7 ms·

I see a few comments praising Sundar. As someone who doesn’t follow closely, but feels that Google has deteriorated dramatically under his watch, does someone m

I see a few comments praising Sundar. As someone who doesn’t follow closely, but feels that Google has deteriorated dramatically under his watch, does someone mind explaining the reasoning for said praise?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Ididntdothis 7y ago
Google has matured into a regular big corporation. By that standard they are doing well with revenues and earnings growing.
lacker 7y ago
Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. That's the simplest reason. Personally I think a lot of their products have gotten better recently, like the experience of using voice-controlled Google Maps in my car, and Google Cloud is superior to AWS in many ways, but the company really offers so many different product lines that it's hard for personal experience to be a great representation.
- nemothekid 7y ago
  > Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. It’s hard for me to say that this is because of Sundar and not just because the whole market has grown size and google already had a massive moat to capture it. Apple, MS, Facebook, Amazon all have grown massively in the past 5 years. However Google seems to continue to be a one trick pony - GCP lags behind the competition despite the fact that Google invented cloud computing. Even Apple is weaning off its iPhone revenue with its fast growing services division.
  - GauntletWizard 7y ago
    I see this meme all the time. What does GCP lag on? What is it missing? I see a proliferation of AWS services, yes, but many seem to be replicating things that GCP has had since the start, in multiple different formats without clear direction. Bigquery covers most of the use cases of Redshift, Kineseis, Athena, EMR, and others. It is at once decoupled from and well integrated with their object storage, allowing reads and writes with clear translation when necessary. I find myself reaching for Bigquery like semantics all the time and having to cobble two or more AWS tools to get similar. I see the same pattern repeated constantly - If I click "ECS" in the Amazon Console, it wants to sell me ECS, ECR, Fargate, and EKS - All of which overlap in non-obvious ways. Disclaimer: I'm Ex-google, and was a poweruser of dremel
    - hosh 7y ago
      I used GCP before and liked it better than AWS. The current startup I work for has a prior business relationship with AWS, and every month, it gets harder to move off to GCP. AWS gave a generous credit to the type of startup we have, and with the relationship-building from the solutions architect and account manager, this probably won't go away. There are a lot of technical refinements in GCP that makes life a lot easier than AWS, but nothing strategically compelling enough for the cost (in cash, developer time, and burning relationships) to jump ship. So I make-do with the not-as-great technology. They are pain-points but not deal-breakers. I think if our startup were doing AI/ML, or even heavy data processing as our core technology, there's probably enough compelling reasons to invest in a move to GCP. But it isn't. If I were greenfielding a new launch at a new startup, I'd push for GCP. I have never worked for Google or Amazon.
      - m0zg 7y ago
        I've seen this several times by now. It's pretty ridiculous. One of my clients was an AI startup. They got $100K in AWS credit. So yeah, of course they aren't going to move off AWS until that credit runs out, even though GCP's offering for GPU is much better: for one thing on GCP you can vary the number of cores allocated to a machine with a GPU (or several). Inexplicably on AWS you can't do that. One GPU - you get 8 cores. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. As a result, you can't use that V100 fully if you do any significant data augmentation - CPU is often a bottleneck. IO and networking are faster on GCP as well. And if your GPU is not "free", you can cut costs by running on preemptible instances (few of their training runs are longer than 8 hours). On top of that if scale is needed (which it was), you can wrap it all into k8s, too. Disclosure: ex-googler (left 4 years ago), own no GOOG, use GCP to run my own business. Clients use whatever they want.
        Spooky23 7y ago
        Totally agreed. Many places don’t even run their AWS environments particularly well, but talk themselves into a most of their own making. AWS is just another IT vendor. The weird dependency, reminiscent of 1980s IBM thinking, is bad for any company, at some point you become more of a vassal than a customer.
- whateveracct 7y ago
  Attributing that growth to a single CEO is a little silly as a default.
- enitihas 7y ago
  But hadn't it grown more in the preceding 5 years than in the 4 years headed by Sundar. Looking at the share price, it seems it has roughly doubled every 5 years since 2005.
- goatinaboat 7y ago
  Correlation is not causation.
- ohazi 7y ago
  > Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. Microsoft grew similarly under Ballmer, despite losing a lot of their strategic advantages and missing the boat in a handful of important ways.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    I can name only one: mobile. OTOH Ballmer spearheaded Azure and Office/Exchange as a service, both of which are the major reasons why MS is a trillion-dollar company on an upswing today. No amount of Satya would save it, if Ballmer didn't beat the internal Microsoft "deep state" into submission on Azure and SaaS first. And a serious beatdown was required before Office and Windows apparatchiks received the message.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Ballmer tried to save Microsoft by killing the Internet, creating the opening for Google to become the industry leader
      - m0zg 7y ago
        I think you're confusing him with Gates. Although Ballmer did refuse to buy Google when he could. Would have been a drop in the bucket. I forgot, BTW, he also spun up the ad and search businesses: the only reason there's any alternative to Google at all.
        ddalex 7y ago
        Arguably, if he would've bought Google, we wouldn't have the internet as we have it today: people would've payed for search, as for the OS and Office suite: $10 per 1000 queries per month. Hmmm, maybe that've been for the better.
        m0zg 7y ago
        There'd be a heck of a lot fewer ads for sure.
- mark_l_watson 7y ago
  Doubling their market share is big. I have also been appreciating their products lately: Play Books and Movies, the Google iOS app that does a good job of showing my article that interests me, and until I retired (just writing now) I really always preferred Google Cloud over AWS. Even with potential privacy issues, YouTube, GMail, and Calendar are also good. In the past have been I have been a vocal supporter of FSF (still am, but...) but I look at the world situation now with people in China quickly losing freedoms but excelling in AI and other tech, here in the USA corporate fascism is unstoppable. With the political problems around the globe getting crazier and with chaotic climate change, I think now that people in different countries should do two things: embrace their own culture and values, and to do what they can to make their countries competitive in AI and other tech, especially tech that will help with climate change and generally increase productivity. Those on top will get bigger and bigger pieces of the pie, so we better grow the pie rapidly so regular peoples’ share is sufficient for a good life.
whoisjuan 7y ago
Honestly, I'm with you on this one. Sundar seems like a good maintainer of the status quo and that's probably wise since the business keeps growing (growing revenue, growing market cap and growing free cash flow), but Google's evolution on cloud infrastructure/services and hardware are honestly kind of lame. I mentioned those two because they seem to be their big bets now. When compared to Satya who is thriving with Microsoft, Sundar looks mediocre at best. I don't mean that in a bad way. Perhaps Google doesn't need to have those tectonic changes to produce value. In that case, Sundar's reserved and low-key profile makes more sense, but don't expect a high profile, exuberant and innovation-driven leadership. I think it's clear he is not that type of leader.
- MikeTheGreat 7y ago
  After having read [that Quiet book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet:_The_Power_of_Introverts_in_a_World_That_Can't_Stop_Talking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet:_The_Power_of_Introverts...) I think it's fascinating that "high profile, exuberant" are conflated with "innovation-driven leadership". To be clear - I'm not criticizing this particular post or person (whoisjuan, anyways? :) ), but I think it's worth noting these little hints that outgoing and extroverted are thought to be synonymous with "good leadership" (in the US, at least)
  - microtherion 7y ago
    I think Tim Cook might be subject to extra criticism for similar reasons.
  - planetzero 7y ago
    "I think it's worth noting these little hints that outgoing and extroverted are thought to be synonymous with "good leadership" (in the US, at least)" I don't think it's synonymous, but it's required. To be a good leader, you need to enjoy being around and understanding people. Most introverted people don't really enjoy either. I've had many introverted managers and they all were horrible: lack of communication which went hand-in-hand with passive aggressive behavior.
cvhashim 7y ago
They've maintained a strong market performance
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jpm_sd 7y ago
He's Ballmer-ing steadily forward, that's all that is really needed at this point.
- dwnvoted2hell 7y ago
  That's the real tragedy - nothing he can do will fail google at this point. He could do a live stream of oral sex on Youtube, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference. He's already lied through his teeth to Congress.
- tpmx 7y ago
  Perhaps Tim Cook-ing forward is a more modern/relevant way of describing the phenomenon? (Pichai and Cook are both competent empire caretakers. Innovation is suffering though...) Ballmer wasn't competent.
  - ben_jones 7y ago
    Cook-ing forward is much more appetizing.
tootie 7y ago
They've done very well from a product perspective as well as dollars and cents. And I think he hasn't absorbed much blame for the culture problems. At least not yet.
bogwog 7y ago
He's a good businessman, but that "deterioration" that you (and me and many many others) see is because he's not driven by the same morals and beliefs that Larry and Sergey had when they were running the company. The "old Google" everyone loved was the pre-Sundar Google. I can't really blame Larry and Sergey for wanting to do something else, and leaving the company in the hands of someone that they know will maximize profits. But that doesn't change the fact that modern Google does a lot of scummy and downright evil stuff today that likely wouldn't have happened during the "old Google" days.
- iainmerrick 7y ago
  The "old Google" everyone loved was the pre-Sundar Google. I’d say it was the pre-Google+ Google. That change happened under Larry Page.
nostrademons 7y ago
He's a Type-2 CEO [1], a Ballmer, Sculley, or Cook figure. These types of personalities are generally incapable of innovating, but they're very good at maximizing the growth, efficiency, and profit potential of existing product lines. Wall Street loves them because they lead to higher EPS; the general public generally considers them mediocre because they don't lead to awesome new toys to play with. Personally I thought Sundar was a very good manager (much better than Larry, who honestly sucked as a CEO) but a poor innovator. As a HN commenter you're probably looking for an innovator. The average user (who just wants Google to stay up) and the average investor (who just want to make more money) are quite happy having a good manager who can optimize operations, though. [1] https://a16z.com/2010/12/16/ones-and-twos/ https://a16z.com/2010/12/16/ones-and-twos/
president 7y ago
It seems most people are probably praising him for bringing up the Google stock price, whereas people who actually care about products/culture/technology realize he hasn't actually contributed anything worthwhile. Yet another classic case of a CEO riding out momentum set forth by predecessors and maximizing value to fiduciaries while selling out the user base.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Ididntdothis 7y ago

Google has matured into a regular big corporation. By that standard they are doing well with revenues and earnings growing.

lacker 7y ago

Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. That's the simplest reason. Personally I think a lot of their products have gotten better recently, like the experience of using voice-controlled Google Maps in my car, and Google Cloud is superior to AWS in many ways, but the company really offers so many different product lines that it's hard for personal experience to be a great representation.

nemothekid 7y ago
> Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. It’s hard for me to say that this is because of Sundar and not just because the whole market has grown size and google already had a massive moat to capture it. Apple, MS, Facebook, Amazon all have grown massively in the past 5 years. However Google seems to continue to be a one trick pony - GCP lags behind the competition despite the fact that Google invented cloud computing. Even Apple is weaning off its iPhone revenue with its fast growing services division.
- GauntletWizard 7y ago
  I see this meme all the time. What does GCP lag on? What is it missing? I see a proliferation of AWS services, yes, but many seem to be replicating things that GCP has had since the start, in multiple different formats without clear direction. Bigquery covers most of the use cases of Redshift, Kineseis, Athena, EMR, and others. It is at once decoupled from and well integrated with their object storage, allowing reads and writes with clear translation when necessary. I find myself reaching for Bigquery like semantics all the time and having to cobble two or more AWS tools to get similar. I see the same pattern repeated constantly - If I click "ECS" in the Amazon Console, it wants to sell me ECS, ECR, Fargate, and EKS - All of which overlap in non-obvious ways. Disclaimer: I'm Ex-google, and was a poweruser of dremel
  - hosh 7y ago
    I used GCP before and liked it better than AWS. The current startup I work for has a prior business relationship with AWS, and every month, it gets harder to move off to GCP. AWS gave a generous credit to the type of startup we have, and with the relationship-building from the solutions architect and account manager, this probably won't go away. There are a lot of technical refinements in GCP that makes life a lot easier than AWS, but nothing strategically compelling enough for the cost (in cash, developer time, and burning relationships) to jump ship. So I make-do with the not-as-great technology. They are pain-points but not deal-breakers. I think if our startup were doing AI/ML, or even heavy data processing as our core technology, there's probably enough compelling reasons to invest in a move to GCP. But it isn't. If I were greenfielding a new launch at a new startup, I'd push for GCP. I have never worked for Google or Amazon.
    - m0zg 7y ago
      I've seen this several times by now. It's pretty ridiculous. One of my clients was an AI startup. They got $100K in AWS credit. So yeah, of course they aren't going to move off AWS until that credit runs out, even though GCP's offering for GPU is much better: for one thing on GCP you can vary the number of cores allocated to a machine with a GPU (or several). Inexplicably on AWS you can't do that. One GPU - you get 8 cores. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. As a result, you can't use that V100 fully if you do any significant data augmentation - CPU is often a bottleneck. IO and networking are faster on GCP as well. And if your GPU is not "free", you can cut costs by running on preemptible instances (few of their training runs are longer than 8 hours). On top of that if scale is needed (which it was), you can wrap it all into k8s, too. Disclosure: ex-googler (left 4 years ago), own no GOOG, use GCP to run my own business. Clients use whatever they want.
      - Spooky23 7y ago
        Totally agreed. Many places don’t even run their AWS environments particularly well, but talk themselves into a most of their own making. AWS is just another IT vendor. The weird dependency, reminiscent of 1980s IBM thinking, is bad for any company, at some point you become more of a vassal than a customer.
whateveracct 7y ago
Attributing that growth to a single CEO is a little silly as a default.
enitihas 7y ago
But hadn't it grown more in the preceding 5 years than in the 4 years headed by Sundar. Looking at the share price, it seems it has roughly doubled every 5 years since 2005.
goatinaboat 7y ago
Correlation is not causation.
ohazi 7y ago
> Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. Microsoft grew similarly under Ballmer, despite losing a lot of their strategic advantages and missing the boat in a handful of important ways.
- m0zg 7y ago
  I can name only one: mobile. OTOH Ballmer spearheaded Azure and Office/Exchange as a service, both of which are the major reasons why MS is a trillion-dollar company on an upswing today. No amount of Satya would save it, if Ballmer didn't beat the internal Microsoft "deep state" into submission on Azure and SaaS first. And a serious beatdown was required before Office and Windows apparatchiks received the message.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Ballmer tried to save Microsoft by killing the Internet, creating the opening for Google to become the industry leader
    - m0zg 7y ago
      I think you're confusing him with Gates. Although Ballmer did refuse to buy Google when he could. Would have been a drop in the bucket. I forgot, BTW, he also spun up the ad and search businesses: the only reason there's any alternative to Google at all.
      - ddalex 7y ago
        Arguably, if he would've bought Google, we wouldn't have the internet as we have it today: people would've payed for search, as for the OS and Office suite: $10 per 1000 queries per month. Hmmm, maybe that've been for the better.
        m0zg 7y ago
        There'd be a heck of a lot fewer ads for sure.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
Doubling their market share is big. I have also been appreciating their products lately: Play Books and Movies, the Google iOS app that does a good job of showing my article that interests me, and until I retired (just writing now) I really always preferred Google Cloud over AWS. Even with potential privacy issues, YouTube, GMail, and Calendar are also good. In the past have been I have been a vocal supporter of FSF (still am, but...) but I look at the world situation now with people in China quickly losing freedoms but excelling in AI and other tech, here in the USA corporate fascism is unstoppable. With the political problems around the globe getting crazier and with chaotic climate change, I think now that people in different countries should do two things: embrace their own culture and values, and to do what they can to make their countries competitive in AI and other tech, especially tech that will help with climate change and generally increase productivity. Those on top will get bigger and bigger pieces of the pie, so we better grow the pie rapidly so regular peoples’ share is sufficient for a good life.

whoisjuan 7y ago

Honestly, I'm with you on this one. Sundar seems like a good maintainer of the status quo and that's probably wise since the business keeps growing (growing revenue, growing market cap and growing free cash flow), but Google's evolution on cloud infrastructure/services and hardware are honestly kind of lame. I mentioned those two because they seem to be their big bets now. When compared to Satya who is thriving with Microsoft, Sundar looks mediocre at best. I don't mean that in a bad way. Perhaps Google doesn't need to have those tectonic changes to produce value. In that case, Sundar's reserved and low-key profile makes more sense, but don't expect a high profile, exuberant and innovation-driven leadership. I think it's clear he is not that type of leader.

MikeTheGreat 7y ago
After having read [that Quiet book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet:_The_Power_of_Introverts_in_a_World_That_Can't_Stop_Talking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet:_The_Power_of_Introverts...) I think it's fascinating that "high profile, exuberant" are conflated with "innovation-driven leadership". To be clear - I'm not criticizing this particular post or person (whoisjuan, anyways? :) ), but I think it's worth noting these little hints that outgoing and extroverted are thought to be synonymous with "good leadership" (in the US, at least)
- microtherion 7y ago
  I think Tim Cook might be subject to extra criticism for similar reasons.
- planetzero 7y ago
  "I think it's worth noting these little hints that outgoing and extroverted are thought to be synonymous with "good leadership" (in the US, at least)" I don't think it's synonymous, but it's required. To be a good leader, you need to enjoy being around and understanding people. Most introverted people don't really enjoy either. I've had many introverted managers and they all were horrible: lack of communication which went hand-in-hand with passive aggressive behavior.

cvhashim 7y ago

They've maintained a strong market performance

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jpm_sd 7y ago

He's Ballmer-ing steadily forward, that's all that is really needed at this point.

dwnvoted2hell 7y ago
That's the real tragedy - nothing he can do will fail google at this point. He could do a live stream of oral sex on Youtube, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference. He's already lied through his teeth to Congress.
tpmx 7y ago
Perhaps Tim Cook-ing forward is a more modern/relevant way of describing the phenomenon? (Pichai and Cook are both competent empire caretakers. Innovation is suffering though...) Ballmer wasn't competent.
- ben_jones 7y ago
  Cook-ing forward is much more appetizing.

tootie 7y ago

They've done very well from a product perspective as well as dollars and cents. And I think he hasn't absorbed much blame for the culture problems. At least not yet.

bogwog 7y ago

He's a good businessman, but that "deterioration" that you (and me and many many others) see is because he's not driven by the same morals and beliefs that Larry and Sergey had when they were running the company. The "old Google" everyone loved was the pre-Sundar Google. I can't really blame Larry and Sergey for wanting to do something else, and leaving the company in the hands of someone that they know will maximize profits. But that doesn't change the fact that modern Google does a lot of scummy and downright evil stuff today that likely wouldn't have happened during the "old Google" days.

iainmerrick 7y ago
The "old Google" everyone loved was the pre-Sundar Google. I’d say it was the pre-Google+ Google. That change happened under Larry Page.

nostrademons 7y ago

He's a Type-2 CEO [1], a Ballmer, Sculley, or Cook figure. These types of personalities are generally incapable of innovating, but they're very good at maximizing the growth, efficiency, and profit potential of existing product lines. Wall Street loves them because they lead to higher EPS; the general public generally considers them mediocre because they don't lead to awesome new toys to play with. Personally I thought Sundar was a very good manager (much better than Larry, who honestly sucked as a CEO) but a poor innovator. As a HN commenter you're probably looking for an innovator. The average user (who just wants Google to stay up) and the average investor (who just want to make more money) are quite happy having a good manager who can optimize operations, though. [1] https://a16z.com/2010/12/16/ones-and-twos/ https://a16z.com/2010/12/16/ones-and-twos/

president 7y ago

It seems most people are probably praising him for bringing up the Google stock price, whereas people who actually care about products/culture/technology realize he hasn't actually contributed anything worthwhile. Yet another classic case of a CEO riding out momentum set forth by predecessors and maximizing value to fiduciaries while selling out the user base.