21 ms·

Does Google need a new CEO?

325 points by t23 4y ago

webscout 4y ago
[dead]
zwieback 4y ago
Just realized I don't even know who the CEO is rn. I remember when Google came out and seemed like this amazing thing invented by two nerds. Now it's just like a utility, useful and mildly annoying. Maybe time to break it up and have three or four new CEOs.
tofuahdude 4y ago
We're in the middle of the hype phase for LLMs; it'll die down when hallucinations are widely understood and the investment community + public realize that none of these organizations have built something that replaces Search (YET). Calling for Sundar's head during the hype phase is premature.
- eganist 4y ago
  You're right, calling for his departure for this is premature. But calling for his departure for an abject lack of corporate strategy (unless you consider "partially bankroll moonshots across Google etc. with ad revenue" a strategy, which it isn't) is fairly overdue. What's Google's north star, their vision for 2035? Have you heard it? I haven't, not from Google. But given Microsoft's trajectory with cloud and AI investments, I know theirs well.
  - mikymoothrowa 4y ago
    Plus, what kind of strategy is it to antagonise every single large player in the industry. Apple and Amazon are friendly to each other. Microsoft and Facebook have been longtime partners despite Microsoft owning Linkedin. but Google manages to enter everybody’s industry and fail.
- cardosof 4y ago
  I haven't fully replaced search, but I have replaced a good part of my usage (disclaimer: I'm a chatgpt plus subscriber). Search isn't dead but it sure is bleeding, and hard.
  - sh4rks 4y ago
    Doesn't it get annoying to have to fact check everything that ChatGPT spews? It's very useful for code generation, but other than that, the frequency of hallucinations makes it a lot less useful.
    - cardosof 4y ago
      After some time you just get used to it and its limitations, so you know what it's reasonable to ask for. In general I use it as a tool for creative writing, code formatting and easy snippets, writing emails and summarizing texts.I lazily copy-pasted my linkedin profile page to it and it wrote a nice bio, which I corrected a bit, but it was time saved nevertheless. I don't ask many specific questions because then I'd have to fact check a lot, like you said.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  It's amazing (literally, I can't fully grasp it) that MS got the state of the art LLM into search and decided to use it to answer questions. It looks like the hype is so strong that even the people that created it don't know its strengths and weaknesses. But the hype will eventually calm down, and people will eventually discover what LLMs are good for. They will be out of the news, but they will still be essential for search. I don't know what Google has on that subject, but if they don't have any good answer by then, they will be done.
adoxyz 4y ago
I don't know if Google needs a new CEO, but from everything I've heard about internal Google, they need to change up how they measure success and who they reward. So many awesome products launched with tremendous hype, left alone to stagnate, and then unceremoniously shut down. At this point, I can't get excited when Google announces something, no matter how amazing it seems.
- A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
  Not only new products. At this point, they're doing a very poor job of maintaining their core, legacy products. Search, their bread and butter, has been going downhill for years -- and is practically unusable today. They've been slipping, bigtime.
  - svantana 4y ago
    > Search [...] is practically unusable today I keep seeing this sentiment around here, which confuses me because I think gsearch is better than ever. I find what I need instantly in 90% of cases, and when I don't, other engines don't really do better. Granted, I use ublock, but even with that turned off I'm not bothered by the ads. Can you provide examples of a query which gives unusable results, but Bing (or whatever) works?
    - adoxyz 4y ago
      From personal experience, Google search on a desktop w/ Adblock is great. And especially when you know what you're searching for, the experience is usually great. On mobile or without adblock though or when trying to do discovery of something new, you really have to sift through pretty much the first 5-7 results as they're all sponsored, ads, or terrible SEO spam. But it is a hard problem to solve, and no other search engine is better in that regard imo.
      - eptcyka 4y ago
        ublock won't help with SEO spam - it doesn't filter out native search results, just the ads. So it isn't really SEO spam, it's adword spam.
debacle 4y ago
Does Google need an autonomous CEO? Market pressure will turn Alphabet into a real company.
- sgt 4y ago
  Do you think you can make a CEO prompt in ChatGPT and gradually use that?
esotericimpl 4y ago
People keep saying chat gpt is the replacement for search, but chat gpt powered bing search is an obscene joke that barely works. Google's problem is that i searched for "Cape Code VRBO" this morning and couldn't get my answer without scrolling past a full screen of ads.
- croisillon 4y ago
  You seem to be kind of shadowban (not sure what the proper term is), you might want to write an email to the hn moderation to clear that up
  - bogomipz 4y ago
    I'm curious, what about their post indicates that status?
    - croisillon 4y ago
      not anymore because someone vouched for it, but all their other posts
      - bogomipz 4y ago
        My question was about how you spot that status.
        shric 4y ago
        Giving detail that you probably already know in case it's useful for others. When you have "showdead" enabled in the settings you can see all the "dead" posts. A dead post is one that has been marked such that it only appears if you have the above setting enabled and prohibits replies to it. This is usually because it's deemed too off topic or otherwise obnoxious to have value. The post in question was probably marked dead and because it wasn't particularly offtopic or obnoxious then a shadowban is a reasonable assumption. This could be further verified by noticing that that person's comments are almost all dead. This suggests either they're shadowbanned or are remarkably consistent at producing offtopic/obnoxious posts without getting shadowbanned.
voytec 4y ago
Are there strong candidates within the organization, so such change wouldn't just end up being "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"?
- eximius 4y ago
  If the complete lack of product roadmap is anything to go by... no.
the_snooze 4y ago
A new CEO would be good, as long as that person has a sense of leadership and can set long-term strategic goals by clamping down on promotion-case projects that get abandoned on short notice. Google strikes me as a place with too much money and no focus on how to productively use it, and now there are viable competitors popping up to challenge them.
- anonyfox 4y ago
  at least the "too much money" part will probably stop soon, with social commerce + chatbots eating into search revenue
- tabtab 4y ago
  Their idea was to be a giant "start-up factory", create tons of interesting ideas and see what sticks: the shotgun approach. But so far not enough are sticking, and their reputation for pulling the plug early makes people not want to risk depending on their platforms and products because they fear being left high and dry. Microsoft has been generally reasonable in that area, and thus seen as a safer bet. (I know, MS is annoying in many ways, but so are their competitors.) I'd like to see Google give MS a run for their money. For one, create a state-ful GUI markup standard that's business-oriented, not crap like Bootstrap. Second, open source key products so users don't fear getting the plug pulled. (The GUI browser/pluggin could be based on the Tk or Qt kits to avoid reinventing the GUI wheel.)
sidcool 4y ago
Google it's way bigger than an LLM. I don't think they need a new CEO.
rvz 4y ago
[flagged]
- eigenvalue 4y ago
  That stuff is all driven from the top down. Who do you think let Google become a “DEI before tech” company in the first place? They need to change management before any of that other stuff has any chance of real change.
- chem83 4y ago
  Brain is a team inside AI, which internally is just called Research.
- hummus_bae 4y ago
  Cut DEI and the company's dead.
yalogin 4y ago
This is weird, I just had this conversation the other day and wrote a comment in another google story on HN that sundar is not doing a good job and will be replaced soon. They need someone that can turn around GCP and productize their self driving platform. I believe the privacy regulations about their search business are now unstoppable and so they should let it happen and adapt
bfrog 4y ago
They've needed a new CEO since Sundar became CEO.
skilled 4y ago
"Should OpenAI be punished for making people beat a dead horse?"
kingcobraninja 4y ago
When I (the consumer) think of successful Google products, I think of search, email, maps, productivity (docs, sheets, drive), Android, and Chromecast. Which of those launched under the current CEO? I'm sure I'm missing another success story, but really, when was the last time Google hit a home run?
- sct202 4y ago
  It's probably not helping that most of their newer products get relaunched/branded and splintered so frequently leading to consumer confusion; for example, Android Pay -> Google Wallet -> Google Pay -> Google Pay and Wallet.
  - kingcobraninja 4y ago
    I'm looking forward to Pixel Purse and its successor G-Billfold.
    - cowmix 4y ago
      Seriously, this example perfectly illustrates Google at its worst.
  - nostrademons 4y ago
    Or the evergreen GoogleTV -> AndroidTV -> GoogleTV. Or Hangouts (the massively online public video space) -> Hangouts (the chat app inside GMail) -> Hangouts (the private videoconfering app) -> Google Meet.
  - muzz 4y ago
    > Android Pay -> Google Wallet -> Google Pay -> Google Pay and Wallet These all sound like the same thing. If they are different, then I guess it would be confusing.
    - spiderice 4y ago
      That's the point.. Google either rebuilds or rebrands a lot of their stuff way to frequently.
dqpb 4y ago
I think Sundar is the right person to hold Google's hand through its natural geriatric decline.
LatteLazy 4y ago
Part of the issue here is that Google is a large, mature, Corporation. People expect it to act like a (or rather 50) small, nimble, innovative start ups. But it isn't that. It's a large mature corporation in a stable market (search/advertising). This is why there were layoffs recently: Google's future is not growing (where people are an asset) it is Efficiency (where people are a cost centre). This is also why Google struggles so much with innovation, new product lines etc. The same things that stopped GE or AT&T becoming big players online will stop Google from being a big player in <Insert New Thing> (remember before ChatGPT when it was Crypto and Google didn't have a coin? Or before that when it was Quantum computing and Google were totally definitely building one, it just still doesn't exist?). And all of this is A-Ok. This is just the corporate lifecycle. There are very good, economically sensible, pragmatic reasons why big companies do not innovate and why efficiency is more important there. Whether Google needs a new CEO or not depends entirely on whether it's current one can deliver that. But Layoffs are a sign the current guy is doing his job, people just don't understand (or don't want to understand) what his job is...
- rixrax 4y ago
  I think you nailed it! I think there is a bit of cognitive dissonance here because a lot of the workforce at Google (and indeed at other FAANGs) are people who have worked their entire careers at Google or similar companies and now their endless summer is coming to an end. Kids that went from college to free food, latte bars, arcade rooms, 20% own projects and such are now waking up to a new reality of their first real down cycle. Profits are down or at least not growing, and they have become sacrificial lambs at the altar of capitalism, where you are measured against the value you produce, not the coolness of your projects. So it goes.
  - LatteLazy 4y ago
    Yeah. I am sort of sympathetic. The same thing has been happening at my company over the last year. We are a startup but we're up to 180 people now and when you're looking to raise and starting to think about a buyer/IPO etc then things get more and more efficient. That's just life. I think Google (and other FAANGs) did really well to remain innovative and start-up-y for so long. But "gravity always wins in the end" It must be a bit bitter for people who recently started at these companies. I think a lot of people worked very hard for a long time to "get in". They expected guaranteed employment for life, perks galore, etc. They had "arrived". And now its all evaporating. That's not fair really. But I don't think anyone did it on purpose. I think people just forgot that middle age comes to all companies eventually...
ok_coo 4y ago
The Stadia closure sealed it for me. Such amazing tech for what it was, completely unable to see the long-term and stay dedicated to a tech that's obviously going to have increasing adoption into the future. Handed over that entire market to MS without a fight. It even had a perfect release window during COVID when everyone was home and wasn't able to find PS5 or Xbox to buy. Everything around that product was a summary of how Google handles things now. I can't take any new product release seriously from them anymore.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  Stadia launched without the full backing of google. Google could have easily foresee the public reaction, and mitigated it with a different pricing model or some guarantee that game purchases will be refunded if stadia closes down within 3 years of purchase.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Say what you want about Microsoft, but they executed with XBox and continued pouring money into it, because they knew its potential as a foothold in the living room was larger than its near-term revenue.
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      they didn't do the same with Windows Phone, though. survivor bias.
      - belval 4y ago
        Windows Phone had a market share so low (~3%) it just didn't make sense to keep pouring money into it when cheap Chinese Android phones were coming in troves and Apple/Samsung dominated the high-end segments. The Xbox only true competitor is the PlayStation which is much more manageable. Even the first Xbox had a market share of 33% in the US. It's important not to mix up killing a product before its prime and pouring money into an established market for dominance. Windows Phone was the latter. Cloud gaming (if we believe it will eventually catch on) does not have an established "winner" yet. Nvidia/Xbox/Luna (Amazon) are still trying to make it work and Google had a better approach than all of them with lower controller latency.
eptcyka 4y ago
Whilst the article itself has some ok arguments for the hypothesis it puts forward, I can't help but point out that it's completely overshadowed by the dumpster fire of a presentation, with scroll event interception until I click on the cookie nagger, and a full screen low-resolution photo blocking the whole viewport that has to be scrolled out of the way to get to the actual article. Maybe om.co should get a new web designer? No, scratch that. I'm willing to bet that these particular design choices were not made by anyone with practical knowledge and experience of web design.
leet_thow 4y ago
Regardless, they will just be a punching bag.
hallqv 4y ago
Sundar is perfect example of an incompetent professional CEO who exceeds at schmoozing and company politics. He's even ex-McKinsey... Works for managing large corps through "business-as-usual" peacetimes but as soon as change & innovation is needed it's a no-go.
- kerpotgh 4y ago
  He was the PM for Chrome so I don’t think I would call him incompetent.
  - gregorygoc 4y ago
    At that times PM had no say in product direction TBH. It was all very SWE driven
    - mikymoothrowa 4y ago
      And at that time they were also operating with enthusiastic Engineers who can’t write bubble sort on their first try but then started hiring using the methods that led to “Cracking the coding interview” and terrible products
      - kingcobraninja 4y ago
        >can’t write bubble sort on their first try lol how do you expect to program if you don't know how every common subroutine works in exhaustive detail?
    - kerpotgh 4y ago
      [dead]
  - woooooo 4y ago
    How hard is it to make product decisions for a new browser? "Make it render the page like IE".
    - 4y ago
m3kw9 4y ago
Sundar was probably lied to by whoever pitched bard as demoable
- spinningslate 4y ago
  Maybe. Or, perhaps, was told an overly-optimistic story that changed as it floated up the hierarchy: engineer: well, yeah, we've got something. It's OK. But it has limitations and needs to be used very carefully. engineer's boss: we've got something. It's OK. AVP: we've got something. VP: We've got something! SVP: We've got something. It's great! CTO: We've got something. It's great! It's just what we need to counter the press noise! CEO: Phew. Great. Get it out there. None of which exonerates Pichai. Given the significance of the threat to the firm, the "code red", the knowledge that he's personally going to take heat, he should've been all over this. Imagine Steve Jobs in a similar situation. He'd have been over it like a rash. So no: Pichai doesn't get away with blaming someone else. His job.
  - m3kw9 4y ago
    Maybe he needed to trust his left right hand man to relay him accurate info but acted on a probability
shadowtree 4y ago
He is an operator, not an innovator. Just shows how much of an outlier Nadella really is.
- tabtab 4y ago
  How is Nadella an innovator? He's just been leveraging corporate dependencies on MS into cloud-world. MS's newer products suck. People only use them because they are bundled with Windows/Azure deals, and thus relatively cheap. MS-Teams is a lesson in How Not To Make A UI.
  - belval 4y ago
    I don't think he is an innovator, but he definitely has a better vision than Sundar. All of Microsoft's acquisitions (LinkedIn, GitHub, Mojang) so far were well executed and leveraged properly to help tie together the company's offering. On top of that you have the Microsoft Loves Linux initiative which saw them finally stop pushing their shitty OS everywhere and embrace being a cloud provider which was a smart move. All of that not to say that he's some. kind of god-tier CEO, but he definitely is above-average and above Sundar Pichai who got the CEO role at about the same time (2015) but saw no such "good business move" in the same timespan. He's been mostly content milking the ads revenue.
- andromeduck 4y ago
  If he's an operator then explain stadia launch/strategy/positioning, over hiring, deprecations, botched layoffs, botched grad/perf, and everything else. Sundar is a politician. He's a fixer and back room power broker. He doesn't give a shit about tech or product.
endisneigh 4y ago
Everyone is of course entitled their opinion, but lately I've noticed people more boldly and frequently thinking they're better than the incumbents, which is interesting.
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
[flagged]
- sahila 4y ago
  So what race do you think is appropriate? Only white males as they’re least shackled by society?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - rocknor 4y ago
    These nonsense generalizations have no place on HN. Similar cultural norms exist in many European countries, but they are never brought up. Such thinly veiled racism against Asians is nauseating.
bayofpigs 4y ago
[dead]
smarkov 4y ago
Yes, badly. Nothing about Google stands out anymore and they've been rotting from multiple ends for a long time. Search rarely returns credible results and I find myself adding 'site:reddit.com' frequently to at least get some organic discussions about things rather than articles which look like they were sponsored and artificially inflated to the top. They've turned into a joke about releasing something and killing it off a few years later. Android is a nightmare for developers (and users) with how they handle API changes and the Google Play store as a whole. Any kind of customer support is non-existent in basically any of their products. Their hardware is good but software gets worse over time and stagnates (their smart home ecosystem). I still don't trust them for a second with my data. Gmail is fine, Maps are fine, YouTube is... well, we don't really have a competitor and nobody wants to switch because they wouldn't have access to a large audience. Whatever they release I have no faith in it, not with it keeping my data, not with its longevity, not in its reliability.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- the_arun 4y ago
  When I search for a keyword, I see an ad for the same product as the first item in search results. For eg. If I search for "rav4", I see "2023 Toyota® RAV4 - Toyota® USA" pointing to toyota.com. I often wonder why show an ad, why can't you show non-ad version of the same? Is it to get commission from Toyota for the click OR Toyota listing an ad for keyword "rav4"?
  - crest 4y ago
    Because they get paid for showing the ad.
  - alephnerd 4y ago
    Companies pay top dollar to show an ad when someone searches their name, otherwise a competitor could make a paid ad slamming the product. We dealt with this first hand a year ago in my company.
dmitrygr 4y ago
Sundar is a great peace-time leader. He can milk and feed the cash cow Ok-ish. Sundar has never made an actual decision. He waits till a consensus forms and then takes that side. That isn’t the kind of leader you need at times of war. ChatGPT declared a war. Sundar is unfit for this duty.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
Google needed nee CEO the day AWS was released. How can you invent cloud and be out-maneuvered on cloud.
hintymad 4y ago
Did Pichai make his name first in Google by being an excellent PM of Chrome? I wonder why he stopped being a product guy after becoming a CEO. It looks to me that the CEOs of mega successful tech companies are mostly "super PMs". Larry Page, Bezos, Jobs, Nadella (arguably, but his strategy has been cloud and super bundling, which has been very successful), and Musk. I can hardly see what Google's product strategy is. AI for everything certainly is not a product statement.
- roncesvalles 4y ago
  In organizations you never know whether something succeeded because of the leader or despite the leader.
throw7 4y ago
I think so. Sundar has been pitching "AI" for who knows how long. All the "A.I." stuff dumped on me has annoyed me more than anything. No, I don't want to talk to my phone. And the times I might want to (driving a car)... I used to be able to simply ask maps what my "E.T.A." was and, shock!, it would answer... that's been broken for years now and I'm fairly sure that will never be fixed.
- mikymoothrowa 4y ago
  This is the same thing that pretty much ended IBM. They had been pitching AI for how long and now they have to sustain themselves on openshift sales.
cheshire137 4y ago
This article is unreadable on mobile because of a huge subscribe modal that appears and whose controls are pushed off screen where I can't even scroll to them.
bilalq 4y ago
A new CEO is needed for a culture shift if nothing else. Google has long been cavalier about their automated systems banning, withholding payments, or otherwise harming users and customers with no recourse to challenge the false positive punishments. They've made a laughing stock of themselves with product launches and sunsets in Chat (GChat, Talk, Hangouts, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Meet, Allo, Duo, Meet, Meet Original, Spaces, etc). They're not really any better in payments (Google Wallet, Android Pay, Google Pay, Google Pay Send, Google Wallet but new this time). Stadia was an amazing product, but I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole because looking at the killed-by-google graveyard made it obvious where it would end up. It's become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Google needs to show that it cares about its customers/users and that it cares about its own products. The willingness to abandon both so casually has hurt its reputation in a way that makes it difficult to trust.
- mikymoothrowa 4y ago
  Google Pay is huge in India but it is/was a completely different product that started in Google India as Tez but was taken over from the Indian team and ruined. Google claims to operate Pay in dozens of countries with millions of transactions but almost all of them are from India where Google pay is merely a client for UPI
muzz 4y ago
Nothing new in this piece. Same tropes regurgitated.
nicenewtemp84 4y ago
In 2007 when I graduated, I thought Google hired the best of the best. Recently they hired an exgf of mine with a degree from a school that accepts anyone, who gets confused watching TV shows, and has trouble doing basic math.
- nicenewtemp84 4y ago
  Gotta love downvotes for basic facts, not even opinion.
  - necroforest 4y ago
    lol, because whining about your ex is a "basic fact"
    - nicenewtemp84 4y ago
      The things I wrote are facts. She really did get confused watching average TV shows, and couldn't calculate basically anything. And she does work at Google now as some kind of project manager. I am not whining about her. I am whining about the poor hires google makes these days, which might explain the downward trajectory of their products we all see.
- tester756 4y ago
  why would "school that accepts anyone" from around 2007 would be relevant in 2023? assuming similar age lol
  - nicenewtemp84 4y ago
    She was a 2014 grad. But why would it be relevant? Because she wasn't that great of a student and unless something changed since 2018, she wasn't that bright either (hence the confusion following story lines and inability to calculate anything more than simple addition). If colleges don't matter, I'm not sure why so many successful companies paid attention during their starts. Its a pretty good metric to estimate intelligence, not knowledge IMO. I'm sure she's a great project manager though! She was a scrum master for 3 years at another company. One day I asked her what the term scrum stood for? I wasn't in the field at all so I had no idea. But it was an obvious question IMO. She didn't know. Next day I looked it up and learned it's just a rugby term. It came up a month later, and she still didn't know. I cared enough to look it up. She didn't. And it's her job. Now she's at Google. If you think that's not a bad sign, you might work at Google too.
aste-risk 4y ago
If they delay doing this, there's going to be irreversible damage. OTOH, it seems unlikely because they just renewed his contract and incentives in November
untangle 4y ago
To be fair, Microsoft's "AI BING" demo wasn't exactly flawless either. But the popular press didn't seem to notice. https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/microsoft_ai_bing_error https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/microsoft_ai_bing_err... https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23599007/microsoft-bing-ai-mistakes-demo https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23599007/microsoft-bing-a...
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Google Search has become aggressively bad after their last few updates. The top pages are literally just filler BS written by someone with no subject matter expertise or first hand experience. I have no idea how it went so far off the rails so fast.
JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
Innovation will never come from the largest companies regardless of who is in charge
blululu 4y ago
This piece has a click bait title and focuses exclusively on the last week of tech-news. IMO the answer to the clickbait title is still yes, but the reasons lie in the last 5 years of stagnation and extend far beyond the use of AI in search/information retrieval. Google is a massive company that does a lot more than Search. The simple problem is that Google as a company is languishing without purpose. The incentives do not line up for attention to detail, product excellence or ground breaking tech. Instead they now have a massive sprawling enterprise that is dominated by politics over products.
- mikymoothrowa 4y ago
  Google used to be the company that delivered us a fast browser, free online video streaming and was going to give absurdly cheaper fiber and wireless internet and affordable yet awesome smartphones. Not anymore.
rllearneratwork 4y ago
Yes. They must regain their "innovator" status. Current CEO is a PM not an innovator.
roncesvalles 4y ago
Every tech company needs to flush their highest level of managers because this cohort was promoted to their positions at a time when tech company stocks saw 20% CAGR growth just for existing. Reminds me of the line from The Godfather 2: "You're not a wartime consigliere, Tom." These aren't wartime CEOs.
- pm90 4y ago
  This. Times have changed. It’s funny that literally every tech company’s response has been to lay off low level workers who could be re-deployed in different projects but to keep their leadership the same. Now they’re all making the same mistake which is gonna bite them hard a couple of quarters down the road when product development grinds to a halt due to overtaxed and burned out engineers.
  - thedougd 4y ago
    Their predecessor tech companies all did the same in the 90s and 00s, then cried through the 10s that they couldn’t find the right talent mix to compete against new tech.
anonyfox 4y ago
the only thing nowadays we can depend on from google: - products: will be buried in the graveyard soon, so NO - tech: might get abandoned or rewritten at any time (angular JS anyone?), so NO - trying to make adblockers and privacy tools harder to use: this is it. yes, I can count on google only on the last part. I only need to de-google from gmail in the coming months, then I am ready to see it burning.
dannyr 4y ago
I use Google not because it's a great product but because I'm locked in or don't have good options.
stephc_int13 4y ago
The fish rots from the head, as they say. Google is in a bad spot, and was in a bad spot well before ChatGPT appeared in the news. I think Pichai is a CFO/accountant, this is not what they need at this point. In practice, I'd like to see Google lose its position, their dominance has been detrimental for the whole tech ecosystem.
mitchitized 4y ago
Whether or not they change CEOs, they need a new business model. They have needed this for decades now, and it shows. Their entire existence relies on GoogleAds. That's it. Nothing else comes even remotely close to GoogleAds revenue to their bottom line. This is why they can be so cavalier discontinuing products, as they don't make money so get cut without a second thought. Search has been so co-opted by this model and dependency on revenue that they are literally killing the one product that makes them money. My take from the outside at least is that GoogleAds revenue is no longer carrying the business (maybe less business, maybe the company grew too fast, maybe market pressure), and now they are forced to make some tough decisions. Although I'd love his paycheck, I am glad I am not Google's CEO. That is a really awful position to be in, IMHO.
rantee 4y ago
Putting aside the product concerns, from my recent Xoogler perspective, they absolutely need a new CEO. Start with a chaotic management style that is constantly reorg'ing and forcing manager changes. I had three managers and four reorgs during my under two years. (YMMV by team but I've heard of others even in product areas who've experienced similar.) You never know when you'll be pulled from a project, projects are developed and then handed-off vs. letting the builders continue to improve them, and promo becomes a political fantasy as you shift around. Reorgs are a fact of enterprise life, but the frequency of them at Google is a huge sign of lack of strategic direction and bad planning. Absorbing HUGE numbers of new employees into this constantly shifting structure is a recipe for disaster. (OTOH, documentation tends to be very good.) And buying up tons of real estate when so many people either WFH full time or are hybrid? Crazy. Then there's the way projects are managed. I never thought I'd miss JIRA so much. There are always too many cooks in the kitchen and everlasting approval processes. To all the amazingly smart, dedicated, and user-focused people still there - you rock. To the board - time to shake things up. [edit - fixed typo]
- dheera 4y ago
  * shrug * If the employees are happy and customers are happy, they don't need a new CEO. CEOs of companies at that scale are largely just PR puppets anyway, it's the ten thousand other engineers who do the real work. If you want to revolutionize the company, you need to swap out the army of ten thousand people, not the puppet. They shouldn't give a damn about what some armchair critics say about an AI boo-boo. Ask those critics to code something better, if they can push some code commits, then they have a right to criticize, if not, shut up. Yeah, we as a society need innovation, but it doesn't have to happen within Google, new companies can be established for that. We need a new Google, not a new Google CEO.
  - ohazi 4y ago
    Other than the pay and the residual prestige from "this is the coolest place to work if you pretend it's still 2004" -- I'm not so sure I'd describe the average Google employee as "happy." "Begrudgingly willing to tolerate it" seems more common.
justizin 4y ago
Yes.
subsubzero 4y ago
I said it before and I'll say it again, take away the search monopoly and Google is the slowest moving and most dysfunctional company in tech. Sundar is doing his best Ballmer impression and what it is truly embarrassing is given Google's supposed "talent" especially in the AI space they are really doing nothing for the billions they are throwing at the problem. I mean just look at the insane amount of articles about one of their top AI engineers, Geoffrey Hinton, so alot of press all fluff so to speak. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/technology/artificial-intelligence-research-toronto.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/technology/artificial-int... https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awa... [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33022768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33022768
- Aleksdev 4y ago
  “Google is the slowest moving and most dysfunctional company in tech.” That’s a little harsh. Google makes great products like the Google cloud and Gmail. To say they are the most dysfunctional and slow moving company in tech is outlandish.
  - subsubzero 4y ago
    If the shoe fits.... Gmail was launched in 2004(almost 20 years ago), and google cloud, well its hemorrhaging money - it lost $3.1B in 2021[1], that's not a successful business in anyone's opinion. [1] - https://www.techradar.com/news/google-cloud-is-still-losing-buckets-of-money https://www.techradar.com/news/google-cloud-is-still-losing-...
    - Aleksdev 4y ago
      Even so, the products are good and Google is far from as bad of a company as your original comment stated.
jeffjobs4000 4y ago
Sundar? The guy who reports into Ruth? Sundar has the CEO title because he's so meek that grandstanding politicians feel bad being too mean to him during congressional hearings. Google's priorities 1 through 10 are to avoid anti-trust messing up their money geysers.
- chewz 4y ago
  Exactly. Google has no future. but for the moment it generates loads of cash to shareholders. Sundar's only task is to keep it as long as possible. And shareholders on their own will allocate this cash to next Google.
mikymoothrowa 4y ago
For a company that really depends on user click signals, removing the dislike count from Youtube (and making the button pointless) is a amateurish mistake indicating a very broken internal structure. the search UX, especially the top bar where you switch between search types is broken for nearly a decade and they are not able to fix that.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  the top bar where you switch between search types I truly wonder what fool decided that it would be a good idea to change the UI depending on what the results were. It's hard to recall a company making such a big bet on dumbing its own products for long.
  - mikymoothrowa 4y ago
    that’s not the worst part. The worst part is not fixing it for over a decade despite being called out
smaudet 4y ago
"Unlike Google, Microsoft’s Bing demo was more polished and free of blemishes." Um, not a fan of either system, but pretty sure this has been shown to be patently false... There was a c-acm post on here just the other day about this. This is some click-bait.
janvdberg 4y ago
Just a side-note but Om has 1.2 million Twitter followers but the poll only attracted 170 votes (!?). Something seems way off here.
nus07 4y ago
Sundar has Mckinsified and MBAfied Google.He faces intense spotlight because his background is McKinsey and Product Management . In core engineering and tech circles that’s the ultimate enemy and sell out. IMO Sundar hasn’t demonstrated the type of tech leadership like Satya or Zuck has. I am no fan of Zuck but he has a product he wants to pursue ( Metaverse) and is sticking to his guns to make it happen . Sundar just comes across as a pleasant McKinsey consultant who has seen ads and search as a cash cow and is focused on extracting as much cash from it to appeal to shareholders and others . There is no underlying tech vision or guts.
tombert 4y ago
Google's CEO claimed that he's taking "full responsibility" for the massive layoffs they went through. I have no idea what the fuck that actually means, but I would think resignation and being replaced would probably be a reasonable way to take responsibility for his reckless gambling with peoples' lives.
Aleksdev 4y ago
I feel like Google is just not focused. They are branching off into many directions.
JohnFen 4y ago
I don't think that the problems with Google are the result of the CEO, specifically. They're the result of the board of directors and the investors.
cannabis_sam 4y ago
Of course they do!?! How is this even a question? Unless you’re a run of the mill mba grifter desperately trying to push short-term “shareholder value”..
more_corn 4y ago
Yeah
thedougd 4y ago
I’ve been pulling away from Google products more and more over the last few years. Their quality is in steady decline. It’s very frustrating and I’m hesitant to use them for something new. I’ve even noticed non-tech folks are noticing the decline as well. When you combine the declining quality with a lack of innovative new products, the public’s privacy concerns, and potentially the awakening of advertisers to poor ROI, there’s a clear picture of trouble ahead for Google.
_5uxp 4y ago
Google is the new Yahoo, just a lot bigger.

325 points by t23 4y ago

[dead]

Just realized I don't even know who the CEO is rn. I remember when Google came out and seemed like this amazing thing invented by two nerds. Now it's just like a utility, useful and mildly annoying. Maybe time to break it up and have three or four new CEOs.

tofuahdude 4y ago

We're in the middle of the hype phase for LLMs; it'll die down when hallucinations are widely understood and the investment community + public realize that none of these organizations have built something that replaces Search (YET). Calling for Sundar's head during the hype phase is premature.

eganist 4y ago
You're right, calling for his departure for this is premature. But calling for his departure for an abject lack of corporate strategy (unless you consider "partially bankroll moonshots across Google etc. with ad revenue" a strategy, which it isn't) is fairly overdue. What's Google's north star, their vision for 2035? Have you heard it? I haven't, not from Google. But given Microsoft's trajectory with cloud and AI investments, I know theirs well.
- mikymoothrowa 4y ago
  Plus, what kind of strategy is it to antagonise every single large player in the industry. Apple and Amazon are friendly to each other. Microsoft and Facebook have been longtime partners despite Microsoft owning Linkedin. but Google manages to enter everybody’s industry and fail.
cardosof 4y ago
I haven't fully replaced search, but I have replaced a good part of my usage (disclaimer: I'm a chatgpt plus subscriber). Search isn't dead but it sure is bleeding, and hard.
- sh4rks 4y ago
  Doesn't it get annoying to have to fact check everything that ChatGPT spews? It's very useful for code generation, but other than that, the frequency of hallucinations makes it a lot less useful.
  - cardosof 4y ago
    After some time you just get used to it and its limitations, so you know what it's reasonable to ask for. In general I use it as a tool for creative writing, code formatting and easy snippets, writing emails and summarizing texts.I lazily copy-pasted my linkedin profile page to it and it wrote a nice bio, which I corrected a bit, but it was time saved nevertheless. I don't ask many specific questions because then I'd have to fact check a lot, like you said.
marcosdumay 4y ago
It's amazing (literally, I can't fully grasp it) that MS got the state of the art LLM into search and decided to use it to answer questions. It looks like the hype is so strong that even the people that created it don't know its strengths and weaknesses. But the hype will eventually calm down, and people will eventually discover what LLMs are good for. They will be out of the news, but they will still be essential for search. I don't know what Google has on that subject, but if they don't have any good answer by then, they will be done.

adoxyz 4y ago

I don't know if Google needs a new CEO, but from everything I've heard about internal Google, they need to change up how they measure success and who they reward. So many awesome products launched with tremendous hype, left alone to stagnate, and then unceremoniously shut down. At this point, I can't get excited when Google announces something, no matter how amazing it seems.

A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
Not only new products. At this point, they're doing a very poor job of maintaining their core, legacy products. Search, their bread and butter, has been going downhill for years -- and is practically unusable today. They've been slipping, bigtime.
- svantana 4y ago
  > Search [...] is practically unusable today I keep seeing this sentiment around here, which confuses me because I think gsearch is better than ever. I find what I need instantly in 90% of cases, and when I don't, other engines don't really do better. Granted, I use ublock, but even with that turned off I'm not bothered by the ads. Can you provide examples of a query which gives unusable results, but Bing (or whatever) works?
  - adoxyz 4y ago
    From personal experience, Google search on a desktop w/ Adblock is great. And especially when you know what you're searching for, the experience is usually great. On mobile or without adblock though or when trying to do discovery of something new, you really have to sift through pretty much the first 5-7 results as they're all sponsored, ads, or terrible SEO spam. But it is a hard problem to solve, and no other search engine is better in that regard imo.
    - eptcyka 4y ago
      ublock won't help with SEO spam - it doesn't filter out native search results, just the ads. So it isn't really SEO spam, it's adword spam.

debacle 4y ago

Does Google need an autonomous CEO? Market pressure will turn Alphabet into a real company.

sgt 4y ago
Do you think you can make a CEO prompt in ChatGPT and gradually use that?

esotericimpl 4y ago

People keep saying chat gpt is the replacement for search, but chat gpt powered bing search is an obscene joke that barely works. Google's problem is that i searched for "Cape Code VRBO" this morning and couldn't get my answer without scrolling past a full screen of ads.

croisillon 4y ago
You seem to be kind of shadowban (not sure what the proper term is), you might want to write an email to the hn moderation to clear that up
- bogomipz 4y ago
  I'm curious, what about their post indicates that status?
  - croisillon 4y ago
    not anymore because someone vouched for it, but all their other posts
    - bogomipz 4y ago
      My question was about how you spot that status.
      - shric 4y ago
        Giving detail that you probably already know in case it's useful for others. When you have "showdead" enabled in the settings you can see all the "dead" posts. A dead post is one that has been marked such that it only appears if you have the above setting enabled and prohibits replies to it. This is usually because it's deemed too off topic or otherwise obnoxious to have value. The post in question was probably marked dead and because it wasn't particularly offtopic or obnoxious then a shadowban is a reasonable assumption. This could be further verified by noticing that that person's comments are almost all dead. This suggests either they're shadowbanned or are remarkably consistent at producing offtopic/obnoxious posts without getting shadowbanned.

voytec 4y ago

Are there strong candidates within the organization, so such change wouldn't just end up being "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"?

eximius 4y ago
If the complete lack of product roadmap is anything to go by... no.

the_snooze 4y ago

A new CEO would be good, as long as that person has a sense of leadership and can set long-term strategic goals by clamping down on promotion-case projects that get abandoned on short notice. Google strikes me as a place with too much money and no focus on how to productively use it, and now there are viable competitors popping up to challenge them.

anonyfox 4y ago
at least the "too much money" part will probably stop soon, with social commerce + chatbots eating into search revenue
tabtab 4y ago
Their idea was to be a giant "start-up factory", create tons of interesting ideas and see what sticks: the shotgun approach. But so far not enough are sticking, and their reputation for pulling the plug early makes people not want to risk depending on their platforms and products because they fear being left high and dry. Microsoft has been generally reasonable in that area, and thus seen as a safer bet. (I know, MS is annoying in many ways, but so are their competitors.) I'd like to see Google give MS a run for their money. For one, create a state-ful GUI markup standard that's business-oriented, not crap like Bootstrap. Second, open source key products so users don't fear getting the plug pulled. (The GUI browser/pluggin could be based on the Tk or Qt kits to avoid reinventing the GUI wheel.)

sidcool 4y ago

Google it's way bigger than an LLM. I don't think they need a new CEO.

rvz 4y ago

[flagged]

eigenvalue 4y ago
That stuff is all driven from the top down. Who do you think let Google become a “DEI before tech” company in the first place? They need to change management before any of that other stuff has any chance of real change.
chem83 4y ago
Brain is a team inside AI, which internally is just called Research.
hummus_bae 4y ago
Cut DEI and the company's dead.

yalogin 4y ago

This is weird, I just had this conversation the other day and wrote a comment in another google story on HN that sundar is not doing a good job and will be replaced soon. They need someone that can turn around GCP and productize their self driving platform. I believe the privacy regulations about their search business are now unstoppable and so they should let it happen and adapt

bfrog 4y ago

They've needed a new CEO since Sundar became CEO.

skilled 4y ago

"Should OpenAI be punished for making people beat a dead horse?"

kingcobraninja 4y ago

When I (the consumer) think of successful Google products, I think of search, email, maps, productivity (docs, sheets, drive), Android, and Chromecast. Which of those launched under the current CEO? I'm sure I'm missing another success story, but really, when was the last time Google hit a home run?

sct202 4y ago
It's probably not helping that most of their newer products get relaunched/branded and splintered so frequently leading to consumer confusion; for example, Android Pay -> Google Wallet -> Google Pay -> Google Pay and Wallet.
- kingcobraninja 4y ago
  I'm looking forward to Pixel Purse and its successor G-Billfold.
  - cowmix 4y ago
    Seriously, this example perfectly illustrates Google at its worst.
- nostrademons 4y ago
  Or the evergreen GoogleTV -> AndroidTV -> GoogleTV. Or Hangouts (the massively online public video space) -> Hangouts (the chat app inside GMail) -> Hangouts (the private videoconfering app) -> Google Meet.
- muzz 4y ago
  > Android Pay -> Google Wallet -> Google Pay -> Google Pay and Wallet These all sound like the same thing. If they are different, then I guess it would be confusing.
  - spiderice 4y ago
    That's the point.. Google either rebuilds or rebrands a lot of their stuff way to frequently.

dqpb 4y ago

I think Sundar is the right person to hold Google's hand through its natural geriatric decline.

LatteLazy 4y ago

Part of the issue here is that Google is a large, mature, Corporation. People expect it to act like a (or rather 50) small, nimble, innovative start ups. But it isn't that. It's a large mature corporation in a stable market (search/advertising). This is why there were layoffs recently: Google's future is not growing (where people are an asset) it is Efficiency (where people are a cost centre). This is also why Google struggles so much with innovation, new product lines etc. The same things that stopped GE or AT&T becoming big players online will stop Google from being a big player in <Insert New Thing> (remember before ChatGPT when it was Crypto and Google didn't have a coin? Or before that when it was Quantum computing and Google were totally definitely building one, it just still doesn't exist?). And all of this is A-Ok. This is just the corporate lifecycle. There are very good, economically sensible, pragmatic reasons why big companies do not innovate and why efficiency is more important there. Whether Google needs a new CEO or not depends entirely on whether it's current one can deliver that. But Layoffs are a sign the current guy is doing his job, people just don't understand (or don't want to understand) what his job is...

rixrax 4y ago
I think you nailed it! I think there is a bit of cognitive dissonance here because a lot of the workforce at Google (and indeed at other FAANGs) are people who have worked their entire careers at Google or similar companies and now their endless summer is coming to an end. Kids that went from college to free food, latte bars, arcade rooms, 20% own projects and such are now waking up to a new reality of their first real down cycle. Profits are down or at least not growing, and they have become sacrificial lambs at the altar of capitalism, where you are measured against the value you produce, not the coolness of your projects. So it goes.
- LatteLazy 4y ago
  Yeah. I am sort of sympathetic. The same thing has been happening at my company over the last year. We are a startup but we're up to 180 people now and when you're looking to raise and starting to think about a buyer/IPO etc then things get more and more efficient. That's just life. I think Google (and other FAANGs) did really well to remain innovative and start-up-y for so long. But "gravity always wins in the end" It must be a bit bitter for people who recently started at these companies. I think a lot of people worked very hard for a long time to "get in". They expected guaranteed employment for life, perks galore, etc. They had "arrived". And now its all evaporating. That's not fair really. But I don't think anyone did it on purpose. I think people just forgot that middle age comes to all companies eventually...

ok_coo 4y ago

The Stadia closure sealed it for me. Such amazing tech for what it was, completely unable to see the long-term and stay dedicated to a tech that's obviously going to have increasing adoption into the future. Handed over that entire market to MS without a fight. It even had a perfect release window during COVID when everyone was home and wasn't able to find PS5 or Xbox to buy. Everything around that product was a summary of how Google handles things now. I can't take any new product release seriously from them anymore.

bushbaba 4y ago
Stadia launched without the full backing of google. Google could have easily foresee the public reaction, and mitigated it with a different pricing model or some guarantee that game purchases will be refunded if stadia closes down within 3 years of purchase.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Say what you want about Microsoft, but they executed with XBox and continued pouring money into it, because they knew its potential as a foothold in the living room was larger than its near-term revenue.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    they didn't do the same with Windows Phone, though. survivor bias.
    - belval 4y ago
      Windows Phone had a market share so low (~3%) it just didn't make sense to keep pouring money into it when cheap Chinese Android phones were coming in troves and Apple/Samsung dominated the high-end segments. The Xbox only true competitor is the PlayStation which is much more manageable. Even the first Xbox had a market share of 33% in the US. It's important not to mix up killing a product before its prime and pouring money into an established market for dominance. Windows Phone was the latter. Cloud gaming (if we believe it will eventually catch on) does not have an established "winner" yet. Nvidia/Xbox/Luna (Amazon) are still trying to make it work and Google had a better approach than all of them with lower controller latency.

eptcyka 4y ago

Whilst the article itself has some ok arguments for the hypothesis it puts forward, I can't help but point out that it's completely overshadowed by the dumpster fire of a presentation, with scroll event interception until I click on the cookie nagger, and a full screen low-resolution photo blocking the whole viewport that has to be scrolled out of the way to get to the actual article. Maybe om.co should get a new web designer? No, scratch that. I'm willing to bet that these particular design choices were not made by anyone with practical knowledge and experience of web design.

leet_thow 4y ago

Regardless, they will just be a punching bag.

hallqv 4y ago

Sundar is perfect example of an incompetent professional CEO who exceeds at schmoozing and company politics. He's even ex-McKinsey... Works for managing large corps through "business-as-usual" peacetimes but as soon as change & innovation is needed it's a no-go.

kerpotgh 4y ago
He was the PM for Chrome so I don’t think I would call him incompetent.
- gregorygoc 4y ago
  At that times PM had no say in product direction TBH. It was all very SWE driven
  - mikymoothrowa 4y ago
    And at that time they were also operating with enthusiastic Engineers who can’t write bubble sort on their first try but then started hiring using the methods that led to “Cracking the coding interview” and terrible products
    - kingcobraninja 4y ago
      >can’t write bubble sort on their first try lol how do you expect to program if you don't know how every common subroutine works in exhaustive detail?
  - kerpotgh 4y ago
    [dead]
- woooooo 4y ago
  How hard is it to make product decisions for a new browser? "Make it render the page like IE".
  - 4y ago

m3kw9 4y ago

Sundar was probably lied to by whoever pitched bard as demoable

spinningslate 4y ago
Maybe. Or, perhaps, was told an overly-optimistic story that changed as it floated up the hierarchy: engineer: well, yeah, we've got something. It's OK. But it has limitations and needs to be used very carefully. engineer's boss: we've got something. It's OK. AVP: we've got something. VP: We've got something! SVP: We've got something. It's great! CTO: We've got something. It's great! It's just what we need to counter the press noise! CEO: Phew. Great. Get it out there. None of which exonerates Pichai. Given the significance of the threat to the firm, the "code red", the knowledge that he's personally going to take heat, he should've been all over this. Imagine Steve Jobs in a similar situation. He'd have been over it like a rash. So no: Pichai doesn't get away with blaming someone else. His job.
- m3kw9 4y ago
  Maybe he needed to trust his left right hand man to relay him accurate info but acted on a probability

shadowtree 4y ago

He is an operator, not an innovator. Just shows how much of an outlier Nadella really is.

tabtab 4y ago
How is Nadella an innovator? He's just been leveraging corporate dependencies on MS into cloud-world. MS's newer products suck. People only use them because they are bundled with Windows/Azure deals, and thus relatively cheap. MS-Teams is a lesson in How Not To Make A UI.
- belval 4y ago
  I don't think he is an innovator, but he definitely has a better vision than Sundar. All of Microsoft's acquisitions (LinkedIn, GitHub, Mojang) so far were well executed and leveraged properly to help tie together the company's offering. On top of that you have the Microsoft Loves Linux initiative which saw them finally stop pushing their shitty OS everywhere and embrace being a cloud provider which was a smart move. All of that not to say that he's some. kind of god-tier CEO, but he definitely is above-average and above Sundar Pichai who got the CEO role at about the same time (2015) but saw no such "good business move" in the same timespan. He's been mostly content milking the ads revenue.
andromeduck 4y ago
If he's an operator then explain stadia launch/strategy/positioning, over hiring, deprecations, botched layoffs, botched grad/perf, and everything else. Sundar is a politician. He's a fixer and back room power broker. He doesn't give a shit about tech or product.

endisneigh 4y ago

Everyone is of course entitled their opinion, but lately I've noticed people more boldly and frequently thinking they're better than the incumbents, which is interesting.

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

[flagged]

sahila 4y ago
So what race do you think is appropriate? Only white males as they’re least shackled by society?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- rocknor 4y ago
  These nonsense generalizations have no place on HN. Similar cultural norms exist in many European countries, but they are never brought up. Such thinly veiled racism against Asians is nauseating.

bayofpigs 4y ago

[dead]

smarkov 4y ago

Yes, badly. Nothing about Google stands out anymore and they've been rotting from multiple ends for a long time. Search rarely returns credible results and I find myself adding 'site:reddit.com' frequently to at least get some organic discussions about things rather than articles which look like they were sponsored and artificially inflated to the top. They've turned into a joke about releasing something and killing it off a few years later. Android is a nightmare for developers (and users) with how they handle API changes and the Google Play store as a whole. Any kind of customer support is non-existent in basically any of their products. Their hardware is good but software gets worse over time and stagnates (their smart home ecosystem). I still don't trust them for a second with my data. Gmail is fine, Maps are fine, YouTube is... well, we don't really have a competitor and nobody wants to switch because they wouldn't have access to a large audience. Whatever they release I have no faith in it, not with it keeping my data, not with its longevity, not in its reliability.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
the_arun 4y ago
When I search for a keyword, I see an ad for the same product as the first item in search results. For eg. If I search for "rav4", I see "2023 Toyota® RAV4 - Toyota® USA" pointing to toyota.com. I often wonder why show an ad, why can't you show non-ad version of the same? Is it to get commission from Toyota for the click OR Toyota listing an ad for keyword "rav4"?
- crest 4y ago
  Because they get paid for showing the ad.
- alephnerd 4y ago
  Companies pay top dollar to show an ad when someone searches their name, otherwise a competitor could make a paid ad slamming the product. We dealt with this first hand a year ago in my company.

dmitrygr 4y ago

Sundar is a great peace-time leader. He can milk and feed the cash cow Ok-ish. Sundar has never made an actual decision. He waits till a consensus forms and then takes that side. That isn’t the kind of leader you need at times of war. ChatGPT declared a war. Sundar is unfit for this duty.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

Google needed nee CEO the day AWS was released. How can you invent cloud and be out-maneuvered on cloud.

hintymad 4y ago

Did Pichai make his name first in Google by being an excellent PM of Chrome? I wonder why he stopped being a product guy after becoming a CEO. It looks to me that the CEOs of mega successful tech companies are mostly "super PMs". Larry Page, Bezos, Jobs, Nadella (arguably, but his strategy has been cloud and super bundling, which has been very successful), and Musk. I can hardly see what Google's product strategy is. AI for everything certainly is not a product statement.

roncesvalles 4y ago
In organizations you never know whether something succeeded because of the leader or despite the leader.

throw7 4y ago

I think so. Sundar has been pitching "AI" for who knows how long. All the "A.I." stuff dumped on me has annoyed me more than anything. No, I don't want to talk to my phone. And the times I might want to (driving a car)... I used to be able to simply ask maps what my "E.T.A." was and, shock!, it would answer... that's been broken for years now and I'm fairly sure that will never be fixed.

mikymoothrowa 4y ago
This is the same thing that pretty much ended IBM. They had been pitching AI for how long and now they have to sustain themselves on openshift sales.

cheshire137 4y ago

This article is unreadable on mobile because of a huge subscribe modal that appears and whose controls are pushed off screen where I can't even scroll to them.

bilalq 4y ago

A new CEO is needed for a culture shift if nothing else. Google has long been cavalier about their automated systems banning, withholding payments, or otherwise harming users and customers with no recourse to challenge the false positive punishments. They've made a laughing stock of themselves with product launches and sunsets in Chat (GChat, Talk, Hangouts, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Meet, Allo, Duo, Meet, Meet Original, Spaces, etc). They're not really any better in payments (Google Wallet, Android Pay, Google Pay, Google Pay Send, Google Wallet but new this time). Stadia was an amazing product, but I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole because looking at the killed-by-google graveyard made it obvious where it would end up. It's become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Google needs to show that it cares about its customers/users and that it cares about its own products. The willingness to abandon both so casually has hurt its reputation in a way that makes it difficult to trust.

mikymoothrowa 4y ago
Google Pay is huge in India but it is/was a completely different product that started in Google India as Tez but was taken over from the Indian team and ruined. Google claims to operate Pay in dozens of countries with millions of transactions but almost all of them are from India where Google pay is merely a client for UPI

muzz 4y ago

Nothing new in this piece. Same tropes regurgitated.

nicenewtemp84 4y ago

In 2007 when I graduated, I thought Google hired the best of the best. Recently they hired an exgf of mine with a degree from a school that accepts anyone, who gets confused watching TV shows, and has trouble doing basic math.

nicenewtemp84 4y ago
Gotta love downvotes for basic facts, not even opinion.
- necroforest 4y ago
  lol, because whining about your ex is a "basic fact"
  - nicenewtemp84 4y ago
    The things I wrote are facts. She really did get confused watching average TV shows, and couldn't calculate basically anything. And she does work at Google now as some kind of project manager. I am not whining about her. I am whining about the poor hires google makes these days, which might explain the downward trajectory of their products we all see.
tester756 4y ago
why would "school that accepts anyone" from around 2007 would be relevant in 2023? assuming similar age lol
- nicenewtemp84 4y ago
  She was a 2014 grad. But why would it be relevant? Because she wasn't that great of a student and unless something changed since 2018, she wasn't that bright either (hence the confusion following story lines and inability to calculate anything more than simple addition). If colleges don't matter, I'm not sure why so many successful companies paid attention during their starts. Its a pretty good metric to estimate intelligence, not knowledge IMO. I'm sure she's a great project manager though! She was a scrum master for 3 years at another company. One day I asked her what the term scrum stood for? I wasn't in the field at all so I had no idea. But it was an obvious question IMO. She didn't know. Next day I looked it up and learned it's just a rugby term. It came up a month later, and she still didn't know. I cared enough to look it up. She didn't. And it's her job. Now she's at Google. If you think that's not a bad sign, you might work at Google too.

aste-risk 4y ago

If they delay doing this, there's going to be irreversible damage. OTOH, it seems unlikely because they just renewed his contract and incentives in November

untangle 4y ago

To be fair, Microsoft's "AI BING" demo wasn't exactly flawless either. But the popular press didn't seem to notice. https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/microsoft_ai_bing_error https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/microsoft_ai_bing_err... https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23599007/microsoft-bing-ai-mistakes-demo https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23599007/microsoft-bing-a...

spaceman_2020 4y ago

Google Search has become aggressively bad after their last few updates. The top pages are literally just filler BS written by someone with no subject matter expertise or first hand experience. I have no idea how it went so far off the rails so fast.

JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago

Innovation will never come from the largest companies regardless of who is in charge

blululu 4y ago

This piece has a click bait title and focuses exclusively on the last week of tech-news. IMO the answer to the clickbait title is still yes, but the reasons lie in the last 5 years of stagnation and extend far beyond the use of AI in search/information retrieval. Google is a massive company that does a lot more than Search. The simple problem is that Google as a company is languishing without purpose. The incentives do not line up for attention to detail, product excellence or ground breaking tech. Instead they now have a massive sprawling enterprise that is dominated by politics over products.

mikymoothrowa 4y ago
Google used to be the company that delivered us a fast browser, free online video streaming and was going to give absurdly cheaper fiber and wireless internet and affordable yet awesome smartphones. Not anymore.

rllearneratwork 4y ago

Yes. They must regain their "innovator" status. Current CEO is a PM not an innovator.

roncesvalles 4y ago

Every tech company needs to flush their highest level of managers because this cohort was promoted to their positions at a time when tech company stocks saw 20% CAGR growth just for existing. Reminds me of the line from The Godfather 2: "You're not a wartime consigliere, Tom." These aren't wartime CEOs.

pm90 4y ago
This. Times have changed. It’s funny that literally every tech company’s response has been to lay off low level workers who could be re-deployed in different projects but to keep their leadership the same. Now they’re all making the same mistake which is gonna bite them hard a couple of quarters down the road when product development grinds to a halt due to overtaxed and burned out engineers.
- thedougd 4y ago
  Their predecessor tech companies all did the same in the 90s and 00s, then cried through the 10s that they couldn’t find the right talent mix to compete against new tech.

anonyfox 4y ago

the only thing nowadays we can depend on from google: - products: will be buried in the graveyard soon, so NO - tech: might get abandoned or rewritten at any time (angular JS anyone?), so NO - trying to make adblockers and privacy tools harder to use: this is it. yes, I can count on google only on the last part. I only need to de-google from gmail in the coming months, then I am ready to see it burning.

dannyr 4y ago

I use Google not because it's a great product but because I'm locked in or don't have good options.

stephc_int13 4y ago

The fish rots from the head, as they say. Google is in a bad spot, and was in a bad spot well before ChatGPT appeared in the news. I think Pichai is a CFO/accountant, this is not what they need at this point. In practice, I'd like to see Google lose its position, their dominance has been detrimental for the whole tech ecosystem.

mitchitized 4y ago

Whether or not they change CEOs, they need a new business model. They have needed this for decades now, and it shows. Their entire existence relies on GoogleAds. That's it. Nothing else comes even remotely close to GoogleAds revenue to their bottom line. This is why they can be so cavalier discontinuing products, as they don't make money so get cut without a second thought. Search has been so co-opted by this model and dependency on revenue that they are literally killing the one product that makes them money. My take from the outside at least is that GoogleAds revenue is no longer carrying the business (maybe less business, maybe the company grew too fast, maybe market pressure), and now they are forced to make some tough decisions. Although I'd love his paycheck, I am glad I am not Google's CEO. That is a really awful position to be in, IMHO.

rantee 4y ago

Putting aside the product concerns, from my recent Xoogler perspective, they absolutely need a new CEO. Start with a chaotic management style that is constantly reorg'ing and forcing manager changes. I had three managers and four reorgs during my under two years. (YMMV by team but I've heard of others even in product areas who've experienced similar.) You never know when you'll be pulled from a project, projects are developed and then handed-off vs. letting the builders continue to improve them, and promo becomes a political fantasy as you shift around. Reorgs are a fact of enterprise life, but the frequency of them at Google is a huge sign of lack of strategic direction and bad planning. Absorbing HUGE numbers of new employees into this constantly shifting structure is a recipe for disaster. (OTOH, documentation tends to be very good.) And buying up tons of real estate when so many people either WFH full time or are hybrid? Crazy. Then there's the way projects are managed. I never thought I'd miss JIRA so much. There are always too many cooks in the kitchen and everlasting approval processes. To all the amazingly smart, dedicated, and user-focused people still there - you rock. To the board - time to shake things up. [edit - fixed typo]

dheera 4y ago
* shrug * If the employees are happy and customers are happy, they don't need a new CEO. CEOs of companies at that scale are largely just PR puppets anyway, it's the ten thousand other engineers who do the real work. If you want to revolutionize the company, you need to swap out the army of ten thousand people, not the puppet. They shouldn't give a damn about what some armchair critics say about an AI boo-boo. Ask those critics to code something better, if they can push some code commits, then they have a right to criticize, if not, shut up. Yeah, we as a society need innovation, but it doesn't have to happen within Google, new companies can be established for that. We need a new Google, not a new Google CEO.
- ohazi 4y ago
  Other than the pay and the residual prestige from "this is the coolest place to work if you pretend it's still 2004" -- I'm not so sure I'd describe the average Google employee as "happy." "Begrudgingly willing to tolerate it" seems more common.

justizin 4y ago

Yes.

subsubzero 4y ago

I said it before and I'll say it again, take away the search monopoly and Google is the slowest moving and most dysfunctional company in tech. Sundar is doing his best Ballmer impression and what it is truly embarrassing is given Google's supposed "talent" especially in the AI space they are really doing nothing for the billions they are throwing at the problem. I mean just look at the insane amount of articles about one of their top AI engineers, Geoffrey Hinton, so alot of press all fluff so to speak. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/technology/artificial-intelligence-research-toronto.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/technology/artificial-int... https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awa... [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33022768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33022768

Aleksdev 4y ago
“Google is the slowest moving and most dysfunctional company in tech.” That’s a little harsh. Google makes great products like the Google cloud and Gmail. To say they are the most dysfunctional and slow moving company in tech is outlandish.
- subsubzero 4y ago
  If the shoe fits.... Gmail was launched in 2004(almost 20 years ago), and google cloud, well its hemorrhaging money - it lost $3.1B in 2021[1], that's not a successful business in anyone's opinion. [1] - https://www.techradar.com/news/google-cloud-is-still-losing-buckets-of-money https://www.techradar.com/news/google-cloud-is-still-losing-...
  - Aleksdev 4y ago
    Even so, the products are good and Google is far from as bad of a company as your original comment stated.

jeffjobs4000 4y ago

Sundar? The guy who reports into Ruth? Sundar has the CEO title because he's so meek that grandstanding politicians feel bad being too mean to him during congressional hearings. Google's priorities 1 through 10 are to avoid anti-trust messing up their money geysers.

chewz 4y ago
Exactly. Google has no future. but for the moment it generates loads of cash to shareholders. Sundar's only task is to keep it as long as possible. And shareholders on their own will allocate this cash to next Google.

mikymoothrowa 4y ago

For a company that really depends on user click signals, removing the dislike count from Youtube (and making the button pointless) is a amateurish mistake indicating a very broken internal structure. the search UX, especially the top bar where you switch between search types is broken for nearly a decade and they are not able to fix that.

anigbrowl 4y ago
the top bar where you switch between search types I truly wonder what fool decided that it would be a good idea to change the UI depending on what the results were. It's hard to recall a company making such a big bet on dumbing its own products for long.
- mikymoothrowa 4y ago
  that’s not the worst part. The worst part is not fixing it for over a decade despite being called out

smaudet 4y ago

"Unlike Google, Microsoft’s Bing demo was more polished and free of blemishes." Um, not a fan of either system, but pretty sure this has been shown to be patently false... There was a c-acm post on here just the other day about this. This is some click-bait.

janvdberg 4y ago

Just a side-note but Om has 1.2 million Twitter followers but the poll only attracted 170 votes (!?). Something seems way off here.

nus07 4y ago

Sundar has Mckinsified and MBAfied Google.He faces intense spotlight because his background is McKinsey and Product Management . In core engineering and tech circles that’s the ultimate enemy and sell out. IMO Sundar hasn’t demonstrated the type of tech leadership like Satya or Zuck has. I am no fan of Zuck but he has a product he wants to pursue ( Metaverse) and is sticking to his guns to make it happen . Sundar just comes across as a pleasant McKinsey consultant who has seen ads and search as a cash cow and is focused on extracting as much cash from it to appeal to shareholders and others . There is no underlying tech vision or guts.

tombert 4y ago

Google's CEO claimed that he's taking "full responsibility" for the massive layoffs they went through. I have no idea what the fuck that actually means, but I would think resignation and being replaced would probably be a reasonable way to take responsibility for his reckless gambling with peoples' lives.

Aleksdev 4y ago

I feel like Google is just not focused. They are branching off into many directions.

JohnFen 4y ago

I don't think that the problems with Google are the result of the CEO, specifically. They're the result of the board of directors and the investors.

cannabis_sam 4y ago

Of course they do!?! How is this even a question? Unless you’re a run of the mill mba grifter desperately trying to push short-term “shareholder value”..

more_corn 4y ago

Yeah

thedougd 4y ago

I’ve been pulling away from Google products more and more over the last few years. Their quality is in steady decline. It’s very frustrating and I’m hesitant to use them for something new. I’ve even noticed non-tech folks are noticing the decline as well. When you combine the declining quality with a lack of innovative new products, the public’s privacy concerns, and potentially the awakening of advertisers to poor ROI, there’s a clear picture of trouble ahead for Google.

_5uxp 4y ago

Google is the new Yahoo, just a lot bigger.