ties with MS.

Google needs leadership and strategy. Right now it has neither. What are they going to do? Build another chat client? I think they've tried that a few dozen times already. They need a better plan than that. And I don't think Sundar Pichai is capable of coming up with that plan.

YouTube and Netflix revenues are actually almost exactly the same. Now that Netflix has launched an ad-supported version, I'm not sure how important paid vs. non-paid accounts are in considerations of who's doing better vs. worse.

Revenues and profit is completely different

Google went for premium content with Youtube many times. And it flopped every time. That's the point: they've been trying to make more of it and they have failed over and over again. Ads are what drives the revenue because in the end that's the only thing they know how to do. Youtube itself is indeed a good business; it's a nice business. And with an ad blocker I find it very enjoyable. Great acquisition more than 15 years ago.

I think that’s the key problem: the ad money makes it hard to see other models as viable because nothing they do now will be anywhere near as profitable over the very short timeframes they evaluate product or personnel performance. If you give up almost immediately, you have nothing waiting to help the company in a dark time for the primary revenue stream – and each time they’ve made it harder for a new product to be successful because people expect it to be cancelled.

Google has really stayed true to its mission: connect people and information.

When I'm sitting at my desk and in focus mode, I get information by opening a web browser and navigating to google.com. But if they hadn't invested in Chrome, that might not have been the case by now.

If I'm out and about, I access information via my phone. They built Android for that. If my only option were Apple or Microsoft phones, I might not be asking Google for information.

When I'm sitting at home on the couch, I just yell my queries and a little round computer answers back. It could use some improvement, but it's still me asking Google.

Along the way, Google finds ways to monetize the dispersion of information. I don't really mind because there's literally no alternative that doesn't also try to retain some of the value add.

So why this myopic focus on search? There are a lot of products here that keep me in the ecosystem. Google is a platform company that knows a lot about me and makes my life easier and along the way takes money from advertisers.

Sundar was a robot put in place to handle the difficulties that Larry wasn't interested in dealing with: growing revenue, handling the leadership ego fights, and making vapid presentations at developer conferences. He has little or no independent thought. No leadership skills (IE, rally the troops) at all.

Ruth will replace Sundar as CEO in the coming year or so. And then Google's transition to evil will be compelte.

Google needs a CEO that is driven and with a product-centric approach and this is not what I currently see in Sundar.

Google is extremely well positioned to respond to ChatGPT as they already have a very popular assistant in people's pockets and homes all over the world.

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