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Comment by eclectic29 | Hacker News Reader

Will Sundar take true ownership of all the debacles after getting rushed to produce something in AI and resign?

Why would Sundar resign? That makes no sense whatsoever. Google is the clear leader in search, as it has always been. Leader in Mail, Browsers, Drive Storage, Video (YouTube), Maps, Calendars - the entire personal software suite, basically.

Not to forget Waymo leading the driverless car race. It's also not like Gemini is pathetic - it's a very high performing model, and although I'd expect them to be closer to GPT4 by now, if it was that easy someone else would have done it. OpenAI are the only ones to have done this well, and it's extraordinary how well they're doing.

> Google is the clear leader in search, as it has always been.

Citation needed.

Did you actually use their search in the last, say, 4 years?

note there is a difference between the best and the one that is most heavily used.

Google still rules the roost despite how as a techy I find it's gone horribly downhill in the last 5 years.

Because Sundar wasn't the CEO responsible for any of these leading products. In fact, he has the distinction of not creating a single major new product during his tenure, despite having one of the most qualified engineering teams in history under his command. But indeed, it's unlikely that he will voluntarily resign rather than keep bloodsucking Google as he has done for years.

> despite having one of the most qualified engineering teams in history under his command

I'm always interested in how people come up with this. I know it's conventional wisdom, but a lot of it seems to be "they passed the google interview", which is very circular, or it's based on "I worked there and was impressed by everyone".

The counterpoint would be that google can't seem to get its head out of its ass and stop its reputational decline.

Reputational decline at FAANGs often has little to do with the actual engineers. There are separate product managers / program managrs setting direction and separate UI / UX designers defining how products will look. Feedback from engineers is sometimes taken into account but, more often, will be met with "You don't get the vision" or "You're not the customer." expressed with varying degrees of politeness. The sensible response by engineers is to shrug, do what they're told, and start looking for an internal transfer before the SHTF.

I mean, of course he isn't going to resign. There's no personal gain in that; no other company sure isn't stupid enough to pay him $100M/year. He should, however, probably be fired by the board.

His primary selling point as a CEO is, as far as I can tell, the ability to avoid rocking the boat and just keep the money printer running and the stock price going up. It's not the stuff you'd normally expect from a CEO, like inspiring the employees, executing bold strategic moves (that turn out work), and it's not building or maintaining a healthy corporate culture that makes great products.

But clearly he actually can't do even that one thing, and has repeatedly steered Google into icebergs. The latest one costing the shareholders $100 billion.

This +100. Sundar has been a competent "steward" but clearly he isn't the visionary the company needs nor shareholders expect.

Just look at Google's recent failures or inability to thwart competitors, despite its massive scale and resources:

- YouTube Short: took too long (4+ years) to launch against TikTok

- Meet: lacked feature parity to Zoom despite the perfect market condition

- Stadia: telegraphed its intention (Project Stream) 5 years early and lacked conviction

- ChatGPT: caught flat-footed and playing catch-up for 2+ years now

It's surprising that he hasn't been fired by the board already.

The only way Waymo is leading the driverless car race is if the future of all driverless cars is geo-fenced.

Clearly, that is not how it will work

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