He’s destroyed googles reputation with developers.
Destroyed customer trust in Google products.
Done nothing to fix googles reputation for terrible customer service.
Led Google to third place in cloud computing.
AND been thrashed by Microsoft / ChatGPT, putting Googles core business at risk.
Why is this guy CEO?
Does he "care deeply" about this? If we look at the direction they've taken in recent years, and the products they've launched (and/or killed) - how many of them demonstrate a "deep care" about this mission? How many of them are even tangentially related to this mission?
(The projects that Google undertook in the early days --Earth, Maps, Mail, digitising whole libraries, photographing the world for StreetView-- definitely showed a dedication to this mission statement.)
Gmail works much better. It does, indeed, organize the world’s information, the world’s private and corporate information.
But the only who can really search through it is the CIA. Maybe we’re not the real customers ;)
Google’s mission is to display ads on everything. Organizing information is just an optional side quest when it enables the former.
I'm not trying to make an argument; instead, I was:
1) Checking what Google's mission is these days (as I'm not clear if the mission statement I found is indeed still their mission, and/or the one that the previous poster said that he cares deeply about)
2) If that is the correct mission statement, testing the premise that he cares deeply about it, by exploring the direction the company under his leadership has taken.
What were you thinking the answer would be?
No, he isn't. However misguided and ridiculous Balmer was, he at least showed that he was fully alive [1]
Sundar wouldn't be caught dead wearing a sweaty shirt or yelling on a stage. The dude is a fucking wax puppet.
I'm willing to presume Larry had bold visions, but if I grouped google products, I think successful and launched before 2006 would be the same.
I think it's time to admit that google has been a conglomerate for decades and could no longer run with innovative management. The correct thing to do is to break it up so subdivisions of today can be innovative companies, or reliable dividend payers, or bankrupt.
In October 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion.[11]
Google Maps was launched in February 2005.[2]
These are the last 2 Google products I use
Search got replaced by DDG then Ecosia Chrome by Firefox Gmail by my own mail server My Pixel 2 ran out of security coverage and sick of buying a new phone every 2 years I went to an iphone xs
Youtube and Maps are the only two sticky products left and both came about when I was in high school
He kept getting told to stop working on it and he kept doing it anyway. Eventually resorting to back-channeling to Larry in order to get him to champion the project.
He tells the story in an episode of the podcast "The Social Radars."
Pretty good listen.
By G+ leadership - Vic Gundotra.
This is hardly reproductible. I guess that the standard place people go after gmail is fastmail.
But getting a free equivalent is hard (at least I do not know any). I could host my mail but this is hard work and monitoring.
Gmail, GDocs, and GAnalytics have been the hardest replace. I can't find a reasonable free alt. to those.
It is the one that works best for concurrent editing IMO (but it is markdown which can be a problem for some)
Was he? What is the evidence that he succeeded? Or even had more positive influence than random decisions?
Does google have consensus over what it’s doing? Or is Sundar specifically a “safe,” milquetoast CEO chosen to not show up previous CEOs. I don’t know Sundar, but it seems he was picked because google leadership assumed supremacy and thought that they just needed a steady hand to coast for a few years.
It's somewhat amazing how many failed, some nearly sociopathic, almost-CEOs Google had.
Overly opinionated people like that could thrive under Jobs, who was the biggest opinion setter, which made them fight for the most important things while getting a pushback on the most controversial areas and not waste time with minor stuff
Take that and they start going crazy (yes I'm talking about Johnny Ive)
Sundar is like Neville Chamberlain. Maybe ok during peacetime. But now Google is at war, and needs a Churchill.
War is sort of the opposite of "business as usual." The normal rules are abandoned. You still have the same high level strategic objectives, but the tactics are radically changed.
I would love to see Google go to war. Wake me up when they figure out how to do that.
that's how market leaders die, btw.
This is in large part due to Ruth Porat's relentless multiyear campaign of cracking down on employee perks and salaries at Google, at a time when VCs were throwing blank checks at startups who in turn were poaching the best people with whole-number multiples of their current compensation. This destroyed arguably Google's single greatest asset — its public image as a "dream employer".
The lack of innovation and risk aversion are just second-order effects of losing the ability to execute (especially in the context of its ambitions) by being known as a second-rate employer in an industry primarily limited by the cost and ability to attract quality labor.
This doesn't excuse Sundar of course, because he was ultimately the CEO through all of this.
"The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free" https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
It's left to the mindlessly ambitious or ppl who are placeholders to prevent the mindlessly ambitious from sitting in the chair.
We have passed the point of org complexity where the CEO does anything beyond ensuring no on totally insane takes over.
There are lot of such ppl who dieing to charge you for every search query or email you send. Think Larry Ellison or Rupert Murdoch types taking over Google.
You don't have to think money is everything to understand how earning $225 million in a short time will help you with all the things you do care about, whether it's retiring early, spending time with kids, supporting charity, pursuing hobbies, doing independent research, or taking care of aging parents.
Especially if you have a cozy 200k 40hr/wk 6 weeks of vacation blah blah blah gig
Even $200k would be awesome and get rid of a lot of major stresses and uncertainties like being able to afford my own place to live and a spare bedroom for the kid and worrying out about finding my next paying contract. It would give me "plenty" of time, but not all of my time, not even half of it. I'd still need to keep working most of my daylight hours for most of my healthy years.
Honestly, with a $225 million compensation package, I don't see how someone like Sundar could have any long-term incentives whatsoever. He's set for life and won't be hungry for anything, regardless of how Google performs.
Take it from a multi millionaire: it's not that cool. You already have everything you need and more, probably. Start appreciating it..
You sound jealous?
Life can still be great. How much money you make isn't really all that important, I'm happy to inform you. No need to be jealous, count your own blessings!
No one sane wants the responsibility: that's why it's so valuable. It's not evil.
Glad you're counting you're blessings, now you can stop worrying about CEOs!
They all keep working from the few I know, it's a certain kind of person. Almost a curse. Even with hundreds of millions. One is doing django alongside me almost 12hr/day... lol...
I know some retired policemen/public workers and they're doing handsomely. Went hunting one time and this guy was decked out, asked him "what do you do?!" Turns out he's retired police...
20yrs gets you 50% of your salary for the rest of your life on top of whatever else you saved. 3% more every year you stay on.
The guy I met hunting was in his 50s and has 30+ years in the force. He's getting like 70k/yr lol
Same with my highschool gf's dad.
The fact that most of the CEOs are still working after receiving such a compensation package shows their different mindset which is probably essential to becoming a CEO in the first place… personally I’d gladly take 1/100th of that and never have to worry about money ever again. Doesn’t mean I would stop working. I’d just stop working for money trying to hack my way into early retirement which probably won’t come anyways.
At the current pace of savings and earnings I won’t be able to retire in the next 25years, whilst mentally I am already ready to retire to do all the things you listed and more. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to just go for it and start living the life as if I had all the millions laying around and making the most out of my relatively healthy body. But I’m afraid it would be quite stressful to burn through savings and be forced to go back to a corporate job all over again…
I think Satya Nadella is a counter example.
There can be 'mindlessly' ambitious people who are also great at being a CEO.
Search hovers around ~90% for the last several years: https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
Google Cloud is growing faster than Azure & AWS for the last few years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/967365/worldwide-cloud-i....
Cloud was at ~4% market share 5 years ago, now it's at ~10%...
Android is the only major product doing somewhat poorly, and this is mostly due to Apple just completely crushing it with the iPhone.
I get that Google is the company everyone loves to hate, but the sky isn't falling on this company yet.
The fasting growing cloud? 6% in five years after pouring in billions now they need to start charging what it costs. The more unprofitable of the cloud vendors.
Chrome is still the most popular free browser. Not sure that matters as much as it once did.
The data they collect via Chrome, plus their ad network, makes Chrome part of their money printing machine.
So market share I think helps them here.
I think the change in sentiment is that the sky is no longer the limit for Alphabet. Meta lost that notion big time, and Amazon is so so too. Apple and Microsoft might still be in the "sky is the limit" category, or at least in another category than the other 3.
Microsoft successfully transitioned into cloud computing with Azure, Office 365, and Teams. They dramatically improved their image among developers/open source with WSL, Typescript, VS Code, and their GitHub acquisition. Now it seems they caught Google completely off guard with respect to AI productization.
Is this the driver?
Microsoft as IBM is a horribly outdated take.
Because of MS, they helped me love desktop apps again: VSCode, Outlook, Edge, and the ever so controversial Teams.
Also it doesn't matter what any of us think, it matters what the market thinks as in where does the stock price go.
AWS made 5.2B last quarter.
Google is selling at cloud at a loss to gain market share while it's biggest competitor is raking in profit. Sure, you can burn money and gain market share. But would anyone pick Google for a long term partner on any product? I sure as hell wouldn't. They have a tendency to simply discard products left and right. The support is non existent. Why tie yourself to such an unreliable partner?
I guess this site could be of interest to some, to have a look at some of the products: https://killedby.tech/
Google has a separate site here as well: https://killedbygoogle.com/
Microsoft also has a site like that: https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
I tried looking up one for Amazon or AWS projects, but only unrelated news articles came up.
I don't really have a horse in the race, though, since all three of the big platforms (and others like Oracle Cloud) are outside of my price point and all my personal projects run on smaller simple VPS providers. From what I can tell, there is not a single large corporation out there with the commitment to never kill a product of theirs and support everything in perpetuity.
If growth rates continue, in 5 years, it's on pace to be one of the most hundred profitable companies in the world...
They are holding at a healthy 25% of the mobile market: https://www.statista.com/statistics/263517/market-share-held...
This predates Sundar's stint. Reader was only the first one, but this culture of killing products is in Google's DNA itself.
“More wood behind fewer arrows” was Google’s direction from Larry Page starting in 2011, which was when they slaughtered a lot of existing and (from Google’s perspective) marginal projects and became a lot more prone to demanding that new efforts prove themselves adequately or be terminated, so Pichai isn’t responsible for starting it, at least.
Eric let a million products bloom, and Larry was too gutless to make the hard calls.
Sundar gets credit for heeding Wall Street (and his CFO's) call for fiscal responsibility, but the implementation has been poor.
For all the Alphabet stuff, and hiring the smartest engineers on the planet, I've yet to hear of a single Google breakthrough beyond their search. They're still just ad salesmen.
Only other useful things they've done that most people would be aware of is refining Microsoft's email/office software into the SaaS age, and making a popular map app. That's great, but no breakthrough.
Now OpenAI's going to kneecap them. Who searches for lists of potential sources of answers when ChatGPT just gives you them? They're fucked.
I don't like what Google has become but I can't deny them the amazing work that both DeepMind and Google Brain have done over the years.
That's what he's done.
Just in 2022, revenues were up $23B, so his cut was 1.2% of that.
Have you seen the ad load (the amount of realestate used by ads) in a search results page? It has gone through the roof.
It used to be a typical Google search ad was: title, 2 lines of text at most, and a URL.
Now you have 10 or more lines in the top ad. Of course as you use more space for ads, revenue will go up. Even an idiot can see that. It's no magic. But yet the leadership in Google acts as if they've done something magical by continuing to grow revenue. Well, d'uh!! Show more ads, get more money!!! This isn't some magical AI thing; it's pure greed at the cost of UX.
Edit: I was looking at the wrong numbers. Google's profit has roughly quadrupled in the 8 years Pichai has been CEO. His compensation makes a lot more sense in that light.
Revenue 2019: $160bn Revenue 2022: $280bn
Net income 2019: $34bn Net income 2022: $60bn
Google hasn't done antything like that. Their product discontinuations have mostly been for niche applications.
He has? How did he do that? Literally, curious, first I've heard of it.
> Led Google to third place in cloud computing.
You don't need to be number 1 to make a profit.
> AND been thrashed by Microsoft / ChatGPT, putting Googles core business at risk.
I suspect you think google search is their core business. When it's ads.
Also, just because Microsoft is ahead just now doesn't mean they will be in the future. OpenAI I believe is only so far ahead because they take what others gave and didn't give back. This resulted in others to stop sharing. Since OpenAI is going to stop getting that boost from others, it could be that others start catching up with advancements they discover but don't share.
GCP is not profitable, though. Or at least, was reported as not being during this calendar year.
There are no real other exchanges.
"We need to be real thoughtful about this", followed by strictly no decision / action will be the hallmark of Sundar's tenure which I hope will end real soon.
Perhaps having a good reputation with developers won't be as important in the upcoming years.
The big tech co lifecycle includes decline. More than 10 years ago, I figured that Google was a few years behind Microsoft on that trajectory. Edit: and a lot of comments here are saying Satya turned MS around; i find that dubious.
The advertising cash firehose is perhaps the only thing that matters at Google.
But, having been severely caned by ChatGPT and left flat footed on AI i think it’s reasonable to say even that firehose is now at risk.
Again: “short term, sure”
Unless you have a convincing case for why “never” evaluating switching will last forever.
etc.
history is littered with the dominant player getting shellacked by an upstart
And it usually is for political reasons not technical reasons.
Bard is a piece of shit. It's probably being held back so that it doesn't compete internally with google search
Case in point, 2017 Google Brain released the "Attention Is All You Need" paper however haven't done anything proactively to deliver it to mass users like OpenAI have done (among others) - perhaps this is the kick that Google needs to remind them that research alone isn't enough, it needs practical applications and the question could be whether Pichai is the right CEO to deliver that
Not sure I buy that.
They're clearly ignoring the already existing human-race scale negative impact of their do-anything-to-capture-peoples-attention advertising business.
Execution is more important than being the first. MS and OpenAI did an excellent move, and now Google needs catch up. It doesn’t matter if they invented the model architecture used by ChatGPT, they are not the ones capitalizing it.
This pattern plays out all the time in the tech industry. You think google didn't know how to make a website like facebook? Of course, but they couldn't beat a much smaller weaker opponent even then. Google now is about 8 times larger than Google 2011 and much slower.
Unfortunately, this recent LLM trend will seriously threaten it. If an LLM can provide the answer, then why would a user click to go to a website? And if there are no clicks to a website, why would the website curate the information? How will they make money? The long-term effects of how LLMs are integrated into Search are still unknown. Of course, MSFT would love to push Google into LLMs, as that hurts their ads business.
Also (as I mentioned in an earlier comment) he has been milking that cow a bit too much. The ad load on Google sites has gone through the roof. A fair(er) comparison of his performance would be to see how much revenue Google would make at the same ad load as in 2015. Any idiot can make 5x more revenue in the very short term by showing 20x more ads. That is not rocket science. What _is_ interesting is if you can do it without increasing the ad load. That's where the real magic lies.
For a $226M compensation, we should be able to demand a bit more don't you think?
I'd argue that most human beings never do anything worth even a million dollars, let alone hundreds of millions, especially execs.
Are you a major shareholder?
The shareholders decide on the compensation of the CEO, that's literally it.
These responses asking who "we" are feels like (bad) attempts at justifying the hilariously inefficient salary, as if "it's none of your business" is the best counterargument to why they should be paid so much but provide so little.
Also, I and I'm sure many others here are shareholders, if that matters.
Android and YouTube are doing great.
That’s the standard we’re talking here.
It's not a big surprise that a Google backed product could suffer to bleed money the longest over other streaming services.. in other words their longevity in the field isn't an indicator of quality or customer happiness, just circumstance.
Other CEO's though definitely have more impact in their respective companies.
Intel's recent re-invigoration once Pat Gelsinger took over seems like a reasonable example.
Not to mention hiring/promoting the right people.
I fully expect the recent advancements in AI to bring to the surface more disruptive startups than Google can possibly gobble up, ultimately sealing its fate.
He might be a smart nerd but he’s not a leader.