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Your first quote leaves off the important bit: against the headwinds of Google culture. I agree, the first half of the sentence is a common scenario among CEOs,

Your first quote leaves off the important bit: against the headwinds of Google culture. I agree, the first half of the sentence is a common scenario among CEOs, it's the 2nd bit that makes it especially challenging. I disagree that it was "fine" because the people who were respected and held up as prime examples of Googlers – for decades – almost always had nothing to do with the ads business. This sends a signal to the rest that the ads business doesn't really matter, it's not the important work, it's akin to the janitorial work that has to happen so the rest of us can work here. If you do that long enough you end up with people optimizing towards things that aren't aligned with the needs of the business. It was on autopilot, relatively, compared to other areas.

burningChrome 2y ago
>> Your first quote leaves off the important bit: against the headwinds of Google culture. I would also add all of the companies that were bought by Google in hopes they would ease some of the laser focus on their search/ad business and never panned out and then were subsequently killed by them. I think this one of the overlooked issues they've had. When they've repeatedly tried to venture into other areas by buying smaller companies in hopes they could grow their revenue and create another revenue stream, the failure rate of those companies is pretty staggering. All three of these have not made it easy for them to try and re-brand themselves as anything but a search/ad company.