Still Sundar is mediocre at best, and I certainly think Google's shareholders should be looking for a new person to run the place. It's not just AI, Google's entire portfolio has weakened.
I often think of his time at Google as Ballmer’s time at Microsoft. Not unsuccessful, business grew manifold. But not pushing the bar. Nothing to keep the competitors on their toes. Like Apple did with Apple Silicon.
I heard this somewhere: you have leaders for peacetime, and leaders for wartime. They are seldom the same people.
Not sure I agree. It's easy to be captain of a ship when you're on a familiar route and there aren't any icebergs to dodge. Just let the crew get on with doing what they always do.
It's only when you have to dodge icebergs that you need to start making difficult decisions under pressure and coordinating subordinates.
I don't know, but I'm really sad to see how Android is currently performing in rich countries. Not stagnating, but losing.
Here, in Germany, Android had a market share of over 70%(!). But over the last three years alone, Apple started eating Android's lunch and iOS' market share has increased from 28% to 38%, while Android's has decreased by the same amount (from 69% to 60%) [1].
Personally, I'd say that at least Google's Android department is currently headless and has no idea what the users want.
Of course this has nothing to do with revenue of YT Premium, GCP and whatever else Google is offering, but it's making me sad regardless.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/693829/market-share-mobi...
The clock change, while minor, really put the nail in the coffin for me. I have very little optimism for Android. Luckily, it still allows me to use an app to revert the clock display to an readable clock display. I don't particularly want to switch to iOS and I am happy about GrapheneOS, but it's still going to suffer from bad decisions coming from Android.
HH
MM
it's a little stupid to be angry about but it's also pretty stupid to do in the first place.
As for a better alternative I think that the Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, is highly underated. She made a lot of unpopular decisions for the public, but all of them successfully protected YouTube from existential threats (copyright holders, advertisers, and TikTok).
After all there you only get presented a handful of links at most and the chatbot can hype up the sponsored link.
How did Youtube Shorts protect anything?! They failed to compete with TikTok but keep antagonizing loyal Youtube users with these unremovable crap.
I think YouTube could have stood its ground or maneuvered much better.
Perhaps the best "decision" to point to is the removing of dislikes. Does nothing but degrade user experience. Claims it was done to "avoid cyber bullying" or something to that effect but that's ridiculous. Now I have to waste a lot of time reading through comments to know if there's something seriously wrong with the "How To" I'm about to watch.
Now do Tim Cook.