The board must fire Pichai. He has turned the most innovative company in the world into an ad business while ignoring its own inventions, which could have saved it.
As the recent anti-trust lawsuits reveal, everything else Google has done since has been to leverage that dominance into other advertising businesses; specifically display ads and now video ads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google
1998 is not outside "living memory"
I don't think that's fair unless you can find something that says that was their intent (sibling posts in this thread claim there's actually evidence to the contrary). I don't see the problem with "startup trying to figure out a sustainable business" and leaving it like that. It's not like that's something unprecedented or even unusual.
Now, to which extent they REALLY wanted to do this, and REALLY impacted the day to day decision, I don't know. Neither if said pitch deck had other options.
I also remember the IPO. Didn’t have any money at the time, but still wish I had invested… or gotten my parents to invest.
I was around 20 years ago when all these companies were losing money. Twitter was a prime example of taking years to land on a business model. They all landed on ads. Consumers wouldn’t fund the company via subscription to cover the obscene engineering and operating costs. They would probably need to lean up the way X did and Google is starting to do anyways.
but this started on the last year of Schmidt. when he gave up to Icahn and other zombies on the board.
not on mine, they won't.
But the shareholders and board don't want to innovate. They don't want to maintain innovation. They really ONLY WANT TO EXTRACT returns.
It is paradoxical. The theory of capitalism says that shareholders will want to maintain their golden goose right? Take care of their assets and property right?
But turns out, public shareholders, large funds, and PE investors only want to maximize their return by sucking the life out of a profitable innovative business. Once they have sucked out enough, they move on to the next profitable venture to suck the life out of.
This is the shape of today's capitalism. It is merely resource extraction.
Google is an extremely well-built machine - built with thousands of the best engineers the world has ever seen, with the best products the world has ever seen. To shareholders, this is a giant blob of tasty juice to suck out of.
After years of sucking the life out of it, now that there is an alternative to suck from - treasuries - they are asking Google execs to suck more, faster, or else they'll move on to suck the tax payers - treasuries.
The shareholders and board absolutely want Pichai. They want a CEO who can cut benefits for shareholder returns.
See also: almost every private equity acquisition we've seen in the last ten or twenty years.
Google's culture wasn't a problem – and maybe a good thing! – when you had a gigantic money printer working in the background, paying for everything. But it was there, ready to be a problem once times got tough.
Should never have led on LLM and not let OpenAI get so big
in a sense, google solved this by trashing it's own reputation, so it's not actually a "net" problem that it spews garbage on the result page now.
"But that will make the product objectively worse."
"But it's what customers want."
"Is it?"
"It's what clueless investors want the customer to want."
"Fair enough."
see, that's just untrue. you could see the company turning all sorts of knobs to increase revenue over the last ten years - cutting down on perks, cutting down on food quality, increasing ad density, making promo harder, etc, etc - this was all happening and it was all happening at a high enough rate to let Ruth announce records almost every quarter. it was a finely oiled machine. and people grumbled, but quietly - it was fine!
doing mass layoffs absolutely changed the game - it showed that Pichai would be pushed around by random "researchers" publishing revenue guesses, it showed that the company would provide dire consequences for employees who were on projects that didn't pan out or were bad ideas, etc. the cost for all that is now everyone is correctly more nervous and pissed off!
> I can't think of another company where a greater share of its employees actively despised the industry that paid for them all to be there.
this is absolutely true, but as you say, it was fine - people still ran the ads machine and processed the firehose of cash, and a thousand other machines besides.
I disagree that it was "fine" because the people who were respected and held up as prime examples of Googlers – for decades – almost always had nothing to do with the ads business. This sends a signal to the rest that the ads business doesn't really matter, it's not the important work, it's akin to the janitorial work that has to happen so the rest of us can work here. If you do that long enough you end up with people optimizing towards things that aren't aligned with the needs of the business. It was on autopilot, relatively, compared to other areas.
I would also add all of the companies that were bought by Google in hopes they would ease some of the laser focus on their search/ad business and never panned out and then were subsequently killed by them.
I think this one of the overlooked issues they've had. When they've repeatedly tried to venture into other areas by buying smaller companies in hopes they could grow their revenue and create another revenue stream, the failure rate of those companies is pretty staggering.
All three of these have not made it easy for them to try and re-brand themselves as anything but a search/ad company.
Or are you saying that ads are the golden goose?