I don't know if Google needs a new CEO, but from everything I've heard about internal Google, they need to change up how they measure success and who they reward. So many awesome products launched with tremendous hype, left alone to stagnate, and then unceremoniously shut down. At this point, I can't get excited when Google announces something, no matter how amazing it seems.
Putting aside the product concerns, from my recent Xoogler perspective, they absolutely need a new CEO.<p>Start with a chaotic management style that is constantly reorg'ing and forcing manager changes. I had three managers and four reorgs during my under two years. (YMMV by team but I've heard of others even in product areas who've experienced similar.) You never know when you'll be pulled from a project, projects are developed and then handed-off vs. letting the builders continue to improve them, and promo becomes a political fantasy as you shift around.<p>Reorgs are a fact of enterprise life, but the frequency of them at Google is a huge sign of lack of strategic direction and bad planning. Absorbing HUGE numbers of new employees into this constantly shifting structure is a recipe for disaster. (OTOH, documentation tends to be very good.) And buying up tons of real estate when so many people either WFH full time or are hybrid? Crazy.<p>Then there's the way projects are managed. I never thought I'd miss JIRA so much. There are always too many cooks in the kitchen and everlasting approval processes.<p>To all the amazingly smart, dedicated, and user-focused people still there - you rock. To the board - time to shake things up.<p>[edit - fixed typo]
The Stadia closure sealed it for me. Such amazing tech for what it was, completely unable to see the long-term and stay dedicated to a tech that's obviously going to have increasing adoption into the future. Handed over that entire market to MS without a fight. It even had a perfect release window during COVID when everyone was home and wasn't able to find PS5 or Xbox to buy.<p>Everything around that product was a summary of how Google handles things now. I can't take any new product release seriously from them anymore.
A new CEO is needed for a culture shift if nothing else.<p>Google has long been cavalier about their automated systems banning, withholding payments, or otherwise harming users and customers with no recourse to challenge the false positive punishments.<p>They've made a laughing stock of themselves with product launches and sunsets in Chat (GChat, Talk, Hangouts, Hangouts Chat, Hangouts Meet, Allo, Duo, Meet, Meet Original, Spaces, etc). They're not really any better in payments (Google Wallet, Android Pay, Google Pay, Google Pay Send, Google Wallet but new this time).<p>Stadia was an amazing product, but I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole because looking at the killed-by-google graveyard made it obvious where it would end up. It's become a self-fulfilling prophecy.<p>Google needs to show that it cares about its customers/users and that it cares about its own products. The willingness to abandon both so casually has hurt its reputation in a way that makes it difficult to trust.
I said it before and I'll say it again, take away the search monopoly and Google is the slowest moving and most dysfunctional company in tech. Sundar is doing his best Ballmer impression and what it is truly embarrassing is given Google's supposed "talent" especially in the AI space they are really doing nothing for the billions they are throwing at the problem. I mean just look at the insane amount of articles about one of their top AI engineers, Geoffrey Hinton, so alot of press all fluff so to speak.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/technology/artificial-intelligence-research-toronto.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/technology/artificial-int...</a><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awa...</a><p>[1] - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33022768" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33022768</a>
Yes, badly. Nothing about Google stands out anymore and they've been rotting from multiple ends for a long time.<p>Search rarely returns credible results and I find myself adding 'site:reddit.com' frequently to at least get some organic discussions about things rather than articles which look like they were sponsored and artificially inflated to the top. They've turned into a joke about releasing something and killing it off a few years later. Android is a nightmare for developers (and users) with how they handle API changes and the Google Play store as a whole. Any kind of customer support is non-existent in basically any of their products. Their hardware is good but software gets worse over time and stagnates (their smart home ecosystem). I still don't trust them for a second with my data.<p>Gmail is fine, Maps are fine, YouTube is... well, we don't really have a competitor and nobody wants to switch because they wouldn't have access to a large audience. Whatever they release I have no faith in it, not with it keeping my data, not with its longevity, not in its reliability.
When I (the consumer) think of successful Google products, I think of search, email, maps, productivity (docs, sheets, drive), Android, and Chromecast. Which of those launched under the current CEO?<p>I'm sure I'm missing another success story, but really, when was the last time Google hit a home run?
A new CEO would be good, as long as that person has a sense of leadership and can set long-term strategic goals by clamping down on promotion-case projects that get abandoned on short notice.<p>Google strikes me as a place with too much money and no focus on how to productively use it, and now there are viable competitors popping up to challenge them.
Sundar has Mckinsified and MBAfied Google.He faces intense spotlight because his background is McKinsey and Product Management . In core engineering and tech circles that’s the ultimate enemy and sell out. IMO Sundar hasn’t demonstrated the type of tech leadership like Satya or Zuck has. I am no fan of Zuck but he has a product he wants to pursue ( Metaverse) and is sticking to his guns to make it happen . Sundar just comes across as a pleasant McKinsey consultant who has seen ads and search as a cash cow and is focused on extracting as much cash from it to appeal to shareholders and others . There is no underlying tech vision or guts.
Sundar is perfect example of an incompetent professional CEO who exceeds at schmoozing and company politics. He's even ex-McKinsey...<p>Works for managing large corps through "business-as-usual" peacetimes but as soon as change & innovation is needed it's a no-go.
We're in the middle of the hype phase for LLMs; it'll die down when hallucinations are widely understood and the investment community + public realize that none of these organizations have built something that replaces Search (YET).<p>Calling for Sundar's head during the hype phase is premature.
Every tech company needs to flush their highest level of managers because this cohort was promoted to their positions at a time when tech company stocks saw 20% CAGR growth just for existing.<p>Reminds me of the line from The Godfather 2: "You're not a wartime consigliere, Tom."<p>These aren't wartime CEOs.
Part of the issue here is that Google is a large, mature, Corporation.<p>People expect it to act like a (or rather 50) small, nimble, innovative start ups. But it isn't that. It's a large mature corporation in a stable market (search/advertising).<p>This is why there were layoffs recently: Google's future is not growing (where people are an asset) it is Efficiency (where people are a cost centre).<p>This is also why Google struggles so much with innovation, new product lines etc. The same things that stopped GE or AT&T becoming big players online will stop Google from being a big player in <Insert New Thing> (remember before ChatGPT when it was Crypto and Google didn't have a coin? Or before that when it was Quantum computing and Google were totally definitely building one, it just still doesn't exist?).<p>And all of this is A-Ok. This is just the corporate lifecycle. There are very good, economically sensible, pragmatic reasons why big companies do not innovate and why efficiency is more important there.<p>Whether Google needs a new CEO or not depends entirely on whether it's current one can deliver that. But Layoffs are a sign the current guy is doing his job, people just don't understand (or don't want to understand) what his job is...
This piece has a click bait title and focuses exclusively on the last week of tech-news.
IMO the answer to the clickbait title is still yes, but the reasons lie in the last 5 years of stagnation and extend far beyond the use of AI in search/information retrieval. Google is a massive company that does a lot more than Search. The simple problem is that Google as a company is languishing without purpose. The incentives do not line up for attention to detail, product excellence or ground breaking tech. Instead they now have a massive sprawling enterprise that is dominated by politics over products.
To be fair, Microsoft's "AI BING" demo wasn't exactly flawless either. But the popular press didn't seem to notice.<p><a href="https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/microsoft_ai_bing_error" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/microsoft_ai_bing_err...</a><p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23599007/microsoft-bing-ai-mistakes-demo" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23599007/microsoft-bing-a...</a>
In 2007 when I graduated, I thought Google hired the best of the best.<p>Recently they hired an exgf of mine with a degree from a school that accepts anyone, who gets confused watching TV shows, and has trouble doing basic math.
Sundar? The guy who reports into Ruth?<p>Sundar has the CEO title because he's so meek that grandstanding politicians feel bad being too mean to him during congressional hearings.<p>Google's priorities 1 through 10 are to avoid anti-trust messing up their money geysers.
Did Pichai make his name first in Google by being an excellent PM of Chrome? I wonder why he stopped being a product guy after becoming a CEO. It looks to me that the CEOs of mega successful tech companies are mostly "super PMs". Larry Page, Bezos, Jobs, Nadella (arguably, but his strategy has been cloud and super bundling, which has been very successful), and Musk. I can hardly see what Google's product strategy is. AI for everything certainly is not a product statement.
Whether or not they change CEOs, they need a new business model. They have needed this for decades now, and it shows.<p>Their entire existence relies on GoogleAds. That's it. Nothing else comes even remotely close to GoogleAds revenue to their bottom line. This is why they can be so cavalier discontinuing products, as they don't make money so get cut without a second thought.<p>Search has been so co-opted by this model and dependency on revenue that they are literally killing the one product that makes them money.<p>My take from the outside at least is that GoogleAds revenue is no longer carrying the business (maybe less business, maybe the company grew too fast, maybe market pressure), and now they are forced to make some tough decisions.<p>Although I'd love his paycheck, I am glad I am not Google's CEO. That is a really awful position to be in, IMHO.
I think so. Sundar has been pitching "AI" for who knows how long. All the "A.I." stuff dumped on me has annoyed me more than anything. No, I don't want to talk to my phone.<p>And the times I might want to (driving a car)... I used to be able to simply ask maps what my "E.T.A." was and, shock!, it would answer... that's been broken for years now and I'm fairly sure that will never be fixed.
Google's CEO claimed that he's taking "full responsibility" for the massive layoffs they went through.<p>I have no idea what the fuck that actually means, but I would think resignation and being replaced would probably be a reasonable way to take responsibility for his reckless gambling with peoples' lives.
The fish rots from the head, as they say.<p>Google is in a bad spot, and was in a bad spot well before ChatGPT appeared in the news.<p>I think Pichai is a CFO/accountant, this is not what they need at this point.<p>In practice, I'd like to see Google lose its position, their dominance has been detrimental for the whole tech ecosystem.
Just realized I don't even know who the CEO is rn. I remember when Google came out and seemed like this amazing thing invented by two nerds. Now it's just like a utility, useful and mildly annoying. Maybe time to break it up and have three or four new CEOs.
Google Search has become aggressively bad after their last few updates. The top pages are literally just filler BS written by someone with no subject matter expertise or first hand experience. I have no idea how it went so far off the rails so fast.
This is weird, I just had this conversation the other day and wrote a comment in another google story on HN that sundar is not doing a good job and will be replaced soon.<p>They need someone that can turn around GCP and productize their self driving platform. I believe the privacy regulations about their search business are now unstoppable and so they should let it happen and adapt
the only thing nowadays we can depend on from google:<p>- products: will be buried in the graveyard soon, so NO<p>- tech: might get abandoned or rewritten at any time (angular JS anyone?), so NO<p>- trying to make adblockers and privacy tools harder to use: this is it.<p>yes, I can count on google only on the last part. I only need to de-google from gmail in the coming months, then I am ready to see it burning.
For a company that really depends on user click signals, removing the dislike count from Youtube (and making the button pointless) is a amateurish mistake indicating a very broken internal structure.<p>the search UX, especially the top bar where you switch between search types is broken for nearly a decade and they are not able to fix that.
Whilst the article itself has some ok arguments for the hypothesis it puts forward, I can't help but point out that it's completely overshadowed by the dumpster fire of a presentation, with scroll event interception until I click on the cookie nagger, and a full screen low-resolution photo blocking the whole viewport that has to be scrolled out of the way to get to the actual article. Maybe om.co should get a new web designer? No, scratch that. I'm willing to bet that these particular design choices were not made by anyone with practical knowledge and experience of web design.
Everyone is of course entitled their opinion, but lately I've noticed people more boldly and frequently thinking they're better than the incumbents, which is interesting.
I’ve been pulling away from Google products more and more over the last few years. Their quality is in steady decline. It’s very frustrating and I’m hesitant to use them for something new. I’ve even noticed non-tech folks are noticing the decline as well.<p>When you combine the declining quality with a lack of innovative new products, the public’s privacy concerns, and potentially the awakening of advertisers to poor ROI, there’s a clear picture of trouble ahead for Google.
This article is unreadable on mobile because of a huge subscribe modal that appears and whose controls are pushed off screen where I can't even scroll to them.
If they delay doing this, there's going to be irreversible damage. OTOH, it seems unlikely because they just renewed his contract and incentives in November
Are there strong candidates within the organization, so such change wouldn't just end up being "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"?
Sundar is a great peace-time leader. He can milk and feed the cash cow Ok-ish. Sundar has never made an actual decision. He waits till a consensus forms and then takes that side. That isn’t the kind of leader you need at times of war. ChatGPT declared a war. Sundar is unfit for this duty.
"Unlike Google, Microsoft’s Bing demo was more polished and free of blemishes."<p>Um, not a fan of either system, but pretty sure this has been shown to be patently false...<p>There was a c-acm post on here just the other day about this. This is some click-bait.
I don't think that the problems with Google are the result of the CEO, specifically. They're the result of the board of directors and the investors.
Of course they do!?! How is this even a question? Unless you’re a run of the mill mba grifter desperately trying to push short-term “shareholder value”..
People keep saying chat gpt is the replacement for search, but chat gpt powered bing search is an obscene joke that barely works.<p>Google's problem is that i searched for "Cape Code VRBO" this morning and couldn't get my answer without scrolling past a full screen of ads.