What's Sundar's goal for Google? They seem to be aimless since he took the helm.
Their products and software seemed genuinely inspiring. Now, it seems to just be maintenance or death. Seemingly happens with all once-loved tech companies to some degree. It's quite sad but I guess time moves on. Totally self-inflicted for them though, they decided to stop moving forward
2) how is it helping Alphabet’s bottom line? I haven’t seen it helping here either.
Of course, the models from Alphabet don't really fit this bill either. I do wonder how many "protein folding" style problems there are out there, for these narrow superintelligent AIs to solve.
If you are using OpenAI stuff you are using it.
> how is it helping Alphabet’s bottom line? I haven’t seen it helping here either.
I guess I wasn't talking about "bottom line" impressive. Oracle might make a lot by squeezing current licensees in an unimpressive way, for example.
- regurgitates stuff it hits on a shallow search as authoritative response (communicating uncertainty would be a great improvement for GPT models but I'm guessing that's not going to happen because of shallow RHLF preferences)
- search index is worse than google (eg. I've tried a search where google lands on a good solution, phind hits official docs and offers suboptimal solution)
- produces results slower than I can read source
- I still need to go to the source for full reference or do follow-up (but again it's slow)
That's not maximizing shareholder return.
That's locally maximizing shareholder return.
As shareholders jump from ship to ship, there is nothing beyond short term shareholder return.
Apple smoked all of them.
Apple long term investors are a string of short term investors.
Of course there are people with a long term view or institutional investors who buy and keep their stock for years.
But most investors, if Apple stock drops enough will sell, and new investors will buy at the new level.
Yep. In fact, he was specifically chose to step in as CEO for his meekness : voted most likely to preserve brand value by best distracting folks from the evil turn the company had taken.
> while maximizing shareholder return.
Nope. He's a 100% static CEO, and he's therefore squandering huge amounts of capital and human resources.
That's not what I'd call "maximizing shareholder return".
These are not the same kind of character.
It worked for Microsoft obviously. This is quite a coup for Satya Nadella. And he got that one on merit. MS has no stake in Android (they declined to get into that after killing Windows Phone). Also, he hit the ground running after Steve Ballmer was retired. Not that hard of course after Ballmer but he did a few decisive things early on that all seem to have mostly worked out. The Linkedin acquisition; fixing .Net, re-establishing MS as a bonafide OSS player with the Github acquisition and VS-Code. And then making a smart investment in OpenAI which they are now riding to success. All great moves.
I'd say, Google is in the same boat right now. Lots of obvious potential, an extended period of a bit rudderless performance, missed boats, and no clear direction or vision. Fix that and it could go somewhere else again. Doing more of the same isn't going to be anywhere near good enough. They seem to be stuck playing a game of whack-a-mole in terms of strategy and ever responding to what others are doing and never quite catching up with that instead of initiating things themselves and leading.
I would argue for 95% of Google's existence they have been pretty much aimless.
I like it, personally speaking. Google has a lot of power, and it's an approach that minimise the use of that power to push people around.
Google is not a grown up company - it runs the way a 2nd generation dynastic family runs their businesses - haphazard and sloppy and entirely surviving because of a cash cow and nothing else. Plus, they have a fairly substantial crew with "rest and vest" as a mantra at least for the folks I knew there prior to 2008..
Coming in right after the founders and trying to raise the moats of the exisiting products instead of creating new moats. Google Stadia is a similar failure to Ballmer's late Windows Live initiatives.
Samsung and other OEMs get a lot of crap for how they handle android. But they are really the ones driving innovation here.
- Gmail (largest email service at 1.5B users)
- YouTube (by far the biggest video sharing platform)
- Android (most used operating system in the world by number of devices)
- Google Maps (maps service with the largest userbase)
- YouTube TV
- The whole Google Drive Suite
- Chromecast/Android TV
- Chromebooks (made huge inroads in the k-12 education space)
They put minimal effort into their products and prematurely sunset them if they don't perform well enough. Their organization is either so fragmented or toxic that they launch products that are competing against eachother.
It really does seem like there are only morons at the helm. A company with as much resources as Google should not continue to fail so badly. My suspicion is as Jobs said of Apple during his time away, the company is being totally run by the product guys not the engineers.