My impression from the outside is indeed that the man is a problem. And part of the problem is that the problem is allowed to continue to exist by the Alphabet

My impression from the outside is indeed that the man is a problem. And part of the problem is that the problem is allowed to continue to exist by the Alphabet board. Which means the real problem is over there. They are just looking at the stock price, which is of course fine. Until it isn't. I think the whole point of Sundar always was that he's very obviously not a leader. He's a care taker. I used to work in a big multi national (Nokia) with a care taker CEO (Olli Pekka Kallasvuo) who took over from the man that grew Nokia from a large but insignificant Finnish company to the smart phone behemoth it was around 2005 (Jorma Ollila). Kallasvuo presided over the emergence of the Apple's iphone and Google's Android as the two new competitors that ultimately killed it off. And did nothing whatsoever about it. The man was a bean counter whose job it was to protect the stock price. By the time the Nokia board (under leadership of the former CEO, Ollila) appointed a new CEO (Stephen Elop, an MS executive) with the clear intention to orchestrate some collaboration with and the eventual takeover by MS, it was already too late. Nokia flailed for a few years and MS eventually pulled the plug a year after acquiring what remained of the phone business unit for next to nothing. By then the stock price had tanked, market share was in the gutter, and the value was gone. Everything the board thought they knew about smart phones was no longer relevant. Ollila got removed from the board in the aftermath. People blame CEOs, but it's the boards of these companies that appoint these CEOs, protect them, and decline to fire them when they fail. That's where the problems are. Nothing changes until you fix the boards. It's always fixable with the right people and leadership. Just look at MS post Ballmer. In Alphabet's case, the two founders are on the board and they are the ones that put Sundar in their place. Maybe it's time for them to move on? Of course the issue is that they have a lot of shares (class B) in Alphabet. Institutional investors have about 35% of the class A shares and the rest is publicly traded. So, nothing happens until the stock nosedives. By which time it might be too late.