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.