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Comment by bmcquade | Hacker News Reader

Sundar became CEO at a time when Google needed a leader who could build consensus across different product areas. Sundar was the right person for this role. Unfortunately Sundar is also relatively weak at setting a bold vision to ensure the company continues to grow and innovate, as Larry had done. So under Sundar the company has slowly shifted from being innovative to being very risk averse, incentivising not making mistakes, maintaining the status quo, and focusing on cutting costs over creating new lasting value. The effect of these changes is finally becoming more apparent.

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> Sundar was the right person for this role.

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.

Sundar was chosen following a series of failures by megalomaniacal executives Larry had appointed/approved to head various departments, including Andy Rubin, Tony Fadell, and Anthony Levandwoski. Sundar was a move in the opposite direction.

Don't forget Vic.

It's somewhat amazing how many failed, some nearly sociopathic, almost-CEOs Google had.

Ironically, Vic was was empowered to counter a similar panic an upstart more formidable than OpenAI. He brought a bold vision alright, but that's not sufficient to be a good leader.

What was Vic's bold vision?

Integrate Google+ into every product made by Google.

That was a bold vision. May Vic's legacy rest in peace w/ G+.

Aren't CEOs supposed to be sociopaths? (Asking for a friend.)

Ugh

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)

I think you have this exactly right.

Sundar is like Neville Chamberlain. Maybe ok during peacetime. But now Google is at war, and needs a Churchill.

Meh.

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.

> Unfortunately Sundar is also relatively weak at setting a bold vision to ensure the company continues to grow and innovate, as Larry had done.

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.

> if I grouped google products, I think successful and launched before 2006 would be the same

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

From what I observe Google Photos is quite popular. It's from 2015.

For me, Google Photos started a bit earlier: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa

A great product, its too bad it was discontinued. I much prefered it over lightroom.

I think it was Bump Photoroll not Picasa that became Google Photos: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/bump

Because of android lockins. Not because it's a great product imo.

Have you used it? The search is so good, I never have to dig through photo grids anymore.

The creation of Google Photos was basically an act of mutiny by David Lieb.

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.

> He kept getting told to stop working on it and he kept doing it anyway.

By G+ leadership - Vic Gundotra.

Isn’t ecosia just a frontend to Google ?

bing

> my own mail server

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.

Agreed.

Gmail, GDocs, and GAnalytics have been the hardest replace. I can't find a reasonable free alt. to those.

You can give HedgeDoc (https://hedgedoc.org/) a try as a replacement for Google Docs.

It is the one that works best for concurrent editing IMO (but it is markdown which can be a problem for some)

definitely protonmail for sure

>the company has slowly shifted from being innovative to being very risk averse, incentivizing not making mistakes, maintaining the status quo, and focusing on cutting costs over creating new lasting value

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...

so to paraphrase, he is a bean counter.

I think he cares deeply about the company and its mission, he just lacks the ability to be a bold and decisive leader. This can be a good thing in some cases (he is good at building consensus for example), but can also be harmful.

A quick Google (natch!) suggests that the company mission is: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

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.)

I don’t find the world information on Google when I search.

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 ;)

The notion of organizing private information (VS the public internet) helped me shift my perspective a bit, thank you. It also dramatically amplified my feelings about other Google products, like Drive, which do an absolutely terrible job organizing and making private information accessible. It's almost maliciously bad.

Everything is branded for what it is not.

Google’s mission is to display ads on everything. Organizing information is just an optional side quest when it enables the former.

What argument are you trying to make here? This feels very “I’m going to logic you into my view”. Google is a large, nuanced organisation. The measure of Sundar “caring deeply” doesn’t have to be filtered through a marketing slogan.

The previous poster wrote (of Sundar): "I think he cares deeply about the company and its mission..."

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.

Sounds like he's more suitable to be 2IC (eg 2nd in charge, not the leader) then?

Why even write 2IC if you then have to explain what it is?

Because it's a term familiar to some, and not to others.

What were you thinking the answer would be?

The better question is why did you use "eg" when you meant "i.e."? :)

Meh, no-one gives a shit. ;)

He’s the Steve Balmer of Google

Steve Ballmer was not a technologist but he had something more than a been counter despite all his flaws.

>He’s the Steve Balmer of Google

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxbJw8PrIkc

I'm sure they could have found a safe consensus building CEO for less that $226M. Like, way less.

> maintaining the status quo, and focusing on cutting costs over creating new lasting value.

that's how market leaders die, btw.

You mean like between Google Brain and DeepMind?

Is he the Steve Ballmer of Google?

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