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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Pichai needs to go, and I've been calling it here for over three years.

It's been so obvious Pichai isn't the one to lead Google. Here's a mountain of evidence where you can see him failing to adapt to a risky situation and changing market:

2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25549445

2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27588571

2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21819608

2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25986216

2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34484142

Pichai has a history of not being bold, not responding to threats, not innovating, not fixing broken culture, not seeing the 20 year view of the market. He's lost some of the biggest advantages Google once held. He needs to be done. And he needs to be done three years ago.

Now when he's tasked with reversing the sinking ship? Totally fumbling.

Show him out and get a Nadella.

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I agree, but not with the conclusion. I don't think a Nadella is what they need. He's far too much of a stabilizer, which makes sense for Microsoft given their incredibly rocky years. This archetype is also what Pichai is trying to fill and why Google isn't working out.

When you step back for a moment, it's utterly bizarre Tim Cook was able to pivot Apple towards being this privacy-focused company who is now able to eat Google's ad lunch from right under them. Tim Cook, the very same guy people called just a boring distributions-focused leader, yet he has a more forward-thinking vision than Pichai. Pichai, the man who once led a team to create Chrome.

It's outright absurd how much one has stalled in comparison.

He never led chrome creation. He was a random PM. By the time he rose in the ranks, chrome already existed.

What I like about Nadella is that he is very responsive to threats, and I think he fundamentally gets the business. Much of MS' product line is improving across the board and ramping up vs AWS.

Cook really understands the customer perspective around privacy, and I view him as part of the A bomb that will destroy the glacier of Surveillance Capitalism. FB is limping, and Google is bleeding. He'll likely be ramming it at Mach5 with the subscription icebreaker which feeds right into the Apple ecosystem. Now, I do think he needs to drop %s and bring them down to reality as part of a long play to make it the best platform and defeat monopoly arguments.

It would be interesting to know who were the key players on that Chrome team.

He was a PM but there's relatively little PMing to do on a browser. If you look at the features Chrome launched with it was all engineering focused stuff: speed, security, non-functionals like that. The project itself was really driven by Page and some hires from Mozilla/Safari teams.

> Show him out and get a Nadella

Better yet, break it up. It's clear a behemoth is no longer in shareholders' interest.

Google has entered it's IBM age.

As if Google has half the staying power of IBM. You have to eeek along for 50 years to be IBM. Google has 1 cash cow and if it does it will be more Nokia than IBM

Seriously... IBM, even in its completely decrepit and uncompetitive state, still kicks off $1-3 billion in free cash flow per quarter.

Nokia has more years than IBM?

Who do you suggest to replace Pichai?

The founders (Sergey and Larry)? Eric Schmidt? Or someone new? Who do you think the "Nadella" or the One who can lead Google?

Id be totally willing to see Jeff Dean promoted to CEO. Not that I think he'd do a great job, but it would be interesting to watch. He's been building a case for this for quite some time.

The Chuck Norris of tech.

What about Demis Hassabis? He seems like he might some ideas on the future.

Eric Schmidt is busy trying to fix Pentagon software development, he's not available.

> Eric Schmidt is busy trying to fix Pentagon software development,

That could actually play to his advantage if he really wants to be CEO again, it is my belief that in the current geo-security climate all the big US tech companies will become more and more entangled with the MIC (transforming it into a MIC+tech thing, in a way).

But I suspect that at this point Schmidt is trying to play the big political cards. Maybe he wants to become the new government-appointed tech Tsar in case that job will be created at some point? (I personally think that it will be created).

Thomas Kurian.

This was the guy responsible for importing Oracle culture into Google, which has since overtaken Google Cloud, search and ads organizations.

I am curious what you mean by culture here, specific focused culture or the general culture?

I don't know much about Oracle's inner culture, but I've heard people always hated it throughout the years.

Is that a good or bad thing?

Good for managers, bad for engineers. Maybe good for the company, I don't know.

Kurian should be the CEO of an Alphabet subsidiary- but not Google. Cloud should be pulled out of Google and turned into a full subsidiary.

Nadella has done a better job than Ballmer but don't overrate him too much! He has many major failures on his watch. Microsoft has been very effectively buying a warm reputational glow with developers by splashing money around, but that's all relative to their previous state. It's still a company with a lot of problems:

- With the exception of VS Code, the Microsoft things developers like are purchased or just catching up with where competitors were 20 years ago e.g. GitHub, Minecraft, OpenAI, Windows Terminal, WSL.

- There's a top thread today on HN all about how much people hate Teams. Teams is an abomination yet forms the central pillar of their collaboration strategy; how can they have executed so badly that people seriously say they'd rather quit their job if it's introduced than deal with its terrible design?

- Windows has totally rotted away on Nadella's watch. The execution failure here is total. Does Nadella even use Windows himself? It's still critical infrastructure for much of the world but the entire Windows platform has no vision, no ideas and has become (just like Teams) mind-blowingly buggy. Absolutely nothing they introduced in the last 15 years or so actually works properly. A good measure of the totality of Nadella's failure here is that Microsoft's new apps are all Electron based and Edge is a fork of Chrome i.e. they institutionally prefer to use Google's code to their own. Also they apparently hand out MacBooks to new employees!

- Visual Studio was once dominant in its space but is now apparently considered a writeoff, so VS Code is a totally different app written from scratch.

- .NET has experienced major product and branding churn that has left anyone not fully committed to the ecosystem confused about what it is and can do e.g. .NET Core vs Framework. .NET isn't a failure but it doesn't seem to be growing or exciting devs either, and in terms of core R&D they've been blown away by the work Oracle is doing with Graal.

- Azure is very successful but is showing worrying signs of the same bugs-and-tech-debt problems that plagues the rest of their products. When I had to use Azure, I was constantly amazed at how even basic things were flaky or did not work. Like even just holding open TCP connections between machines wouldn't work properly. This is despite the fact that Microsoft was able to built out Azure seemingly only by raiding the rest of the firm for talent, hence the Windows brain drain. Also cloud is becoming strongly associated with cost disease, which opens up a possible weakness in future (in fairness, a problem shared with AWS and GCP).

- HoloLens is cool but does anyone use it?

Nadella fixed the monolithic our-way-or-the-highway approach, which allowed them to import tech from elsewhere to fix their weaknesses. But compare that to Apple, which consistently doubles down on its own tech stack and has become even more successful with the monolithic integrated approach and it's hard not to see this as something Nadella was forced into rather than some great act of leadership.

I don't think this is the right way to look at it at all.

> With the exception of VS Code, the Microsoft things developers like are purchased or just catching up with where competitors were 20 years ago e.g. GitHub, Minecraft, OpenAI, Windows Terminal, WSL.

Yes, but now they're leaders in every one of these categories. And instead of holding back acquisitions, Microsoft has made each one demonstrably better.

> how much people hate Teams

Teams is a beachhead, and they're absolutely going to take it and win.

> Windows has totally rotted away on Nadella's watch. The execution failure here is total. Does Nadella even use Windows himself?

There's really not much need for Windows anymore. Putting a veneer on Linux would do just as well. That said, they're continuing to win gamers and over half of businesses. The future is thin clients, though, and that's where the battle is shaping up.

> Microsoft's new apps are all Electron based and Edge is a fork of Chrome i.e. they institutionally prefer to use Google's code to their own

The entire world chose Blink/Chrome/Chromium. Keeping their old browser around would have been a major mistake. And now they're set to take the the lead. Google will be too busy defending their own moat to keep up Chrome leadership, and Edge will push search margin to zero.

> Visual Studio was once dominant in its space but is now apparently considered a writeoff

The way people write software is changing. Cloud based thin clients are what businesses want. The entire development setup virtualized without DevOps. Fully secured. And beyond that, AI-assisted coding. Of course Visual Studio is a dinosaur.

> .NET has experienced major product and branding churn

Microsoft is busy winning Linux developers and the rest of the world.

> Azure is very successful but is showing worrying signs of the same bugs-and-tech-debt problems that plagues the rest of their products.

It's a top cloud contender and will gain even more market share.

> HoloLens is cool but does anyone use it?

A small, synergistic bet on spatial computing and XR that keeps them in the game should the field pop off.

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