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Pichai has been a very poor CEO but Google's position was so strong that it is still doing fine. I am sure he is in the founder's good graces so as long as the

Pichai has been a very poor CEO but Google's position was so strong that it is still doing fine. I am sure he is in the founder's good graces so as long as the company's stock takes a big dive he is gonna stay at the helm and keep raking in the big bucks.

pinkmuffinere 7mo ago
> Pichai has been a very poor CEO Why do you say this? I’m not familiar with him, and really haven’t paid much attention to Google’s strategy beyond cultural awareness, but I think Google has done well with staying competitive in AI, is dominating the self driving battle with Waymo, and has mostly kept its good brand intact (no small feat when you are so big). Are there some big mis-steps I don’t know about?
- rybosworld 7mo ago
  Sundar was at the helm when the decision to worsen search results for the sake of ad revenue was made. Previously, the two concerns were "firewalled" so as to prevent the money-generating side of the company from eroding the user experience. This is a theme that's been at the core of every Titan of Industry's decline. That is: chasing of short-term results with disregard for the long term consequences. Alphabet is just so big and dominate in search that it will likely take quite a long time for the negative effects to appear. And they have other large businesses that haven't been as aggressively enshitified (Youtube, GCP). See Intel, Boeing, GE etc.
  - gtowey 7mo ago
    It's like when the Titanic struck the iceberg and the crew mostly thought the ship would be fine. Just because they're still making money doesn't mean the company hasn't already been damaged beyond repair. But in this case by the time it's clear the damage is fatal, those at the helm have jumped ship with piles of cash.
- turzmo 7mo ago
  I would argue that Google has had declining quality in search results, bordering on completely unusable in the past few years, and that has resulted in people using LLMs for things that they would have searched for years ago. Although they are competitive in AI, I think it is surprising that their product continues to frustrate people and that they are a distant second place.
  - pinkmuffinere 7mo ago
    Without taking a stance on whether their search has improved or degraded, we can observe that the same claim (“search is so degraded it’s unusable”) has been common for like 5 years at this point. If it’s really such a problem, why haven’t people already switched? Google’s search is at 90% market share [1]. Surely if it was perceived as a problem to customers there should be some measurable effect? [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
    - jordanb 7mo ago
      The only real competitor is bing (other search engines like DDG are just repackaged bing) and Microsoft is pursuing the same strategy as Google.
      - replooda 7mo ago
        What about Kagi?
        pinkmuffinere 7mo ago
        No offense to Kagi, but they don’t rank in the top 6. They are behind even Baidu, which I had forgotten exists. I think they have good mind-share among power users, but probably not in the general population.
        replooda 7mo ago
        But the question is whether or not Kagi is a competitor — not just in regards to the market share it currently holds, but what it could come to hold. Let's see where it is next year.
- tombert 7mo ago
  Not the person you're replying to, but something that has bothered me about him (and a lot of SV tech), is how they did rapid over-hiring in 2022, then a year later fire a bunch of people, while he claimed he took "full responsibility", but still got a nice happy bonus that year. I'm not sure I know what "taking full responsibility" actually means, because to me it seems like if you have to lay off thousands of people in a year, that would be a good reason to not get a bonus. These are peoples' lives. People almost certainly quit decent jobs because there was a prestige factor in working for Google, potentially moved to the overpriced world of California, just to be fired less than a year later because apparently Pichai thought that interest rates would never increase and there would be free money for forever. These people have families, and they almost certainly thought that moving to Google would be a "stable" position, because it's one of the biggest SV companies. I don't know if he's good for the stock price, that's tougher to gauge, but I do think he's a short-sighted jerk.
  - rkomorn 7mo ago
    The "I take full responsibility" thing has been entirely meaningless. I guess it's supposed to convey that it's not the laid-off folks' fault, and that it was "his decision", but as you said: "taking full responsibility" without any real impact to his life? I may as well take full responsibility for the layoffs. It'd mean just as much.
    - tombert 7mo ago
      Yeah, that's the thing; if he's acknowledging that it was his decision to do this, then maybe he shouldn't be getting bonuses and maybe be fired? Why are the regular schmucks the ones being punished for his terrible decisions and not him?
      - tasuki 7mo ago
        Maybe it was the right decision at the time to lay them off? I think that's why he got the bonus, actually! I'm sure the layoff was difficult for him as well: he certainly lost a lot of goodwill with his workforce and I'm sure the internal politics were tricky for anyone involved. No one is getting "punished" - there was no promise of ten years of employment from Google. Like when an employee leaves, you wouldn't say they're "punishing" the employer.
- fragmede 7mo ago
  They missed the boat with ChatGPT, the research paper for it initially came from Google. There's no real focus between Android, ChromeOS, and Fuschia. The AI results box was possible a decade ago, but not giving money to the sites the info was gotten from was too far a stretch. How I feel is that the company doesn't really know what it's doing, there's no real leadership. KilledByGoogle is a website. With Stadia the technology was there but didn't have the right backing to make it in the market. Though it turns out those GPUs are useful for GCP for AI, so that might have been the real reason. He's just not much of a leader. He doesn't need to go full Elon, but some amount of character would be nice.
smt88 7mo ago
Pichai is being evaluated for his effect on stock price. His shareholders don't care if every product and service they offer has gotten worse for users in the meantime. Gemini keeping pace with Claude and ChatGPT is clearly some kind of management victory, because Zuckerberg and Musk don't seem to be able to do it despite having limitless cash to spend.
- CuriouslyC 7mo ago
  Don't give Pichai credit for that. Google had the strongest ML research org on the planet before he took over, and it had Demis, arguably the best researcher in the field (and it had Geoffrey Hinton before that). The fact that goog was so far behind OAI despite Demis blazing frontiers was a major management failure. Sundar's enshittification has also juiced short term share prices at the cost of long term health. It might turn out to be a decent decision for search because it's in the midst of being disrupted, but that's a happy accident for Sundar, not 4d chess (and you can argue the enshittification hastened the disruption).
- JCharante 7mo ago
  naive question: which product and service has gotten worse? Like they removed the youtube dislike button what else? Everything seems to be getting better. Tying incentives to Waymo is almost unfair because Waymo is amazing and just keeps getting better.
  - smt88 7mo ago
    Text search (without Gemini) and Gmail are much worse than they used to be. Android is less open, Chrome doesn't allow proper ad-blocking, YouTube has insane ads if you don't have Premium.
dwa3592 7mo ago
>> Pichai has been a very poor CEO and then immediately follows with "but Google's position was so strong". Isn't it a CEO's job to make sure the company's position is strong among other responsibilities?
- MikeNotThePope 7mo ago
  I believe that the parent comment is saying Google was in a strong position before Pichal took over.
- shevy-java 7mo ago
  I think this refers less so on "Pichai did a great job" and more that Google is in a good position right now. One COULD say that Pichai is responsible for this - but probably many other semi-competent CEOs could have done about an equally solid job here. Google would have profited either way.
mountainriver 7mo ago
Pichai has been a terrible CEO, he almost lost the AI race before it started because he was too focused on Google’s consumer products. I was shocked they kept him around. He’s very much just a money manager like Tim Cook or Steve Ballmer. Those types are great in the short term but risk the entire company’s future long term
- nilkn 7mo ago
  I'm surprised people still think this. Google has the strongest position of any company in the world on AI. They have expertise and capability across the entire stack from chips to data centers to fundamental research to frontier models. Just because they weren't first-to-market with a chatbot doesn't mean they almost lost or made some terrible durable blunder. That's about Google, though. The picture about Sundar specifically is harder to evaluate. The pessimistic take is that Google had that position already and Sundar failed to proactively lead through a fundamental product shift, forcing the company onto the defensive for some time. The optimistic take is that Sundar, having occupied the top spot since 2015, prioritized investments in the company's overall technology development, then successfully executed a rapid product pivot when the market changed, securing a dominant position in both research and product that nobody else can compete with long-term.
  - loudmax 7mo ago
    All of Google's advantages in AI are despite Sundar Pichai's leadership, not because of it.
    - nilkn 7mo ago
      That's not clear to me. He's been in charge for over a decade, and the company he's in charge of has the most dominant position in AI in the world.
  - mountainriver 7mo ago
    People give him way too many breaks, he's a money manager. He was asleep at the wheel when OpenAI absolutely steamrolled them, even though they very easily could have won that race.
lateforwork 7mo ago
Poor CEO my abs. When ChatGPT came out Microsoft was singing victory songs, and predicted Google's imminent death. 3 years later Google has one of the best models and Microsoft is still borrowing OpenAI's model. Not only that, Google is running their models on their own hardware, not Nvidia's.
- KellyCriterion 7mo ago
  my bet is: - Google will be #1 because of sher data amount - Anthropic will be #2 because of the best product (whatever this may mean in the future) - Microsoft will be #3, because of enough cash to follow
  - lateforwork 7mo ago
    What data does Google have that OpenAI can't get at?
    - wil421 7mo ago
      Android too.
    - KellyCriterion 7mo ago
      e.g. years of tracking: Movement data etc., as simple & first example
    - alephnerd 7mo ago
      Enterprise Distribution thanks to GCP. Consumer distribution thanks to Android. SMB distribution thanks to GSuite. And non-western and non-Mandarin language support (the only other competitors are Indian, Emirati, and Saudi sovereign models).
    - astrophage 7mo ago
      the whole of youtube. (including the private stuff.) edit: +gmail/google docs/google drive
    - bnchrch 7mo ago
shevy-java 7mo ago
I kind of agree. Google's trajectory is going upwards. Unfortunately so.
KellyCriterion 7mo ago
I remember Pichai mainly for his "AI now first everything" in 2015, destroying Google search as a reliable channel to acquisit users somehow for free.
- kingofmen 7mo ago
  That may have been bad for users, but you can hardly claim it was bad for the company - not even in the long run. Ten years is like 40% of Google's lifetime, that is the long run! And if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision. Dislike AI by all means, but you can't say it's not the Current Big Thing or that Google is doing badly because of it. To see that coming so early as 2015 looks rather skilful to me. I did not know this about Pichai and if true, it makes me feel rather better about his leadership.
  - vitus 7mo ago
    > if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision. Also note that 7 years later, when ChatGPT came out, built on top of Google Brain research (transformers), Google was caught flat-footed. Even supposing that Pichai really had the right vision a decade ago, he completely failed in leading its execution until a serious threat to the company's core business model materialized.
  - KellyCriterion 7mo ago
    Not sure if the days of SEO spam where that much worse than todays AI spam? :-D
nashashmi 7mo ago
I don't like him either but he is definitely exchanging Google's future positions and cashing it in for profit now, which reflects positively on him.

pinkmuffinere 7mo ago

> Pichai has been a very poor CEO Why do you say this? I’m not familiar with him, and really haven’t paid much attention to Google’s strategy beyond cultural awareness, but I think Google has done well with staying competitive in AI, is dominating the self driving battle with Waymo, and has mostly kept its good brand intact (no small feat when you are so big). Are there some big mis-steps I don’t know about?

rybosworld 7mo ago
Sundar was at the helm when the decision to worsen search results for the sake of ad revenue was made. Previously, the two concerns were "firewalled" so as to prevent the money-generating side of the company from eroding the user experience. This is a theme that's been at the core of every Titan of Industry's decline. That is: chasing of short-term results with disregard for the long term consequences. Alphabet is just so big and dominate in search that it will likely take quite a long time for the negative effects to appear. And they have other large businesses that haven't been as aggressively enshitified (Youtube, GCP). See Intel, Boeing, GE etc.
- gtowey 7mo ago
  It's like when the Titanic struck the iceberg and the crew mostly thought the ship would be fine. Just because they're still making money doesn't mean the company hasn't already been damaged beyond repair. But in this case by the time it's clear the damage is fatal, those at the helm have jumped ship with piles of cash.
turzmo 7mo ago
I would argue that Google has had declining quality in search results, bordering on completely unusable in the past few years, and that has resulted in people using LLMs for things that they would have searched for years ago. Although they are competitive in AI, I think it is surprising that their product continues to frustrate people and that they are a distant second place.
- pinkmuffinere 7mo ago
  Without taking a stance on whether their search has improved or degraded, we can observe that the same claim (“search is so degraded it’s unusable”) has been common for like 5 years at this point. If it’s really such a problem, why haven’t people already switched? Google’s search is at 90% market share [1]. Surely if it was perceived as a problem to customers there should be some measurable effect? [1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
  - jordanb 7mo ago
    The only real competitor is bing (other search engines like DDG are just repackaged bing) and Microsoft is pursuing the same strategy as Google.
    - replooda 7mo ago
      What about Kagi?
      - pinkmuffinere 7mo ago
        No offense to Kagi, but they don’t rank in the top 6. They are behind even Baidu, which I had forgotten exists. I think they have good mind-share among power users, but probably not in the general population.
        replooda 7mo ago
        But the question is whether or not Kagi is a competitor — not just in regards to the market share it currently holds, but what it could come to hold. Let's see where it is next year.
tombert 7mo ago
Not the person you're replying to, but something that has bothered me about him (and a lot of SV tech), is how they did rapid over-hiring in 2022, then a year later fire a bunch of people, while he claimed he took "full responsibility", but still got a nice happy bonus that year. I'm not sure I know what "taking full responsibility" actually means, because to me it seems like if you have to lay off thousands of people in a year, that would be a good reason to not get a bonus. These are peoples' lives. People almost certainly quit decent jobs because there was a prestige factor in working for Google, potentially moved to the overpriced world of California, just to be fired less than a year later because apparently Pichai thought that interest rates would never increase and there would be free money for forever. These people have families, and they almost certainly thought that moving to Google would be a "stable" position, because it's one of the biggest SV companies. I don't know if he's good for the stock price, that's tougher to gauge, but I do think he's a short-sighted jerk.
- rkomorn 7mo ago
  The "I take full responsibility" thing has been entirely meaningless. I guess it's supposed to convey that it's not the laid-off folks' fault, and that it was "his decision", but as you said: "taking full responsibility" without any real impact to his life? I may as well take full responsibility for the layoffs. It'd mean just as much.
  - tombert 7mo ago
    Yeah, that's the thing; if he's acknowledging that it was his decision to do this, then maybe he shouldn't be getting bonuses and maybe be fired? Why are the regular schmucks the ones being punished for his terrible decisions and not him?
    - tasuki 7mo ago
      Maybe it was the right decision at the time to lay them off? I think that's why he got the bonus, actually! I'm sure the layoff was difficult for him as well: he certainly lost a lot of goodwill with his workforce and I'm sure the internal politics were tricky for anyone involved. No one is getting "punished" - there was no promise of ten years of employment from Google. Like when an employee leaves, you wouldn't say they're "punishing" the employer.
fragmede 7mo ago
They missed the boat with ChatGPT, the research paper for it initially came from Google. There's no real focus between Android, ChromeOS, and Fuschia. The AI results box was possible a decade ago, but not giving money to the sites the info was gotten from was too far a stretch. How I feel is that the company doesn't really know what it's doing, there's no real leadership. KilledByGoogle is a website. With Stadia the technology was there but didn't have the right backing to make it in the market. Though it turns out those GPUs are useful for GCP for AI, so that might have been the real reason. He's just not much of a leader. He doesn't need to go full Elon, but some amount of character would be nice.

smt88 7mo ago

Pichai is being evaluated for his effect on stock price. His shareholders don't care if every product and service they offer has gotten worse for users in the meantime. Gemini keeping pace with Claude and ChatGPT is clearly some kind of management victory, because Zuckerberg and Musk don't seem to be able to do it despite having limitless cash to spend.

CuriouslyC 7mo ago
Don't give Pichai credit for that. Google had the strongest ML research org on the planet before he took over, and it had Demis, arguably the best researcher in the field (and it had Geoffrey Hinton before that). The fact that goog was so far behind OAI despite Demis blazing frontiers was a major management failure. Sundar's enshittification has also juiced short term share prices at the cost of long term health. It might turn out to be a decent decision for search because it's in the midst of being disrupted, but that's a happy accident for Sundar, not 4d chess (and you can argue the enshittification hastened the disruption).
JCharante 7mo ago
naive question: which product and service has gotten worse? Like they removed the youtube dislike button what else? Everything seems to be getting better. Tying incentives to Waymo is almost unfair because Waymo is amazing and just keeps getting better.
- smt88 7mo ago
  Text search (without Gemini) and Gmail are much worse than they used to be. Android is less open, Chrome doesn't allow proper ad-blocking, YouTube has insane ads if you don't have Premium.

dwa3592 7mo ago

>> Pichai has been a very poor CEO and then immediately follows with "but Google's position was so strong". Isn't it a CEO's job to make sure the company's position is strong among other responsibilities?

MikeNotThePope 7mo ago
I believe that the parent comment is saying Google was in a strong position before Pichal took over.
shevy-java 7mo ago
I think this refers less so on "Pichai did a great job" and more that Google is in a good position right now. One COULD say that Pichai is responsible for this - but probably many other semi-competent CEOs could have done about an equally solid job here. Google would have profited either way.

mountainriver 7mo ago

Pichai has been a terrible CEO, he almost lost the AI race before it started because he was too focused on Google’s consumer products. I was shocked they kept him around. He’s very much just a money manager like Tim Cook or Steve Ballmer. Those types are great in the short term but risk the entire company’s future long term

nilkn 7mo ago
I'm surprised people still think this. Google has the strongest position of any company in the world on AI. They have expertise and capability across the entire stack from chips to data centers to fundamental research to frontier models. Just because they weren't first-to-market with a chatbot doesn't mean they almost lost or made some terrible durable blunder. That's about Google, though. The picture about Sundar specifically is harder to evaluate. The pessimistic take is that Google had that position already and Sundar failed to proactively lead through a fundamental product shift, forcing the company onto the defensive for some time. The optimistic take is that Sundar, having occupied the top spot since 2015, prioritized investments in the company's overall technology development, then successfully executed a rapid product pivot when the market changed, securing a dominant position in both research and product that nobody else can compete with long-term.
- loudmax 7mo ago
  All of Google's advantages in AI are despite Sundar Pichai's leadership, not because of it.
  - nilkn 7mo ago
    That's not clear to me. He's been in charge for over a decade, and the company he's in charge of has the most dominant position in AI in the world.
- mountainriver 7mo ago
  People give him way too many breaks, he's a money manager. He was asleep at the wheel when OpenAI absolutely steamrolled them, even though they very easily could have won that race.

lateforwork 7mo ago

Poor CEO my abs. When ChatGPT came out Microsoft was singing victory songs, and predicted Google's imminent death. 3 years later Google has one of the best models and Microsoft is still borrowing OpenAI's model. Not only that, Google is running their models on their own hardware, not Nvidia's.

KellyCriterion 7mo ago
my bet is: - Google will be #1 because of sher data amount - Anthropic will be #2 because of the best product (whatever this may mean in the future) - Microsoft will be #3, because of enough cash to follow
- lateforwork 7mo ago
  What data does Google have that OpenAI can't get at?
  - wil421 7mo ago
    Android too.
  - KellyCriterion 7mo ago
    e.g. years of tracking: Movement data etc., as simple & first example
  - alephnerd 7mo ago
    Enterprise Distribution thanks to GCP. Consumer distribution thanks to Android. SMB distribution thanks to GSuite. And non-western and non-Mandarin language support (the only other competitors are Indian, Emirati, and Saudi sovereign models).
  - astrophage 7mo ago
    the whole of youtube. (including the private stuff.) edit: +gmail/google docs/google drive
  - bnchrch 7mo ago

shevy-java 7mo ago

I kind of agree. Google's trajectory is going upwards. Unfortunately so.

KellyCriterion 7mo ago

I remember Pichai mainly for his "AI now first everything" in 2015, destroying Google search as a reliable channel to acquisit users somehow for free.

kingofmen 7mo ago
That may have been bad for users, but you can hardly claim it was bad for the company - not even in the long run. Ten years is like 40% of Google's lifetime, that is the long run! And if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision. Dislike AI by all means, but you can't say it's not the Current Big Thing or that Google is doing badly because of it. To see that coming so early as 2015 looks rather skilful to me. I did not know this about Pichai and if true, it makes me feel rather better about his leadership.
- vitus 7mo ago
  > if indeed he went all-in on AI in 2015, that seems to me like a damn near prophetic vision. Also note that 7 years later, when ChatGPT came out, built on top of Google Brain research (transformers), Google was caught flat-footed. Even supposing that Pichai really had the right vision a decade ago, he completely failed in leading its execution until a serious threat to the company's core business model materialized.
- KellyCriterion 7mo ago
  Not sure if the days of SEO spam where that much worse than todays AI spam? :-D

nashashmi 7mo ago

I don't like him either but he is definitely exchanging Google's future positions and cashing it in for profit now, which reflects positively on him.