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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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