On one hand, I agree with you, on the other, as a former Googler I think that "just needs better coaching" is a huge barrier in Google's current corporate culture and environment.
Google as a whole has a long history of not being able to successfully build great products out of great tech. That seems wrong from looking at search, Gmail, Maps*, Docs*, etc., but I think these are cases where a single great insight or innovation so dominated the rest of the product qualities that it made the product successful on it's own (PageRank, AJAX, realtime collaboration). There have been so many other cases where this pattern didn't hold, and even though Google had better tech, it wasn't so much better on one axis as to pull the whole product along with it.
That's the problem I see here. Maybe they have a better model. Can they make it a better product? OpenAI and Anthropic seem to ship faster, with a clearer vision, and more innovation with features around the model. Is their AI hardware acceleration really going to be a game changer if it's only ever available in-house?
I do believe in Waymo, but only because they've been incrementally investing and improving it for 15 years. They need to do that with all products, instead of giving up when they're not an instant hit.
*Maps, Docs, and YouTube were acquired with their key advantages in place, so I wonder how much they even count.
Yeah and even Gemini only seemed to come about because OpenAI forced their hand and gave them a product vision to follow. If OpenAI didn't exist I bet Google would still be fumbling over how to make a product out of transformers.
Even OpenAI wasn’t going to release ChatGPT because the product internally was that it wasn’t that good but with some obvious internal pressure we are where we are at now.
On the topic of better management, I can't believe they haven't replaced Sundar Pichai. Satya Nadella by comparison really seemed to have turned MS around.
Larry Page was making the rounds when all of this AI hype started. He seemed to have a much more aggressive stance, even ruffling feathers about how many hours Google employees should be working to compete in AI. And there is obviously Demis Hassabis who is the most likely contender for a replacement.
I doubt it is an easy position to fill. But Pichai has presided over this lackluster Google. Even if he isn't strictly to blame, I am surprised he hasn't be replaced.
Google (Alphabet's) stock price has generally gone up 200% in the past 5 years. That is the only reason he is there, and that is the only way he is judged.
Yes, that is fair and probably the accurate assessment. A bit like Tim Cook. He may not be innovative but Apple sure has been profitable.
I guess it is easy to view it from my own perspective, one tinged with a hope for invention and innovation. But the market probably loves the financial stability Pichai has brought to the table and doesn't care about the flaws I see.
And I 'm not sure why I have rose tinted glasses for Nadella. I believe MS has been doing well financially (not something I've studied) while also supporting things I believe are valuable (e.g. VS Code, GitHub, TypeScript). Maybe I just wish I felt the same kind of balance in Google.
I just saw an interview w/ Nadella where he said straight up: Open Source takes half of every market, and this will happen with AI.
That’s such a refreshing change from the “DIE OPEN SOURCE DIE” attitude that Gates/Ballmer had.
I also love GitHub, TypeScript, and VSCode. These have become the foundation of my development toolset. That was something Gates did well, and Ballmer gave lip service to (“developers! developers!”) but for me only recently has Microsoft actually been maintaining good quality developer tools again.
That’s where my goodwill comes from anyway.
Google makes a better Office Suite (Gmail, Docs, Maps), ironically. But it’s hard for me to get too excited about that. It’s been pretty stagnant for 10 years.
Imo this is just Tim Cook’s public image. By all accounts, comparing Sundar to him is just not fair.
Just off the top of my head, under Tim Cook the company managed to:
* Propel smartwatches as a brand new product category into the mainstream and be the leader in that category.
* Propel AirPods as a brand new product category into the mainstream (and be the leader in that category as well).
* Smoothly transition to ARM (aka Apple Silicon) with great success.
* Various behind the scenes logistical/supply-chain achievements (which makes sense, as Tim Cook is the logistics/supply-chain guy by specialization).
None of those things were simple or uncontroversial. In fact, I remember the pushback people and the press had against smartwatches and airpods, calling Apple washed out and Tim Cook a bean-counter. And these are just the largest examples off the top of my head, there are definitely more. However, Google doesn’t seem to have even a singular product win of such magnitude in the past 10 years.
In the meantime, what did Google do productwise? Catching up on the cloud compute game to AWS (while nearly killing it due to their PR nightmare announcements during 2019-2020 iirc), killing their chat app that finally managed to gain enough mainstream traction (Hangouts) and then rebranding/recreating it at least twice since then, redoing their payments app multiple times (gWallet vs gPay vs whatever else there was that I forgot), etc.
I am trying to be generous here, and of course Apple had their misses too (the butterfly keyboard on 2016-2019 intel macbooks, homepod is kinda up in the air as a product category, mac pro stagnating, etc.). But I legitimately cannot think of a single consumer product that Google knocked out of the park or any that wowed me.
This sucks, because I know for a fact it has nothing to do with their engineers lacking the skill to execute on a new innovative product (as evident by Google being early to the AI/transformers era and being fundamental to what is happening with AI right now). Google has all the technical prerequisites to succeed. But the product and organizational strategies there are by far the most cartoonishly bad I’ve ever seen for such a company.
I don’t want to blame it on Sundar, because I cannot say for sure that the root of this dysfunction is at his level. I just know it is on some level between org directors and Sundar, but not where exactly. I just know that killing off a whole org working on a truly innovative AR org/product, only for most of those people to switch to Meta and continue working on an improved version of the exact same thing (the Orion glasses) wasn’t the move. And I just know that having 5+ major reorgs in one year for a single team is not normal or good.
TLDR: apologies for the long rant, but the short version is that Google under Sundar has absolutely zero sense for internal organization management or delivering products to consumers. And comparing him to Tim Cook (who has been the CEO through the AirPods/Apple Watch/ARM macbooks era) is unfair to Tim Cook and is based purely on the public image.
Because we are talking about what product wins they had. Apple Car was never officially announced, and Vision Pro is clearly their experimental/devkit sort of a product.
Vision Pro might succeed or fail, and that’s fine. I tried it, and it is clearly a significant step towards the future, but I am not sure of it becoming a successful product at its current price point and in its current state.
I am not judging CEOs or companies negatively for taking ambitious product bets and not always striking gold on those bets. I am judging them negatively for not having any product wins and not taking any ambitious product bets.
Exactly. If the founders (who still have majority voting control) or board wanted an innovator they wouldn't have picked Sundar in the first place. His job is bean counting and increasing profits, and he is doing that brilliantly.
But why does that matter to Google? They'll never need to issue more stock to raise cash; last year they had $200 billion in gross profit, money they literally didn't find a reason to spend.
Imagine being so replete with cash that after paying all your costs, all your salaries, all your R&D - you still can't find a way to spend 200 billion, so you threw a chunk of it away as tax and put the rest in the bank.
The price of a share should be utterly irrelevant to them.
Take chat, one of Google's biggest fumbles. They had a good thing with Gtalk. Really screwed things up with Hangouts (thanks, Vic!), added the weird Allo to the mix, almost turned things around, and then brought in Chat to compete with Slack as opposed to AIM...WhatsApp.
If they had just incrementally invested in chat, even if they swapped out back ends, they could have kept most of their user base, maybe even have grown it. Gchat was pretty popular, even during the rise of Facebook Messenger.
But they screwed around with the public-visible product side of things too much, and revealed their tech stack and org chart as product changes. There was no product-first, continuity-oriented planning.
The main problem with chat is that there are too many angles to communication, making it impossible to fulfil all requirements with a single tool. Apple does IM, period, they don’t want any of the Slack-type team communications and that's fine for them. Even Facebook realised that having multiple chat apps is fine as long as they offer value on their own. Meanwhile, Google has gone through several iterations, with internal groups competing for the top spot in defining what a chat app should be, but ultimately falling short because there's no single chat app for all requirements. They aimed too close to the average and failed to deliver anything useful enough for any specific group.
Or we need to break it up. The ai search team should not be afraid of killing the traditional search engine.
Many of the decisions companies make are to ensure the cow they are currently milking very efficiently does not die. This is bad for the rest of us, specially if they place barriers to innovation.
You couldn't break up the AI search engine and the traditional search engine. They're basically one and the same. The AI search engine relies on the index. The index uses AI in various places. The "traditional" side has long used AI for query understanding, ranking, and fact extraction.
Legislators don’t (and should not) care about your implementation. The old company will be banned from using ai for their search for x years the new company will get employees and assets including source code to startup the new entity.
Waymo clearly stands out as an exception amongst all moonshots that Google went after. However, they don't seem to have that one axis advantage in Waymo. I can't believe they didn't double, triple down on their efforts to build a fully integrated car. Compared to Apple, they were at a much better position to do this because of all the underlying tech/models and research.
May be that's the problem - that there is no one rallying individual for Waymo. They should just spin it off and make it an independent private company and retain % ownership.
I somehow feel Google will be way better if it's run like Berkshire, the CEO just focuses on capital allocation and let's the managers do their jobs in their respective companies - YT, Waymo, search, cloud, deepmind.
I'm not sure that culture can dissipate in Google at this juncture.
Only disagree with the last part of your footnote. YouTube was acquired with an underpants gnomes' business model: spend $$$$ on network traffic; ????; profit! The "key advantage" that enabled YouTube was dirt-cheap global networking. And I think that is the thread that ties together all of Google's products. They are the protobuf moving company, first and foremost. Even on AI one of their key advantages is the ability to reliably and rapidly start training, literally they have blogged about their cutting-edge protobuf tsunami capabilities.
This is a bad take. The business model is pretty clear: subsidized new line of business using the search revenu until it is so dominant that no competition is viable, only then heavily monetize it.
Google needs to be broken up. The DOJ / FTC want to do it.
There's far too much value and scale in the company and they can't even focus their energies appropriately.
YouTube is the most valuable media property in the world. As a standalone company, it would still outperform Netflix on the basis of ads alone.
The monopolistic stuff Google is pulling off with Chrome/Android/Search is unfathomably market distorting, so those business units alone could/should be pulled apart. The tech sector would probably be better off if YouTube, Waymo, and GCP/AI efforts were similarly split up.
As a consumer I don't have any great desire to see it broken up. Youtube has worked well for me for years. If they spun it off it would probably get way more aggressive in trying to extract money and sell data.
Maybe, but IMO the DOJ's current proposal would be harmful for users and the web. Chrome is not worth as much to anyone else what it is to Google. And with Google barred from paying for default search engine placement, all browser investment everywhere will be severely cut back. Mozilla will probably finally fall, Safari will stagnate, and Chrome will rot.
Apple would no longer get $20 billion from Google for default search engine placement. Microsoft... and DDG or Yandex? might pay some, but nothing like that with the biggest bidder off the table. Safari funding would _definitely_ take a huge hit.
I don't think we know how much google pays for it right now. That 20B figure is from 2022. Also, that payment is mainly for iOS's Safari. Google would still pay Apple for search engine placement on iOS even if Apple stopped updating Safari today. What I'm poorly trying to say: I don't think safari development funding related to how much it brings in.
Also there is MS that wants to pay for search engine placement and it's fact.
> *Maps, Docs, and YouTube were acquired with their key advantages in place.
I don’t think the same logic applies to Google Docs as it does to YouTube. The original companies behind Docs, Sheets, and Slides were practically unknown, and Google deserves credit for their evolution, features, and clear vision. Developing an office suite might be “easier” from a vision standpoint since the category already exists, whereas marketing something like Gemini Robotics is an entirely different challenge. Just my two cents.
I think you might be on to something. I heard Google Gemini has a best in class system for depicting historical figures accurately, it is extraordinarily unphased by “modern audience” political bias.
Google as a whole has a long history of not being able to successfully build great products out of great tech. That seems wrong from looking at search, Gmail, Maps*, Docs*, etc., but I think these are cases where a single great insight or innovation so dominated the rest of the product qualities that it made the product successful on it's own (PageRank, AJAX, realtime collaboration). There have been so many other cases where this pattern didn't hold, and even though Google had better tech, it wasn't so much better on one axis as to pull the whole product along with it.
That's the problem I see here. Maybe they have a better model. Can they make it a better product? OpenAI and Anthropic seem to ship faster, with a clearer vision, and more innovation with features around the model. Is their AI hardware acceleration really going to be a game changer if it's only ever available in-house?
I do believe in Waymo, but only because they've been incrementally investing and improving it for 15 years. They need to do that with all products, instead of giving up when they're not an instant hit.
*Maps, Docs, and YouTube were acquired with their key advantages in place, so I wonder how much they even count.