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What's Sundar's goal for Google? They seem to be aimless since he took the helm.
by tapoxi 4y ago
What's Sundar's goal for Google? They seem to be aimless since he took the helm.
- Palpatineli 4y agoEspecially compared to Nadella, who shows that someone not from the the founders’ circle, a corporate ladder climber, can lead an IT company with great vision too.
- foobiekr 4y agoMicrosoft dealt with with the too-rich-to-work problem and the founders-and-earlies-lost-interest problems in the 80s and 90s. "FYIFV" (despite being a bit of a tech urban legend) and "Quietly Vesting Disease" (QVD) and all that. They're an actual grown up company that knows how to build and vet leaders. Google is not a grown up company - it runs the way a 2nd generation dynastic family runs their businesses - haphazard and sloppy and entirely surviving because of a cash cow and nothing else. Plus, they have a fairly substantial crew with "rest and vest" as a mantra at least for the folks I knew there prior to 2008..
- m00dy 4y agoHe will be fired very soon
- throwntoday 4y agoHopefully. I can't think of a single product that has grown because of him so much as in spite of him.
- Zigurd 4y agoHow is that different from everything after Google Search. Alphabet is even structured around the idea of not being able to pick winners. I can discern some long term strategy in Android Automotive and Waymo, but nothing is sacred when it comes to cutting off products that are not growing.
- KoftaBob 4y agoIt's one thing to say that Sundar hasn't led Google to innovate much in his tenure (I agree there), but to say Google hasn't picked any winners since Google Search? - Gmail (largest email service at 1.5B users) - YouTube (by far the biggest video sharing platform) - Android (most used operating system in the world by number of devices) - Google Maps (maps service with the largest userbase) - YouTube TV - The whole Google Drive Suite - Chromecast/Android TV - Chromebooks (made huge inroads in the k-12 education space)
- Zigurd 4y agoWhat I mean by "not picking winners" is that Google admits they can't foresee, for example, the acquisition of YouTube turning into a first-tier social network. Just like they could not foresee Orkut and G+ not becoming successful social networks.
- KoftaBob 4y agoFair, though it seems more like Google just got in their own way with G+ by keeping it invite only for waaaaay too long.
- throwntoday 4y ago> Just like they could not foresee Orkut and G+ not becoming successful social networks. They put minimal effort into their products and prematurely sunset them if they don't perform well enough. Their organization is either so fragmented or toxic that they launch products that are competing against eachother. It really does seem like there are only morons at the helm. A company with as much resources as Google should not continue to fail so badly. My suspicion is as Jobs said of Apple during his time away, the company is being totally run by the product guys not the engineers.
- ksec 4y ago>They seem to be aimless I would argue for 95% of Google's existence they have been pretty much aimless.
- nbar1 4y agoThen please provide your argument.
- Arnt 4y agoRight. They develop services, see which ones attract a large audience, and close those that don't. https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com. I like it, personally speaking. Google has a lot of power, and it's an approach that minimise the use of that power to push people around.
- kramerger 4y agoA little bit of everything until they figure out what to do. Samsung and other OEMs get a lot of crap for how they handle android. But they are really the ones driving innovation here.
- piyush_soni 4y agoThat's exactly what I think. I personally also find him very uninspiring, it looks like he's basically just 'maintaining' the company on auto-pilot mode. No out of the world new ideas, and now the company is losing on the very field they were seemingly far-far ahead than the rest of the world.
- bowsamic 4y ago10 years ago, Google was one of the most exciting companies in the world to me, culminating in that amazing Google Chrome comic https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/ https://www.scottmccloud.com/googlechrome/ Their products and software seemed genuinely inspiring. Now, it seems to just be maintenance or death. Seemingly happens with all once-loved tech companies to some degree. It's quite sad but I guess time moves on. Totally self-inflicted for them though, they decided to stop moving forward
- cma 4y agoDeepMind's stuff has all been impressive.
- mdorazio 4y ago1) where can I use it? Compare this to what’s come out of OpenAI in the last two years. It’s like science fair vs. a company making actual tools. 2) how is it helping Alphabet’s bottom line? I haven’t seen it helping here either.
- mirker 4y agoAlphafold is open and seems fundamentally transformative in the science space. GPT is nice but it’s a smart meme-generator at the moment. I don’t disagree with the impact on G’s bottom line, though.
- uejfiweun 4y agoGonna have to disagree about GPT. I’ve been using it as a tutor to learn ML on the side, and it’s literally the best tutor I’ve ever had.
- vxNsr 4y agoSeems his main goal was avoiding getting anything on the record.
- ranting-moth 4y agoOr, if it got on, deleting those records after 24 hours.
- egeozcan 4y agoIf gods of chaos decide give a future where google completely gets broken up a chance, I'd be massively pissed if someone doesn't detach google reader and bring it online just to make a point.
- ant6n 4y agoWell, blogs are dead so bringing back reader won’t be all that useful.
- musictubes 4y agoThere are plenty of good RSS services now. In fact I’d argue there is more choice and higher quality now than when Reader was around. I use Newsblur as my aggregator and either net news wire on my Mac and Unread on my iPhone and ipad. I’m glad Google got out of the RSS business.
- egeozcan 4y agoI know, that's why I said they should revive it just to make a point, not that people would prefer it anymore.
- nus07 4y agoSundar is a McKinsey consultant who is very pleasant and agreeable and can keep a boat steady while maximizing shareholder return. Unfortunately there isn’t much innovation happening . Google needs a Larry Page or Musk like character back at the helm.
- oldgradstudent 4y ago> while maximizing shareholder return. That's not maximizing shareholder return. That's locally maximizing shareholder return.
- KingOfCoders 4y ago"That's locally maximizing shareholder return" As shareholders jump from ship to ship, there is nothing beyond short term shareholder return.
- oldgradstudent 4y agoMany long term Apple investors view things differently.
- RoyGBivCap 4y agoI bought Apple, nvidia, google, amd, intel, and motorola in 2005. Apple smoked all of them.
- KingOfCoders 4y ago"Many long term Apple investors view things differently." Apple long term investors are a string of short term investors. Of course there are people with a long term view or institutional investors who buy and keep their stock for years. But most investors, if Apple stock drops enough will sell, and new investors will buy at the new level.
- TrackerFF 4y agomaximizing returns while minimizing risk.
- joseph_grobbles 4y agoSundar is a caretaker who got credited for simple inertia: The momentum in place before he took the reigns were predestined to grow earnings for years, but suddenly Pichai gets to pretend it's all him.
- oeoeoe 4y ago[flagged]
- m3kw9 4y agoGoogle hasn't done jack in terms of innovation since he took over. They did close out a few moon shots. but nothing to note.
- philistine 4y agoIt's werid to me that no one has made the self-evident comparison: Sundar is like Steve Ballmer was for Microsoft. Coming in right after the founders and trying to raise the moats of the exisiting products instead of creating new moats. Google Stadia is a similar failure to Ballmer's late Windows Live initiatives.
- krade 4y agoBad comparison. Ballmer launched Azure, Surface, Bing, Xbox and Office on iOS and Office365. He was also the one go all-in on the cloud and to start the shift towards embracing Open Source. Pretty much everything that people attribute to Nadella either launched or started under Ballmer.
- kccqzy 4y agoMaybe finally the board will wake up and find a replacement for Sundar this year. I thought Googlers were internally very unhappy about Sundar for a long time now.
- bushbaba 4y agoTo maximize shareholder value which he’s done. He’s the balmer (but worse) of our generation.
- jillesvangurp 4y agoNot sure. The real question is what the Google founders and board want and expect. Sundar is just looking after things for them. The reason he got the job is that he was never going to do more than that. But you might legitimately ask at this point if that's enough. And he's been there long enough that he could be replaced without anyone losing too much face. Surround it with some corporate euphemisms and get some fresh blood in and move on. I would not be surprised if they are already looking around. It worked for Microsoft obviously. This is quite a coup for Satya Nadella. And he got that one on merit. MS has no stake in Android (they declined to get into that after killing Windows Phone). Also, he hit the ground running after Steve Ballmer was retired. Not that hard of course after Ballmer but he did a few decisive things early on that all seem to have mostly worked out. The Linkedin acquisition; fixing .Net, re-establishing MS as a bonafide OSS player with the Github acquisition and VS-Code. And then making a smart investment in OpenAI which they are now riding to success. All great moves. I'd say, Google is in the same boat right now. Lots of obvious potential, an extended period of a bit rudderless performance, missed boats, and no clear direction or vision. Fix that and it could go somewhere else again. Doing more of the same isn't going to be anywhere near good enough. They seem to be stuck playing a game of whack-a-mole in terms of strategy and ever responding to what others are doing and never quite catching up with that instead of initiating things themselves and leading.
- AndrewKemendo 4y agoThe same job as every public company CEO: Keep their job by prioritizing the stock price, board happiness and keeping activist shareholders from causing problems