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Comment by alberth | Hacker News Reader

> “Much of these problems with Google today stem from a lack of visionary leadership from Sundar Pichai, and his clear lack of interest in maintaining the cultural norms of early Google.”

Ouch.

I know a lot of outsiders believe that, but to have someone who spent 2-decades at Google saying it publicly is rough.

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Sundar is one of the worst CEOs in modern American corporate history. Anyone can keep Google profitable, but only the most inept could mismanage, to such a magnitude, the "Dream Team" of Engineers that Google used to be and, to some extent, still is.

Google hasn't created a new major product in years, despite having some of the best paid professionals in the market. I know many Googlers; people at the top of their game, from the best universities, going to waste as Sundar directs the company to one uninspired direction after another.

Sometimes I feel that wasting the intellectual resources of our species is borderline a crime against humanity. This man has to go.

I would rather the people go, and use their considerable intellect on things that have interests more aligned with societal benefit. Do we really want a re-ignited Google?

If creates new things with the impact of Chrome, Maps and Gmail, but with less spyware? Hell, yeah!

If it means it fuels more competition than the late stagnation in tech that was pre-LLM stuff? (and arguably in a wide variety of fields than just ML)

Absolutely.

> Google hasn't created a new major product in years

Indeed, and this goes back even further in time than you might think. All their best products came from acquisitions: Maps (KeyHole), Android, YouTube, Google Docs. The only truly original Google products that I can think of, other than Search, are GMail and Chrome (which was largely powered by WebKit anyway).

But they do deserve credit for nurturing those products. Maybe that's where their strength lies: in throwing a massive amount of elbow grease and server power at problems that can't be solved any other way. Nobody is innovating their way to a new Web browser or maps platform. Those products need a massive organization behind them. Google seems to have a good formula for keeping these large projects on track. What they've been missing since 2005 is the ability to start a new project from zero.

And you know what? Maybe that kind of innovation is actually almost impossible, like winning the lottery, and it's unrealistic to expect one organization to strike gold more than once, or a handful of times if they're really lucky.

The same pattern is observable at Facebook - they've got one flagship product, an undiversified revenue stream from ads, and a bunch of successful products they acquired. But has Facebook really innovated since their original product?

~Chrome was an acquisition.~ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome (Edit: I misremembered / misstated, this is incorrect.)

Kubernetes, TensorFlow, and Spanner were not.

> Nobody is innovating their way to a new Web browser or maps platform. Those products need a massive organization behind them.

OpenStreetMap Foundation, 1.5 FTE.

> throwing a massive amount of elbow grease and server power at problems that can't be solved any other way.

Street View is the perfect example of this. It still seems like an insane-in-a-good-way product to me after all these years.

Eh, YouTube was going to crash and burn hard without an acquisition. It was acquired in 2006, and was built into something sustainable by integrating with Google infrastructure.

Not to be an egghead/navel gazer about it, but I’ve grown skeptical of “innovation” as an end in itself: was Facebook innovative, or was it just another small iterative improvement on an existing form? Same with Google and search. My gut tells me companies should focus on more concrete measures of success rather than the abstract “innovation”.

It’s probably not semantically wrong to say that these two cases really were/are innovative, but even so, was that really the cause of their success? And is it replicable as a methodology? My gut tells me that a lot of what gets labeled as a massive innovation is really just a market inevitability, and someone got to the right idea first, either by luck or having a single clever differentiating idea.

Yeah, "innovation" has always been a rather nebulous term for iterative improvement, and more particularly, the iterative improvement that people remember in retrospect. Often the same "innovation" appears almost simultaneously from multiple companies (or inventors, or mathematicians... this phenomenon has existed for a long time). But usually only one of them can win, and it seems relatively arbitrary who it is. Certainly once they're perceived as winning, they benefit from a compounding effect.

Really, "innovation" is a matter of hard work, timing, and luck. You need to work hard to ship a product or publish a theory. You need to recognize the opportunity and execute on it at the right time. And you probably need some luck to get your initial boosts. But even after all that, you still need to be mature and capable enough to turn your small golden egg into a golden goose. It's still a long slog from initial hit to resting on your laurels.

Given Google's current reputation killing of products left and right, lately I don't bother even trying new things they roll out, and building anything dependent on it is completely out of the question. No.

Having spent two decades at a far, far less known company, I think it’s common for long-timers to look back with fondness and a feeling that their early days were Camelot, that the current days are worse, and that the fault lies with a specific leadership change.

It’s way more interesting, dynamic, and fun to work at a place growing 25-50% per year (or more) than it is when it’s growing 10-15%, even if the absolute growth dollars are way bigger now.

I don’t have any strong opinion of Sundar, but I’m not at all surprised that 2003 Google was a way more fun, exciting, and engaging place to be than 2023 Google.

I've had that experience at a different company. Was really exciting when I joined and I had a very long leash to do pretty much whatever I thought was the right thing. Long-time manager left and did some new interesting stuff for a while. But then I bumped around a bit and I really just counted a couple years until my last major vests and retired.

I sorta agree with you, but sorta don't. While I don't think you can squarely lay the blame on any one person, culture comes from the top. The board/CEO (but mostly the CEO) sets the culture, and hires (or molds) other executives and leadership positions into their vision of that culture.

Page and Brin chose Pichai to succeed them. They, and the rest of their board, share blame as well.

I personally felt the best icon of original Google culture was Craig Silverstein, whose departure greatly affected the various intergrouplets that were holding the company culture together. In that sense, I wouldn't place all the blame on Sundar, although he didn't necessarily help.

But all hope is not lost yet -- even though the work environment might change from big family to big company to big factory as the company size grows, it has gotten to the size where there are now pockets of families that are cohesive among themselves. I believe these fractals of families will be what carries the culture forward.

I'm the "12 years at Google" commenter from below.

Got a personal email from Craig Silverstein my first day at Google welcoming me to the company and thanking me for my work on hash functions. Chatted with him occasionally after that. Good guy.

Reminds me of a funny story - the first day at Google (2018) I got a chat from an SVP, I forgot who, saying "Hi!". At first I was blown, wow, what a company! SVPs greeting new engineers! A minute later they were like "oops, my bad, wrong person".

They intended to message someone else with my first name, so my guess is they used to type that name and hit tab to start the chat, and that person was no longer the first option in the auto-complete since I joined.

(side note - the most bad-ass response to this would have been to just send back "go/no-hello" ;) )

The thing is it's not Sundar's job to be a visionary leader. That's not why the shareholders put him where he is. He is a bean counter and is doing a fantastic job bean counting and increasing Google's share price.

Google has passed up too many great opportunities that don't even take a visionary to see. Biggest examples, we let Zoom, OpenAI, and even Microsoft (Teams) steal our thunder. Microsoft, that company we make fun of as a dinosaur, moves faster than we do!

I remember the discussions around the office right when ChatGPT came out. "Bard performs better," "we're more ethical," etc. Nope, they ate our lunch.

Yes, Microsoft really re-invented itself. Maybe Google can turn itself around too after a decade or two of malaise.

But Microsoft reinvented itself with precisely leadership change in Satya, right?

Sure, but consider that MS came from Ballmer, whom many of us blame for Microsoft's badness of the 00s (granted, Ballmer of course came from Gates, who probably set back general-purpose computing by decades due to his greed). I do believe Nadella has made MS a much better, likeable company, but I don't think I'll ever trust them to do right by humanity.

Google has gone the other way: Page and Brin seemed to be well-liked outside of Google, as they were the visionaries who started it all. They made the choice to go with Pichai, who cares more about ad revenue than doing anything great. And Page and Brin, sadly, seem to be happy with their choice so far.

I don't see how Microsoft reinvented themselves. For better and worse, they behave the same way I grew to expect in the 00s with Ballmer. New CEO knocked off the Google founders' "nice guy" look, that's about it.

Meanwhile, Google is reinventing themselves... to be more like Microsoft.

ime Googlers/Xooglers have this egotism that needs a sharp kick in the butt to remedy.

Well they're getting that kick now.

Bard is trash. In my experience it's ChatGPT > Bing Chat > Bard.

Shame because Google invented the transformer architecture that enabled the technology.

Could add AWS and Azure to that list

I thought about that, but my list was focused on things that Google was leading in but let the market get away. Amazon got into cloud before Google did.

And, as the article postulates, that sort of bean counting goes directly against what used to excite Google's employees, and is leading to their continued disillusionment.

Yeah that’s what I don’t understand, what is the incentive to preserve the culture?

Outcomes follow incentives

‘Shareholders’ can’t do anything. Different classes of shares confer different voting rights, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin still own shares controlling over 50% of shareholder votes.

IDK, if you look at what Microsoft has accomplished under the leadership of Satya over the last 9 years it's obviously possible to innovate and bean count at the same time

Yes, but that happened after they had Ballmer which was their own bean counting CEO.

And they noticed that that's a problem - something VERY FEW corporations figure out.

> I know a lot of outsiders believe that, but to have someone who spent 2-decades at Google saying it publicly is rough.

Not really. Leave the job and berate the leadership next day is a thing nowadays. These template of criticism just assumes Google or any other company changed had simple choice to stay same whereas people and world at large has changed drastically over same period.

And I am not even saying that Google has not gone worse which most likely it is. But to assume to some kind of visionary leadership would have been be great for employees and users is like saying we can all live happily and peacefully on earth. Sounds excellent but not really happening.

It feels like tech generally has a CEO vision problem.

Andy Jassy + Sudar for example.

off the top of my head I can only think of Zuckerburg, and maybe Satya. (Although Satya is more an exceptional operator than visionary.)

Tech started to have a vision problem the moment big money (and people with big money) entered the picture and started calling the shots. Sundar, Jassy, Satya, Tim Cook are all cut from the same cloth. Their job is to appease the shareholders and not much else.

Zuckerberg is probably the only founder/majority shareholder still involved in the weeds of running his ~trillion dollar company day to day and executing his vision, and you have to give him kudos for that. He could easily go buy multiple countries instead and live out his life with a lot less stress.

It’s a tale as old as time

The kid inherits the company built by the parent

Jassy was at AWS and in a senior role essentially since its inception. Retail predates Jassy, but I give Jassy a lot more credit than presiding over a company that someone else built.

I think Pichai tries his best within his abilities, maybe it's time to pay attention to the ones who had chosen him?

It may be more helpful to pay attention to the ones leaving him in charge if its clear his abilities may not be the right fit.

I would bet that the average tech-savvy outsider has a higher opinion of Sundar than the average Googler does.

Sundar became CEO in 2015. The author quit this year. Was his "lack of visionary leadership" not that obvious for 8+ years? Or did the author stay because the stock price and his TC kept going up?

Just because you stay in a job doesn't mean you can't criticize the company and its leadership.

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