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Comment by dbreunig | Hacker News Reader

Pichai inherited one of the most difficult challenges: he had to figure out how to grow revenue right as search revenue was plateauing and money was becoming expensive, all against the headwinds of Google's culture. Your comment is a good example of the headwind: 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.

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.

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Google were too risk averse with AI.

Should never have led on LLM and not let OpenAI get so big

google was leading on LLM, Search just (correctly) didn't want to tarnish their good name with the disaster that putting matrix-multiplied text generation on it would case.

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.

"We need to integrate generative AI into our search results."

"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."

I don't think that's quite correct. I have my screenshot from years back when google was "correcting" your query so I asked google what year Marilyn Munroe shot JFK and it said 1962. I'm reasonably sure this is before the transformers paper.

The one time they _should_ have created a new chat app.

> Pichai inherited one of the most difficult challenges: he had to figure out how to grow revenue right as search revenue was plateauing and money was becoming expensive

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.

Your first quote leaves off the important bit: against the headwinds of Google culture. I agree, the first half of the sentence is a common scenario among CEOs, it's the 2nd bit that makes it especially challenging.

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.

>> Your first quote leaves off the important bit: against the headwinds of Google culture.

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.

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