8 ms·

I've no inside knowledge on Google, so can't comment on the rationale for selecting those being let go. From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasing

I've no inside knowledge on Google, so can't comment on the rationale for selecting those being let go. From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed mobile. Gates still smarts about the latter. Pichai looks like Google's Ballmer. He inherited a cash cow - search was already dominant and both YouTube and Android had been in the stable for ~10 years when he took over. Despite the investment in ML/AI (Google Brain, DeepMind) and notable advances that have come from there (e.g. the Transformer architecture), Google has stagnated with Pichai at the helm. The profit drop is indicative of that. There's only so long you can keep milking the same cow. Of course, it's rarely those at the top of the tree that go first. Microsoft was staring over the precipice of existence before they finally got rid of Ballmer. OpenAI has grabbed the AI/ML limielight despite much of the formative work coming from Google. The recent "code red" looks a lot like a CEO who's been asleep at the wheel - and someone finally woke him up. I don't know what's ahead for Google, but I'll wager it'll need a change at the top.

darkerside 4y ago
This doesn't quite line up for me. Ballmer, for his lack of technical foresight, managed an incredibly profitable business. People act like anybody could have just stepped in to milk Windows and Office for all they were worth, but the focus and execution are easy to scoff at in hindsight. If MS had focused on mobile, who's to say they would have succeeded? And perhaps in the process of losing, also ceded dominance to an upstart in the office software space. Pichai may not have capitalized effectively on the impressive AI investments Google has made, but he has steered innovation in newer directions like AI and cloud. Technical victories, but questionable business decisions. I think one possible moral here is, sometimes the best opportunity is the one you don't take.
- aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  Ballmer succeeded in spite of tripping over his own feet repeatedly, not because of it. https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-stack-ranking-internal-structure https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
- doktorhladnjak 4y ago
  I worked at Microsoft during the Ballmer era. Profits and revenue continued to increase under his watch. They did invest in mobile from fairly early. Microsoft was selling smart phones (through third party manufacturers) in the early 2000s. They just executed very poorly on mobile by building the wrong thing for the wrong customers. By the time leadership figured this out and started to pour money into Windows Phone, they were too late to catch up. App stores and app platforms became critical to the success on any mobile platform. Microsoft didn’t sufficiently cultivate the Windows CE based apps enough. Then they ditched that app platform for a new one in Windows Phone 7, losing what little they had. Companies that had built apps for iPhone and Android had no incentive doing so on Windows at that point. Ballmer at least recognized the value of Azure, Office in the cloud and similar efforts. All the seeds of Satya’s success were planted during Ballmer’s reign. There was just so much fumbling.
  - radlad 4y ago
    > Then they ditched that app platform for a new one in Windows Phone 7, losing what little they had. Companies that had built apps for iPhone and Android had no incentive doing so on Windows at that point. I remember this basically as around the time that Microsoft bought Nokia and produced some really nice looking phones that people were excited about... they had also just reinvented their app platform and nothing could run on them.
    - doktorhladnjak 4y ago
      The new app platform happened maybe a couple years before the Nokia acquisition. I don’t remember the whole timeline but don’t forget Steven Elop (who had been the business head of Office) left Microsoft to become the Nokia CEO, had the company dump their own mobile platform for Windows Phone, then when that failed closed to deal for Microsoft to buy their cratered mobile business. In the interim, Microsoft built quite a few phones mostly with Samsung, HTC, and Huawei, but also oddball partners like Dell.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    Culturally my impression is Microsoft was never happy about digital distribution or really grokked it: even today, things like the System File Checker will ask for original installation media rather then just downloading whatever they need from Microsoft when a problem is found. Like it has always broadly felt like they were very late to the party on comprehending where software was headed (caught up pretty well with O365, but that seems like leveraging then entrenched nature of Office successfully).
bushbaba 4y ago
Pichai never fully supported google cloud either. The fact google cloud exists is thanks to Amit Singh’s leadership. Palo Alto networks is lucky to have such a visionary CBO at their helm.
- varelse 4y ago
  Too bad about all the sexual harassment, but he was good people.
  - bushbaba 4y ago
    Wrong Amit. You are thinking about the google search Amit. That’s a different google exec.
    - varelse 4y ago
      [dead]
- mike_d 4y ago
  Google should have never been in the cloud business to start with. It is a race to the bottom, and revenue depends on your ability to scale up staff - a model Google doesn't have in any of it's other businesses.
  - RhodesianHunter 4y ago
    You should tell AWS about that race to the bottom while they continue to produce a majority of Amazon's profit.
    - mike_d 4y ago
      Advertising is way more profitable than AWS. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasongoldberg/2022/02/04/amazon-reveals-its-most-profitable-business/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasongoldberg/2022/02/04/amazon...
adra 4y ago
Microsoft didn't miss mobile, they supported many or all verticals of mobile probably 10 years before it ever really took off. They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat by miss-judging the market or self defeating strategies to protect their other products/partners. I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather a maturity of companies that no longer have founder CEOs and how that changes the nature of people's interactions from top to bottom.
- fidgewidge 4y ago
  Did they misjudge the market? Windows CE was quite popular in the smartphone segment before iOS and Android steamrollered every existing incumbent. The idea that having a computer in your pocket was important, that was classic 90s era Gatesism and they were right on target. Microsoft lost (not missed) mobile because the Windows team had been losing the ability to execute competently. iOS was essentially macOS for mobile, and Windows wasn't competitive with macOS on the desktop and still isn't today so it wasn't a big surprise that they couldn't pull off great results on mobile either. For as long as the mobile playing field didn't have the most competent companies doing software they could be the leader but once Apple/Google showed up the piles of tech debt and general apathy got the better of them.
  - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
    Android is just now catching up with where Windows Mobile was years ago. Execution wasn't the problem. The problem remains that Gmail and YouTube are monopolies and Google aggressively interfered with them working on WinMo because it was Android's only real competitor (an OS licensed to phone OEMs). Microsoft obviously has it's own monopolies but it failed to leverage them on mobile. Shockingly, a great experience using Excel on a 4" screen isn't a huge selling point.
    - fidgewidge 4y ago
      YouTube hardly mattered on mobile at the time we're talking about, iPhone 1 didn't even do 3G. Gmail isn't a monopoly and never has been. iPhone came out just a few years after Gmail did, whilst Microsoft had Outlook/Exchange in the enterprise which practically was a monopoly. The Windows team didn't really care about slick UI until long after Apple beat them on that. And the reason they scrapped CE and tried to do UWP is because the Windows API was long ago on its last legs but they hadn't been able to upgrade it properly. Whereas Apple had managed the evolution of nextstep much better, and Android was free / a clean slate design with proper sandboxing, and better consumer apps.
sylware 4y ago
"Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer" alphabet(google) and msft are own and steered by the same network of ppl from blackrock/vanguard. No magic here.
- tra3 4y ago
  What do you mean? Is there a board?
morelisp 4y ago
I mostly agree, but to be a little fair to Pichai: He didn't get a company that was really in a dominant (or at least not already rapidly declining) market position. Microsoft missing the boat on the Internet might have been inherited from Gates, but Google not missing but still absolutely fucking up social networking, immediately prior to Pichai taking the role, is all on former leadership. Whatever Pichai's failures, the two anointed candidates given the space to ascend prior to him (Rubin and Gundotra) were so much worse, both at product vision and at not sexually harassing their employees.
- shp0ngle 4y ago
  I don’t think given all the shit Facebook is getting now, and Twitter in shambles, Google is crying that hard about missing social networks. And they still own YouTube, don’t forget.
  - morelisp 4y ago
    They could have done literally nothing and ended up in a preferable position to today. It blew immeasurable goodwill and burned whole teams of developers. (And by some stories I heard, “literally nothing” might even have been Pichai’s approach had it been his choice.)
spaceman_2020 4y ago
The three Google products I use most frequently - Gmail, Search, Maps - have been underperforming heavily lately. Search is useless unless you really tailor your query to find organic results (throwing in "reddit.com" is almost a necessity). Gmail frequently lets harmful spam slip through, sometimes even tagging it with an 'important' label. The decline in Maps has been the most visible, mostly because it has negatively impacted my commute at times. Google Maps will frequently reroute me through slow, complex side roads and will often completely miss main roads. On routes that I already know, I've stopped following Google's directions altogether because its hilariously off-target.
- bastardoperator 4y ago
  I've noticed the maps issue too. I like their reporting in terms of traffic but allowing it to decide where I drive is just a no go at this point.
- malinoal 4y ago
  maps missing main roads is a (relatively) new "feature", you have to disable "prefer fuel-efficient routes" in your navigation settings to get sensical routes back
  - cmckn 4y ago
    I’m no expert, but the “eco” routes don’t usually pass the smell test with me. I’ll be routed away from a thoroughfare that’s mostly flat/downhill to take a slightly-shorter side street that’s a steep incline. It just seems like half-baked greenwashing.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      The net altitude change is the same for all routes between two points.
      - shawabawa3 4y ago
        Even with a car with regenerative breaking, going up then down is less efficient than staying flat/just down In the extreme case, one route might take no fuel at all vs one that climbs a mountain before dropping
ignoramous 4y ago
> ...search was already dominant and both YouTube and Android Easy to forget but Pichai-led Chrome team ensured Search stayed dominant in face of an increasingly hostile Microsoft. Later, Pichai was handed the keys to all of Google Apps and Android with Rubin pushed out to Robotics. According to reports, Pichai was a key peacemaker in deals with Samsung and Xiaomi, who otherwise threatened to break away from the Open Handset Alliance. Pichai went to war and further tightened Google's grip on Android, dealt with Microsoft (CyanogenMod / patents), Amazon (FireOS), and Apple / Oracle (patents). This is discounting Pichai's track record with hardware: Chromebook and Chromecast. Probably hardware firsts for Google back in the day? As an outsider, it seems like Pichai sustained most if not all of Google's consumer products, bar YouTube and Nest.
- scarface74 4y ago
  And the desktop hardly matters anymore and they still end up paying Apple almost $20B a year to be the default search engine on iOS.
- LarsDu88 4y ago
  People really don't seem to understand. Google doesn't make most of its money by making "stuff" it's value is in it's ad monopoly. Who is most responsible for maintaining this monopoly? It's Pichai. Larry and Sergei brought in the passion and innovation which has led to Google's AI lead and numerous money sink X projects. The trio need to get back together to make AI monopoly happen.
yafbum 4y ago
Pichai didn't completely inherit the cash cow? He led Chrome to quiet dominance, on the basis of a better product, in the face of entrenched and better funded competitors. That is quite different from Ballmer. One difference with the previous leadership is how little decisive strategic action is going on. Google founders leaned hard on the company to steer it and "bet the farm" in clear areas. Pichai doesn't seem to.
diordiderot 4y ago
Before 2018ish Android was steadily 3~4 years ahead of iOS feature wise. That is no longer the case.
sytelus 4y ago
Search has particularly gone south last 3-4 months. Quotes and exact phrasing is now a necessity and I find myself rather use ChatGPT. What bothers me is complete stagnation. I can tell you 5 things that must be fixed in Maps in 5 mins but hasn’t been for a long time. People who are working on it full time should be doing better.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cvalka 4y ago
I agree, Pichai should have been fired a long time ago.
GuB-42 4y ago
> Google has stagnated with Pichai at the helm. The profit drop is indicative of that. There's only so long you can keep milking the same cow. How can companies the size of Google not stagnate at some point? Economically, they are at the scale of not-that-small countries, bigger than that and they take over the world. Maybe that's indeed Pichai's fault but no matter who is at the helm, stagnation must happen, and sometimes, just being able to slow down the fall enough so that the company can recover later when the stars align is the best thing to do, though not the most exciting. Unlike Google, Facebook tried something. They went "Meta", going all-in on AR/VR, and that make me hate Facebook/Meta a little bit less (but only a little, I am still angry about the Oculus-Facebook account tie-in thing). This is a genuine attempt to break from stagnation, but unfortunately, and at least for now, it looks like "milking the same cow", would have been a better decision for the health of the company.

darkerside 4y ago

This doesn't quite line up for me. Ballmer, for his lack of technical foresight, managed an incredibly profitable business. People act like anybody could have just stepped in to milk Windows and Office for all they were worth, but the focus and execution are easy to scoff at in hindsight. If MS had focused on mobile, who's to say they would have succeeded? And perhaps in the process of losing, also ceded dominance to an upstart in the office software space. Pichai may not have capitalized effectively on the impressive AI investments Google has made, but he has steered innovation in newer directions like AI and cloud. Technical victories, but questionable business decisions. I think one possible moral here is, sometimes the best opportunity is the one you don't take.

aaronbrethorst 4y ago
Ballmer succeeded in spite of tripping over his own feet repeatedly, not because of it. https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-stack-ranking-internal-structure https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
doktorhladnjak 4y ago
I worked at Microsoft during the Ballmer era. Profits and revenue continued to increase under his watch. They did invest in mobile from fairly early. Microsoft was selling smart phones (through third party manufacturers) in the early 2000s. They just executed very poorly on mobile by building the wrong thing for the wrong customers. By the time leadership figured this out and started to pour money into Windows Phone, they were too late to catch up. App stores and app platforms became critical to the success on any mobile platform. Microsoft didn’t sufficiently cultivate the Windows CE based apps enough. Then they ditched that app platform for a new one in Windows Phone 7, losing what little they had. Companies that had built apps for iPhone and Android had no incentive doing so on Windows at that point. Ballmer at least recognized the value of Azure, Office in the cloud and similar efforts. All the seeds of Satya’s success were planted during Ballmer’s reign. There was just so much fumbling.
- radlad 4y ago
  > Then they ditched that app platform for a new one in Windows Phone 7, losing what little they had. Companies that had built apps for iPhone and Android had no incentive doing so on Windows at that point. I remember this basically as around the time that Microsoft bought Nokia and produced some really nice looking phones that people were excited about... they had also just reinvented their app platform and nothing could run on them.
  - doktorhladnjak 4y ago
    The new app platform happened maybe a couple years before the Nokia acquisition. I don’t remember the whole timeline but don’t forget Steven Elop (who had been the business head of Office) left Microsoft to become the Nokia CEO, had the company dump their own mobile platform for Windows Phone, then when that failed closed to deal for Microsoft to buy their cratered mobile business. In the interim, Microsoft built quite a few phones mostly with Samsung, HTC, and Huawei, but also oddball partners like Dell.
- XorNot 4y ago
  Culturally my impression is Microsoft was never happy about digital distribution or really grokked it: even today, things like the System File Checker will ask for original installation media rather then just downloading whatever they need from Microsoft when a problem is found. Like it has always broadly felt like they were very late to the party on comprehending where software was headed (caught up pretty well with O365, but that seems like leveraging then entrenched nature of Office successfully).

bushbaba 4y ago

Pichai never fully supported google cloud either. The fact google cloud exists is thanks to Amit Singh’s leadership. Palo Alto networks is lucky to have such a visionary CBO at their helm.

varelse 4y ago
Too bad about all the sexual harassment, but he was good people.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  Wrong Amit. You are thinking about the google search Amit. That’s a different google exec.
  - varelse 4y ago
    [dead]
mike_d 4y ago
Google should have never been in the cloud business to start with. It is a race to the bottom, and revenue depends on your ability to scale up staff - a model Google doesn't have in any of it's other businesses.
- RhodesianHunter 4y ago
  You should tell AWS about that race to the bottom while they continue to produce a majority of Amazon's profit.
  - mike_d 4y ago
    Advertising is way more profitable than AWS. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasongoldberg/2022/02/04/amazon-reveals-its-most-profitable-business/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasongoldberg/2022/02/04/amazon...

adra 4y ago

Microsoft didn't miss mobile, they supported many or all verticals of mobile probably 10 years before it ever really took off. They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat by miss-judging the market or self defeating strategies to protect their other products/partners. I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather a maturity of companies that no longer have founder CEOs and how that changes the nature of people's interactions from top to bottom.

fidgewidge 4y ago
Did they misjudge the market? Windows CE was quite popular in the smartphone segment before iOS and Android steamrollered every existing incumbent. The idea that having a computer in your pocket was important, that was classic 90s era Gatesism and they were right on target. Microsoft lost (not missed) mobile because the Windows team had been losing the ability to execute competently. iOS was essentially macOS for mobile, and Windows wasn't competitive with macOS on the desktop and still isn't today so it wasn't a big surprise that they couldn't pull off great results on mobile either. For as long as the mobile playing field didn't have the most competent companies doing software they could be the leader but once Apple/Google showed up the piles of tech debt and general apathy got the better of them.
- ocdtrekkie 4y ago
  Android is just now catching up with where Windows Mobile was years ago. Execution wasn't the problem. The problem remains that Gmail and YouTube are monopolies and Google aggressively interfered with them working on WinMo because it was Android's only real competitor (an OS licensed to phone OEMs). Microsoft obviously has it's own monopolies but it failed to leverage them on mobile. Shockingly, a great experience using Excel on a 4" screen isn't a huge selling point.
  - fidgewidge 4y ago
    YouTube hardly mattered on mobile at the time we're talking about, iPhone 1 didn't even do 3G. Gmail isn't a monopoly and never has been. iPhone came out just a few years after Gmail did, whilst Microsoft had Outlook/Exchange in the enterprise which practically was a monopoly. The Windows team didn't really care about slick UI until long after Apple beat them on that. And the reason they scrapped CE and tried to do UWP is because the Windows API was long ago on its last legs but they hadn't been able to upgrade it properly. Whereas Apple had managed the evolution of nextstep much better, and Android was free / a clean slate design with proper sandboxing, and better consumer apps.

sylware 4y ago

"Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer" alphabet(google) and msft are own and steered by the same network of ppl from blackrock/vanguard. No magic here.

tra3 4y ago
What do you mean? Is there a board?

morelisp 4y ago

I mostly agree, but to be a little fair to Pichai: He didn't get a company that was really in a dominant (or at least not already rapidly declining) market position. Microsoft missing the boat on the Internet might have been inherited from Gates, but Google not missing but still absolutely fucking up social networking, immediately prior to Pichai taking the role, is all on former leadership. Whatever Pichai's failures, the two anointed candidates given the space to ascend prior to him (Rubin and Gundotra) were so much worse, both at product vision and at not sexually harassing their employees.

shp0ngle 4y ago
I don’t think given all the shit Facebook is getting now, and Twitter in shambles, Google is crying that hard about missing social networks. And they still own YouTube, don’t forget.
- morelisp 4y ago
  They could have done literally nothing and ended up in a preferable position to today. It blew immeasurable goodwill and burned whole teams of developers. (And by some stories I heard, “literally nothing” might even have been Pichai’s approach had it been his choice.)

spaceman_2020 4y ago

The three Google products I use most frequently - Gmail, Search, Maps - have been underperforming heavily lately. Search is useless unless you really tailor your query to find organic results (throwing in "reddit.com" is almost a necessity). Gmail frequently lets harmful spam slip through, sometimes even tagging it with an 'important' label. The decline in Maps has been the most visible, mostly because it has negatively impacted my commute at times. Google Maps will frequently reroute me through slow, complex side roads and will often completely miss main roads. On routes that I already know, I've stopped following Google's directions altogether because its hilariously off-target.

bastardoperator 4y ago
I've noticed the maps issue too. I like their reporting in terms of traffic but allowing it to decide where I drive is just a no go at this point.
malinoal 4y ago
maps missing main roads is a (relatively) new "feature", you have to disable "prefer fuel-efficient routes" in your navigation settings to get sensical routes back
- cmckn 4y ago
  I’m no expert, but the “eco” routes don’t usually pass the smell test with me. I’ll be routed away from a thoroughfare that’s mostly flat/downhill to take a slightly-shorter side street that’s a steep incline. It just seems like half-baked greenwashing.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    The net altitude change is the same for all routes between two points.
    - shawabawa3 4y ago
      Even with a car with regenerative breaking, going up then down is less efficient than staying flat/just down In the extreme case, one route might take no fuel at all vs one that climbs a mountain before dropping

ignoramous 4y ago

> ...search was already dominant and both YouTube and Android Easy to forget but Pichai-led Chrome team ensured Search stayed dominant in face of an increasingly hostile Microsoft. Later, Pichai was handed the keys to all of Google Apps and Android with Rubin pushed out to Robotics. According to reports, Pichai was a key peacemaker in deals with Samsung and Xiaomi, who otherwise threatened to break away from the Open Handset Alliance. Pichai went to war and further tightened Google's grip on Android, dealt with Microsoft (CyanogenMod / patents), Amazon (FireOS), and Apple / Oracle (patents). This is discounting Pichai's track record with hardware: Chromebook and Chromecast. Probably hardware firsts for Google back in the day? As an outsider, it seems like Pichai sustained most if not all of Google's consumer products, bar YouTube and Nest.

scarface74 4y ago
And the desktop hardly matters anymore and they still end up paying Apple almost $20B a year to be the default search engine on iOS.
LarsDu88 4y ago
People really don't seem to understand. Google doesn't make most of its money by making "stuff" it's value is in it's ad monopoly. Who is most responsible for maintaining this monopoly? It's Pichai. Larry and Sergei brought in the passion and innovation which has led to Google's AI lead and numerous money sink X projects. The trio need to get back together to make AI monopoly happen.

yafbum 4y ago

Pichai didn't completely inherit the cash cow? He led Chrome to quiet dominance, on the basis of a better product, in the face of entrenched and better funded competitors. That is quite different from Ballmer. One difference with the previous leadership is how little decisive strategic action is going on. Google founders leaned hard on the company to steer it and "bet the farm" in clear areas. Pichai doesn't seem to.

diordiderot 4y ago

Before 2018ish Android was steadily 3~4 years ahead of iOS feature wise. That is no longer the case.

sytelus 4y ago

Search has particularly gone south last 3-4 months. Quotes and exact phrasing is now a necessity and I find myself rather use ChatGPT. What bothers me is complete stagnation. I can tell you 5 things that must be fixed in Maps in 5 mins but hasn’t been for a long time. People who are working on it full time should be doing better.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cvalka 4y ago

I agree, Pichai should have been fired a long time ago.

GuB-42 4y ago

> Google has stagnated with Pichai at the helm. The profit drop is indicative of that. There's only so long you can keep milking the same cow. How can companies the size of Google not stagnate at some point? Economically, they are at the scale of not-that-small countries, bigger than that and they take over the world. Maybe that's indeed Pichai's fault but no matter who is at the helm, stagnation must happen, and sometimes, just being able to slow down the fall enough so that the company can recover later when the stars align is the best thing to do, though not the most exciting. Unlike Google, Facebook tried something. They went "Meta", going all-in on AR/VR, and that make me hate Facebook/Meta a little bit less (but only a little, I am still angry about the Oculus-Facebook account tie-in thing). This is a genuine attempt to break from stagnation, but unfortunately, and at least for now, it looks like "milking the same cow", would have been a better decision for the health of the company.