Sundar misses the mark on these things. AI is a good example. Google invented the transformer architecture, but simply published it for its competitors to use. It took a code red in 2023 to finally push Google to develop products based on this.
Cloud. Years late to the game. All it would have taken is a letter similar to the famous Bezos memo to eventually get all of Google's world-class scaled infra pointing externally and generating revenue. Instead, Google Cloud started late, and couldn't reuse much of the internal infrastructure.
Stadia, another example. That architecture is probably the future. It's not clear how gamers in developing countries are going to afford thousands of dollars in hardware that sits idle 90% of the time.
That's how innovation works in this industry. If companies didn't allow researchers to publish their work it would set us back decades. Researchers building on each other's work is how this industry was built.
> It took a code red in 2023 to finally push Google to develop products based on this.
So Google executed. Ability to execute is one of the things that makes a good CEO. Other CEOs have additional qualities such as vision, and getting others to believe in the vision. But not every CEO needs to be a Steve Jobs!
Plenty of innovations are coming out of Google, just look at Nano Banana Pro for example.
Lmao I love this. "Hey, engineers. Make something like that but better here's money, but only a fraction of what I'll make off it!"
Yeah, being a CEO is reeeally hard. Even when they fail they still walk out with >10m.
- Google will be #1 because of sher data amount
- Anthropic will be #2 because of the best product (whatever this may mean in the future)
- Microsoft will be #3, because of enough cash to follow
2. Commercial Datacenters (theyre ahead at least)
3. Chip production (Google is manufactoring proprietary chips)
4. Consumer OS (Chrome, Andriod)
5. Consumer Hardware (Pixel)
Basically google has access to data that OpenAI will never have access to, can lower costs below what OpenAI can, and is already a leader in all the places OpenAI will need massive capex to catch up.
So it matters less than one would think. Also, ChatGPT can do 'internet search' as a tool already, so it already has access to say Google maps POI database of SMBs.
And ChatGPT also gets a lot of proprietary data of its own as well. People use it as a Google replacement.
If this is your only criteria I think you have a misunderstanding of what proprietary data is and ways companies can mitigate the situation in the inference stage.
And non-western and non-Mandarin language support (the only other competitors are Indian, Emirati, and Saudi sovereign models).
If that's going to decide who wins, Zuckerberg will be the winner. He's been hiring researchers for $100 Million a piece. We'll see soon.
Why do you say this? I’m not familiar with him, and really haven’t paid much attention to Google’s strategy beyond cultural awareness, but I think Google has done well with staying competitive in AI, is dominating the self driving battle with Waymo, and has mostly kept its good brand intact (no small feat when you are so big). Are there some big mis-steps I don’t know about?
These are peoples' lives. People almost certainly quit decent jobs because there was a prestige factor in working for Google, potentially moved to the overpriced world of California, just to be fired less than a year later because apparently Pichai thought that interest rates would never increase and there would be free money for forever. These people have families, and they almost certainly thought that moving to Google would be a "stable" position, because it's one of the biggest SV companies.
I don't know if he's good for the stock price, that's tougher to gauge, but I do think he's a short-sighted jerk.
I guess it's supposed to convey that it's not the laid-off folks' fault, and that it was "his decision", but as you said: "taking full responsibility" without any real impact to his life? I may as well take full responsibility for the layoffs. It'd mean just as much.
No one is getting "punished" - there was no promise of ten years of employment from Google. Like when an employee leaves, you wouldn't say they're "punishing" the employer.
It probably was the right decision to lay everyone off. What was not the right decision, and this should have been obvious, was hiring 10+k more employees than you actually need because you assume that this free money will last forever. He was almost certainly aware and signed off on this mass hiring. Other companies didn't make this mistake; Tim Cook didn't take a bonus that year to avoid mass layoffs.
> he certainly lost a lot of goodwill with his workforce and I'm sure the internal politics were tricky for anyone involved.
He probably did, because he's a bad CEO. He was right to lose goodwill.
> No one is getting "punished" - there was no promise of ten years of employment from Google.
No, there isn't a legal promise or anything, but people go to these BigCos primarily for stability. If you want an exciting job with lots of interesting new things, it's much easier to find that in a startup, but startups can be frustrating because they're inherently unstable. This is partly why startups tend to be made up of very young people; it's much easier to deal with volatility if you don't have a family.
You're obviously not "entitled" to a job, but the people who run Google aren't complete idiots; they know people are joining BigCo because they think it's going to be relatively stable. They depended on that in order to do all this overhiring.
And after all this, people will think twice whether BigCo is stable. Just as well! If you want stability, look into small family-run companies.
I'm not trying to "absolve" Google, nor do I think they're guilty. They used their reputation to hire people. It turns out that needs to be updated. Perhaps in the future they will do things to improve their reputation again? Who knows...
If you're agreeing that they misled people by using their reputation in a way that's dishonest, how are they "not guilty"?
To give a somewhat contorted example: If people believe you give 1 Bitcoin to anyone who can recite the whole Beowulf, they will perhaps spend a lot of time learning Beowulf, forgoing other things. Then they find out you in fact have not promised them that and that you have no such obligation. I don't think you've misled them! Do they have a right to be angry with you? Or should they have checked with you what the precise conditions were before upending their life?
Google knew that people would join based on a perception of stability. Did they hire 10,000 people knowing that they would fire them six months later? If so, they are jerks. If not, then they are so categorically idiotic as to think that they will just have free money for forever and interest rates would never ever go up. In either situation they are bad.
The question is who’s a competitor now, right? It’s not “Who will be a competitor in n years”
Also, whether it’s ChatGPT or something else, five years is really not that long. Time will tell, but does it really seem like decreasing quality in the name of profits is such a good long-term strategy?
Previously, the two concerns were "firewalled" so as to prevent the money-generating side of the company from eroding the user experience.
This is a theme that's been at the core of every Titan of Industry's decline. That is: chasing of short-term results with disregard for the long term consequences. Alphabet is just so big and dominate in search that it will likely take quite a long time for the negative effects to appear. And they have other large businesses that haven't been as aggressively enshitified (Youtube, GCP).
See Intel, Boeing, GE etc.
Just because they're still making money doesn't mean the company hasn't already been damaged beyond repair. But in this case by the time it's clear the damage is fatal, those at the helm have jumped ship with piles of cash.
Gemini keeping pace with Claude and ChatGPT is clearly some kind of management victory, because Zuckerberg and Musk don't seem to be able to do it despite having limitless cash to spend.
Sundar's enshittification has also juiced short term share prices at the cost of long term health. It might turn out to be a decent decision for search because it's in the midst of being disrupted, but that's a happy accident for Sundar, not 4d chess (and you can argue the enshittification hastened the disruption).
Like they removed the youtube dislike button
what else?
Everything seems to be getting better. Tying incentives to Waymo is almost unfair because Waymo is amazing and just keeps getting better.
Isn't it a CEO's job to make sure the company's position is strong among other responsibilities?
I did not know this about Pichai and if true, it makes me feel rather better about his leadership.
Also note that 7 years later, when ChatGPT came out, built on top of Google Brain research (transformers), Google was caught flat-footed.
Even supposing that Pichai really had the right vision a decade ago, he completely failed in leading its execution until a serious threat to the company's core business model materialized.
I was shocked they kept him around. He’s very much just a money manager like Tim Cook or Steve Ballmer.
Those types are great in the short term but risk the entire company’s future long term
That's about Google, though. The picture about Sundar specifically is harder to evaluate. The pessimistic take is that Google had that position already and Sundar failed to proactively lead through a fundamental product shift, forcing the company onto the defensive for some time. The optimistic take is that Sundar, having occupied the top spot since 2015, prioritized investments in the company's overall technology development, then successfully executed a rapid product pivot when the market changed, securing a dominant position in both research and product that nobody else can compete with long-term.