None of these were bad ideas.
Sundar can't execute because he doesn't know how to do programming and doesn't understand the details.
He would never pass an engineering interview at Google, or any other software company (especially not OpenAI).
Sundar can't execute because he doesn't know how to do programming and doesn't understand the details.
He would never pass an engineering interview at Google, or any other software company (especially not OpenAI).
Google often has 2 of same ideas competing internally, which might sound like it encourages a healthy competition but most of their competitions have failed. Gmail can use dozens of new features which would be useful but they launched Inbox instead, an app with a confusion interface and nothing more. Duo has great video compression but that's it. They never used that in Meet or Hangouts.
Seems like they have gold but would rather use bronze.
Whatever problems Google has, Sundar's technical background has nothing to do with it. Which either way with an engineering and science background and 20 years at the company is in itself more than decent.
it's the difference between technical, engineering leadership and bean-counters or MBAs.
It used to be that we expected the leaders of tech companies to be technical (old time HP or even Microsoft. At some point that transitioned into non-technical people running software companies and I agree that does not sit well with me either.
That said, Google is not a software company or a tech company. It's an advertising company.
Duo was two person video calls optimized for mobile phones, and allowing calling via phone number. Basically Facetime and Whatsapp. Again, a hugely popular product category that they did not have a product in, and with a paradigm that was not compatible with their existing video call app.
That's not to say these were good ideas, or that the projects were well executed. They were me-too copies of other companies' products, and possibly without enough understanding of what made those products popular. But the "duplicates" criticism is just lazy, and makes it seem that you're just parroting memes and did not know anything about the apps other than their names.
This is classic Google culture where Director A and B decide to get into the same category of product and refuse to work together. Unfortunately there is no adult in the room to put them in the place.
Tbf every company suffers from this. Look at multi tasking on iPad as an example. Classic Jobs might have been the only one who could cut this out
So, no I don't think this is a lazy criticism, the fact that a new app was created instead of adding a feature to something that already existed is a managerial mistake because it creates extra confusion for users weakening the existing products[1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVFda0I8uW0&t=1s
[1] Sometimes it makes sense to extract a smaller app from a big one, but this is not the case.
What you saw was not the original project that the engineers were trying to launch.