14 ms·

Larry Page Reorgs Staff, Anoints Sundar Pichai as New Product Czar

162 points by foobarqux 12y ago

subpixel 12y ago
I don't envy the man. Just last night I led a Google+ "Hangout On Air" for a tech meetup I organize. The whole universe around Google+ products and related tools is so dense, opaque, and counter-intuitive I felt like Bill Gates trying to use Moviemaker(1) in 2003. (1)[http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-epic-bill-gates-e-mail-rant/ http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-...]
- yuhong 12y ago
  Yea, I am glad Vic Gundotra was fired. I wonder why wasn't he fired earlier.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - salimmadjd 12y ago
    Yeah, I'm also glad they fired Vic. And yes, @selmnoo of course Vic is going to say positive things. One, he has no reasons to say anything negative, google gave him such an amazing opportunity; and two, he is a professional executive and corporate savvy. He will never say anything negative publicly, it'll be a career suicide. Google has one huge problem in general when it comes to hiring. I call them the China of tech companies. They have a lot of engineers and a large infrastructure so they can copy anything that works and use their scale to get market share. Hearing from friends who have interviewed with Google, it seems to me they are good at hiring great engineers, they've hired bunch of MBAs but they're not able to hire product-driven entrepreneurs or give them space to shine.
    - cromwellian 12y ago
      I think it's a little unfair to accuse Google of copying anything that works. Google moves too slowly these days, often I watch as they work on a product ages before someone else comes up with it, but they take so long to launch that they're passed up by startups, and by the time they launch it looks like they're a copy cat. Just to give you an example, Inbox precedes MailBox by years. I joined Google in 2009 and they were working its various incarnations even back then. Also, doing what other people do is not necessarily "copying". When Google entered the Search market, there were plenty of search engines. They didn't "copy" search, they make their own. When they introduced Chrome, there were plenty of browsers, but they put their own spin on it. It's not just about the ideas, but about their implementation and execution that matter.
    - hkmurakami 12y ago
      >they've hired bunch of MBAs but they're not able to hire product-driven entrepreneurs or give them space to shine. Possibly related to why they acquihire so much?
      - justincormack 12y ago
        No, I don't think they can acqui-hire them effectively either.
    - pas 12y ago
      Why is this so hard? They were the by the book power-geek company, measure, iterate, profit. Search is more like a platform, not a product, so let's look at GMail the first product that comes to mind, with the many gigabytes and proper IMAP/POP3 access they went all in. Filtering and search, labels and labs, plus it meant people were always logged in even while searching and looking at ads on 3rd party sites (and even though Blogger is and older Google product, not everyone had a blogger account, and I don't know how well integrated that was back in 2002-2003). Then Maps, with all the bells and whistles. Analytics, you still can do arbitrary dimensions and metrics with it, drive it from a simple API, etc. Calendar, boldly supports ICAL, XML, RSS and so on. And compared to these Google+ is still a trainwreck speeding ahead by the sheer force of will of Google. (Even Facebook switched back from the multi-column layout fast, because it's unreadable.) The overarching theme used to be making something very powerful for average users and cater to the power-users/developers (who will then happily evangelize/integrate-with the product). Lately Google does none of that. At least Google Wave had a nice API on launch day to write robots, G+ was just a HTML5 slideshow for months. (Now, even on 1440p when reading comments, even after clicking to show more than one, I have to scroll the comment section in a 518x430 box. Why?) They have thousands of very capable engineers, and it's great that now I can see the curvature of Earth in all its glory thanks to WebGL in Maps, but simply measuring distance just recently made a comeback. RSS with PubSubHubbub, microformats and organic evolution of de facto standards would have been completely adequate for almost anything they wanted in this new sharing economy. Though, to think of it, it sort of started when they elegantly neglected to make the profile (user data) path customizable in Chrome, and continued with the Real Name policy blunders on G+, and now YouTube subscriptions by default are completely useless too. (Because if you are not a simple user, but a channel of some sorts, your likes are not visible on your profile/channel page - nor anywhere else as far as I can tell - but subscribers by default get notified of new content on the channel, then proceed to visit it, and find none. At least users can then tweak this in the well hidden clickable gear menu!) It doesn't take top pro exec Vic (or anyone) to fix bugs or provide more configurability. (In 2014, just 8 years after You were the person of the year, how fast You just became a wallet to milk.) Or if it does, then all the more power to the startups.
  - MichaelMoser123 12y ago
    nobody seems to like that guy - but he only delivered this big integrated product that a lot of people have been asking for (for example in the piece that Steve Yegge accidentally posted) Now it turns out that a big integrated product really isn't such a great idea - but that's a different problem. (partly because it kills a lot of smaller interesting projects, and it kills the playground where things were tried out; a big platform is more involved with politics (the real name requirement); a big platform is harder to modify - as one has to care about such tricky things as overall consistency, etc, etc).
- droopyEyelids 12y ago
  I'd sure love to hear Bill G explain how things reached that state with him at the head of the company. I want to hear about what he thinks of his decision to focus on business vs product as his company grew. It just seems insane from my perspective, far outside the realm of business leadership.
  - meddlepal 12y ago
    Seems insane... But it was highly effective...
  - jameshart 12y ago
    He explained it himself, and is quoted in that article - he said he sent emails like that every day, and considered it his job. I guess he presumably felt like it had some kind of effect...
g123g 12y ago
Definitely an uphill task from here onwards for anyone other than Sundar Pichai to become the next CEO of Google.
- general_failure 12y ago
  Well page still has quite a way to go
- _random_ 12y ago
  That post is for visionaries, Pichai does not yet come across as one.
IBM 12y ago
Calling it: Larry will step down as CEO within 2-3 years, maybe even earlier.
- dnissley 12y ago
  Why do you think that?
  - chdir 12y ago
    http://rt.com/usa/198632-mark-zuckerberg-tsinghua-chinese/ http://rt.com/usa/198632-mark-zuckerberg-tsinghua-chinese/
- badusername 12y ago
  Nice try, IBM.
  - tymekpavel 12y ago
    What a bad username.
    - cumeater 12y ago
      So meta.
- clubhi 12y ago
  So...within 3 years.
julianpye 12y ago
This is purely speculative, but for me it looks like Larry Page may be preparing Google towards becoming a more privacy-aware company that you can entrust with information. Why do I think this? Trend: I think that 2014 has led to consumers becoming more actively aware of privacy. Google will be aware of consumer behaviour changing in this space. I have noticed in my general non-techie personal circle that people are far more protective of personal data and changing their online behaviour compared to two years ago. I think this is Google's current Achilles heel. Tech: Google has so far got the best track record of security implementations which are open to anyone using their end-to-end platforms. They could seriously leverage this capability as a differentiator if it wasn't for the perception that they 'snoop' on its users. Mission: In contrast to this Trend Larry Page has always been enthusiastic about a big vision of how consumers can benefit from sharing information to the right people, for example in the health space. At I/O 2013 this was a big topic for him: so many people's health could be improved if they would be able to comfortably share their personal data with the right people. The true value of this has massive potential. Indications for a Pivot: Eric Schmidt is currently touring Europe, stating that Google doesn't 'read' email and does not make its money from analyzing your personal data. In the end Google's best bet may be to try to transform itself into a personal, trusted data company.
- idibidiart 12y ago
  LOL http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447 http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279...
  - yuhong 12y ago
    There is another HN thread discussing this. I would not take Assuage at face value, and Newsweek is not a particularly good source either.
    - banange1 12y ago
      haha, assuage
    - 12y ago
fidotron 12y ago
This is known as what happens when you're in a hole and think you'll get out by digging harder. That said, their PR machine is incredible. Admittedly, I'd like to be in a hole where no matter what you still rake in billions, but they really are not very productive for all that wealth and talent.
beaner 12y ago
IMO Sundar has executed brilliantly at the things he's been tasked with so far, so I'm excited to see him take on more responsibility.
- Steko 12y ago
  Chrome browser, Gmail yes. Chrome OS, Google Apps, Android since 2013... I must be missing something.
  - blinkingled 12y ago
    > Android From all indications 5.0 is a terrific release.
    - Steko 12y ago
      I'm not suggesting Android has dropped in quality or momentum at all under Pichai. I'm just noting the lack of the opposite. As an outsider how can we judge Andy Rubin a failure and Pichai a brilliant success when the former exceeded all of Gooogles goals with Android and the latter by all appearances is just staying the course?
      - mintplant 12y ago
        Where was Andy Rubin judged a failure?
        Steko 12y ago
        How else do you interpret 'Andy you're not the head of Android anymore, we're giving your job to Sundar.'?
        magicalist 12y ago
        "I've been in charge of Android for 9.5 years and now I want to go work on robots"?
Steko 12y ago
Perhaps the price of keeping him from going to MS?
- modarts 12y ago
  Exactly, you don't want a guy with his kind of intellectual firepower headed to your competitor.
- purpletoned 12y ago
  I don't know. Being the head of the largest mobile operating system(that's still growing) alone should be a big enough incentive to stay.
mikepalmer 12y ago
This is a strategic move to give Larry Page more free time for Mandarin lessons...
banange1 12y ago
I think Larry just wants to spend more time with Amanda Rosenberg
cllns 12y ago
> Sundar Pichai is now The Man at Google . Should not use the term "The Man" like this.
venomsnake 12y ago
The only thing I was able to think about is how the whole article was send to them by some PR and they just copy pasted it. The language. The horror.
AwesomeTogether 12y ago
"Reorgs staff"
pitchups 12y ago
Remarkably, 3 of the top 8 executives that run Google - the so-called L-Team (Larry's team) are from the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology): Amit Singhal(IIT Roorkee 89), Sridhar Ramaswamy (IIT Madras '89) and Sundar Pichai (IIT Kharagpur '93) [1] http://theiitian.com/the-iitian-tech-trio-that-runs-google-2/ http://theiitian.com/the-iitian-tech-trio-that-runs-google-2...
- purpletoned 12y ago
  It's not so remarkable considering the IITs aren't a single university. They are dispersed across all of India which is a fairly large country geographically. Also the fact these three people come from India isn't that remarkable considering that there are 1 Billion people there. Now if they were from some small developing country like say Sri Lanka or Bhutan, it would be really impressive.
  - hnriot 12y ago
    yeah, isn't it even quite the opposite, I'd be really surprised to hear otherwise. The startup scene in SF is predominantly white, but SV is nothing like that, pick any large software company and you'll find the split is something like 80% Asian, split with varying amounts between south asian and the far east (india and china/taiwan) with the remaining 20% being of european descent. Whenever I interview for a position, I can guarantee one or more of the candidates will be from one of the IITs. As someone said, with CS being such a strong emphasis in two of the largest population centers of the world, this really isn't very surprising at all. America was and continues to be an immigrant's best opportunity for prosperity with the shift over the centuries from europeans to asians.
    - wiseleo 12y ago
      IIT as alma-mater gives the engineer an escape vehicle from India. That is partially why you see so many of them at interviews in SV.

162 points by foobarqux 12y ago

I don't envy the man. Just last night I led a Google+ "Hangout On Air" for a tech meetup I organize. The whole universe around Google+ products and related tools is so dense, opaque, and counter-intuitive I felt like Bill Gates trying to use Moviemaker(1) in 2003. (1)[http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-epic-bill-gates-e-mail-rant/ http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-...]

yuhong 12y ago
Yea, I am glad Vic Gundotra was fired. I wonder why wasn't he fired earlier.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- salimmadjd 12y ago
  Yeah, I'm also glad they fired Vic. And yes, @selmnoo of course Vic is going to say positive things. One, he has no reasons to say anything negative, google gave him such an amazing opportunity; and two, he is a professional executive and corporate savvy. He will never say anything negative publicly, it'll be a career suicide. Google has one huge problem in general when it comes to hiring. I call them the China of tech companies. They have a lot of engineers and a large infrastructure so they can copy anything that works and use their scale to get market share. Hearing from friends who have interviewed with Google, it seems to me they are good at hiring great engineers, they've hired bunch of MBAs but they're not able to hire product-driven entrepreneurs or give them space to shine.
  - cromwellian 12y ago
    I think it's a little unfair to accuse Google of copying anything that works. Google moves too slowly these days, often I watch as they work on a product ages before someone else comes up with it, but they take so long to launch that they're passed up by startups, and by the time they launch it looks like they're a copy cat. Just to give you an example, Inbox precedes MailBox by years. I joined Google in 2009 and they were working its various incarnations even back then. Also, doing what other people do is not necessarily "copying". When Google entered the Search market, there were plenty of search engines. They didn't "copy" search, they make their own. When they introduced Chrome, there were plenty of browsers, but they put their own spin on it. It's not just about the ideas, but about their implementation and execution that matter.
  - hkmurakami 12y ago
    >they've hired bunch of MBAs but they're not able to hire product-driven entrepreneurs or give them space to shine. Possibly related to why they acquihire so much?
    - justincormack 12y ago
      No, I don't think they can acqui-hire them effectively either.
  - pas 12y ago
    Why is this so hard? They were the by the book power-geek company, measure, iterate, profit. Search is more like a platform, not a product, so let's look at GMail the first product that comes to mind, with the many gigabytes and proper IMAP/POP3 access they went all in. Filtering and search, labels and labs, plus it meant people were always logged in even while searching and looking at ads on 3rd party sites (and even though Blogger is and older Google product, not everyone had a blogger account, and I don't know how well integrated that was back in 2002-2003). Then Maps, with all the bells and whistles. Analytics, you still can do arbitrary dimensions and metrics with it, drive it from a simple API, etc. Calendar, boldly supports ICAL, XML, RSS and so on. And compared to these Google+ is still a trainwreck speeding ahead by the sheer force of will of Google. (Even Facebook switched back from the multi-column layout fast, because it's unreadable.) The overarching theme used to be making something very powerful for average users and cater to the power-users/developers (who will then happily evangelize/integrate-with the product). Lately Google does none of that. At least Google Wave had a nice API on launch day to write robots, G+ was just a HTML5 slideshow for months. (Now, even on 1440p when reading comments, even after clicking to show more than one, I have to scroll the comment section in a 518x430 box. Why?) They have thousands of very capable engineers, and it's great that now I can see the curvature of Earth in all its glory thanks to WebGL in Maps, but simply measuring distance just recently made a comeback. RSS with PubSubHubbub, microformats and organic evolution of de facto standards would have been completely adequate for almost anything they wanted in this new sharing economy. Though, to think of it, it sort of started when they elegantly neglected to make the profile (user data) path customizable in Chrome, and continued with the Real Name policy blunders on G+, and now YouTube subscriptions by default are completely useless too. (Because if you are not a simple user, but a channel of some sorts, your likes are not visible on your profile/channel page - nor anywhere else as far as I can tell - but subscribers by default get notified of new content on the channel, then proceed to visit it, and find none. At least users can then tweak this in the well hidden clickable gear menu!) It doesn't take top pro exec Vic (or anyone) to fix bugs or provide more configurability. (In 2014, just 8 years after You were the person of the year, how fast You just became a wallet to milk.) Or if it does, then all the more power to the startups.
- MichaelMoser123 12y ago
  nobody seems to like that guy - but he only delivered this big integrated product that a lot of people have been asking for (for example in the piece that Steve Yegge accidentally posted) Now it turns out that a big integrated product really isn't such a great idea - but that's a different problem. (partly because it kills a lot of smaller interesting projects, and it kills the playground where things were tried out; a big platform is more involved with politics (the real name requirement); a big platform is harder to modify - as one has to care about such tricky things as overall consistency, etc, etc).
droopyEyelids 12y ago
I'd sure love to hear Bill G explain how things reached that state with him at the head of the company. I want to hear about what he thinks of his decision to focus on business vs product as his company grew. It just seems insane from my perspective, far outside the realm of business leadership.
- meddlepal 12y ago
  Seems insane... But it was highly effective...
- jameshart 12y ago
  He explained it himself, and is quoted in that article - he said he sent emails like that every day, and considered it his job. I guess he presumably felt like it had some kind of effect...

g123g 12y ago

Definitely an uphill task from here onwards for anyone other than Sundar Pichai to become the next CEO of Google.

general_failure 12y ago
Well page still has quite a way to go
_random_ 12y ago
That post is for visionaries, Pichai does not yet come across as one.

IBM 12y ago

Calling it: Larry will step down as CEO within 2-3 years, maybe even earlier.

dnissley 12y ago
Why do you think that?
- chdir 12y ago
  http://rt.com/usa/198632-mark-zuckerberg-tsinghua-chinese/ http://rt.com/usa/198632-mark-zuckerberg-tsinghua-chinese/
badusername 12y ago
Nice try, IBM.
- tymekpavel 12y ago
  What a bad username.
  - cumeater 12y ago
    So meta.
clubhi 12y ago
So...within 3 years.

julianpye 12y ago

This is purely speculative, but for me it looks like Larry Page may be preparing Google towards becoming a more privacy-aware company that you can entrust with information. Why do I think this? Trend: I think that 2014 has led to consumers becoming more actively aware of privacy. Google will be aware of consumer behaviour changing in this space. I have noticed in my general non-techie personal circle that people are far more protective of personal data and changing their online behaviour compared to two years ago. I think this is Google's current Achilles heel. Tech: Google has so far got the best track record of security implementations which are open to anyone using their end-to-end platforms. They could seriously leverage this capability as a differentiator if it wasn't for the perception that they 'snoop' on its users. Mission: In contrast to this Trend Larry Page has always been enthusiastic about a big vision of how consumers can benefit from sharing information to the right people, for example in the health space. At I/O 2013 this was a big topic for him: so many people's health could be improved if they would be able to comfortably share their personal data with the right people. The true value of this has massive potential. Indications for a Pivot: Eric Schmidt is currently touring Europe, stating that Google doesn't 'read' email and does not make its money from analyzing your personal data. In the end Google's best bet may be to try to transform itself into a personal, trusted data company.

idibidiart 12y ago
LOL http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447 http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279...
- yuhong 12y ago
  There is another HN thread discussing this. I would not take Assuage at face value, and Newsweek is not a particularly good source either.
  - banange1 12y ago
    haha, assuage
  - 12y ago

fidotron 12y ago

This is known as what happens when you're in a hole and think you'll get out by digging harder. That said, their PR machine is incredible. Admittedly, I'd like to be in a hole where no matter what you still rake in billions, but they really are not very productive for all that wealth and talent.

beaner 12y ago

IMO Sundar has executed brilliantly at the things he's been tasked with so far, so I'm excited to see him take on more responsibility.

Steko 12y ago
Chrome browser, Gmail yes. Chrome OS, Google Apps, Android since 2013... I must be missing something.
- blinkingled 12y ago
  > Android From all indications 5.0 is a terrific release.
  - Steko 12y ago
    I'm not suggesting Android has dropped in quality or momentum at all under Pichai. I'm just noting the lack of the opposite. As an outsider how can we judge Andy Rubin a failure and Pichai a brilliant success when the former exceeded all of Gooogles goals with Android and the latter by all appearances is just staying the course?
    - mintplant 12y ago
      Where was Andy Rubin judged a failure?
      - Steko 12y ago
        How else do you interpret 'Andy you're not the head of Android anymore, we're giving your job to Sundar.'?
        magicalist 12y ago
        "I've been in charge of Android for 9.5 years and now I want to go work on robots"?

Steko 12y ago

Perhaps the price of keeping him from going to MS?

modarts 12y ago
Exactly, you don't want a guy with his kind of intellectual firepower headed to your competitor.
purpletoned 12y ago
I don't know. Being the head of the largest mobile operating system(that's still growing) alone should be a big enough incentive to stay.

mikepalmer 12y ago

This is a strategic move to give Larry Page more free time for Mandarin lessons...

banange1 12y ago

I think Larry just wants to spend more time with Amanda Rosenberg

cllns 12y ago

> Sundar Pichai is now The Man at Google . Should not use the term "The Man" like this.

venomsnake 12y ago

The only thing I was able to think about is how the whole article was send to them by some PR and they just copy pasted it. The language. The horror.

AwesomeTogether 12y ago

"Reorgs staff"

pitchups 12y ago

Remarkably, 3 of the top 8 executives that run Google - the so-called L-Team (Larry's team) are from the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology): Amit Singhal(IIT Roorkee 89), Sridhar Ramaswamy (IIT Madras '89) and Sundar Pichai (IIT Kharagpur '93) [1] http://theiitian.com/the-iitian-tech-trio-that-runs-google-2/ http://theiitian.com/the-iitian-tech-trio-that-runs-google-2...

purpletoned 12y ago
It's not so remarkable considering the IITs aren't a single university. They are dispersed across all of India which is a fairly large country geographically. Also the fact these three people come from India isn't that remarkable considering that there are 1 Billion people there. Now if they were from some small developing country like say Sri Lanka or Bhutan, it would be really impressive.
- hnriot 12y ago
  yeah, isn't it even quite the opposite, I'd be really surprised to hear otherwise. The startup scene in SF is predominantly white, but SV is nothing like that, pick any large software company and you'll find the split is something like 80% Asian, split with varying amounts between south asian and the far east (india and china/taiwan) with the remaining 20% being of european descent. Whenever I interview for a position, I can guarantee one or more of the candidates will be from one of the IITs. As someone said, with CS being such a strong emphasis in two of the largest population centers of the world, this really isn't very surprising at all. America was and continues to be an immigrant's best opportunity for prosperity with the shift over the centuries from europeans to asians.
  - wiseleo 12y ago
    IIT as alma-mater gives the engineer an escape vehicle from India. That is partially why you see so many of them at interviews in SV.