Sundar became CEO at a time when Google needed a leader who could build consensus across different product areas. Sundar was the right person for this role. Unfortunately Sundar is also relatively weak at setting a bold vision to ensure the company continues to grow and innovate, as Larry had done. So under Sundar the company has slowly shifted from being innovative to being very risk averse, incentivising not making mistakes, maintaining the status quo, and focusing on cutting costs over creating new lasting value. The effect of these changes is finally becoming more apparent.
Was he? What is the evidence that he succeeded? Or even had more positive influence than random decisions?
Does google have consensus over what it’s doing? Or is Sundar specifically a “safe,” milquetoast CEO chosen to not show up previous CEOs. I don’t know Sundar, but it seems he was picked because google leadership assumed supremacy and thought that they just needed a steady hand to coast for a few years.
Sundar was chosen following a series of failures by megalomaniacal executives Larry had appointed/approved to head various departments, including Andy Rubin, Tony Fadell, and Anthony Levandwoski. Sundar was a move in the opposite direction.
Ironically, Vic was was empowered to counter a similar panic an upstart more formidable than OpenAI. He brought a bold vision alright, but that's not sufficient to be a good leader.
Overly opinionated people like that could thrive under Jobs, who was the biggest opinion setter, which made them fight for the most important things while getting a pushback on the most controversial areas and not waste time with minor stuff
Take that and they start going crazy (yes I'm talking about Johnny Ive)
War is sort of the opposite of "business as usual." The normal rules are abandoned. You still have the same high level strategic objectives, but the tactics are radically changed.
I would love to see Google go to war. Wake me up when they figure out how to do that.
> Unfortunately Sundar is also relatively weak at setting a bold vision to ensure the company continues to grow and innovate, as Larry had done.
I'm willing to presume Larry had bold visions, but if I grouped google products, I think successful and launched before 2006 would be the same.
I think it's time to admit that google has been a conglomerate for decades and could no longer run with innovative management. The correct thing to do is to break it up so subdivisions of today can be innovative companies, or reliable dividend payers, or bankrupt.
> if I grouped google products, I think successful and launched before 2006 would be the same
In October 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion.[11]
Google Maps was launched in February 2005.[2]
These are the last 2 Google products I use
Search got replaced by DDG then Ecosia
Chrome by Firefox
Gmail by my own mail server
My Pixel 2 ran out of security coverage and sick of buying a new phone every 2 years I went to an iphone xs
Youtube and Maps are the only two sticky products left and both came about when I was in high school
The creation of Google Photos was basically an act of mutiny by David Lieb.
He kept getting told to stop working on it and he kept doing it anyway. Eventually resorting to back-channeling to Larry in order to get him to champion the project.
He tells the story in an episode of the podcast "The Social Radars."
>the company has slowly shifted from being innovative to being very risk averse, incentivizing not making mistakes, maintaining the status quo, and focusing on cutting costs over creating new lasting value
This is in large part due to Ruth Porat's relentless multiyear campaign of cracking down on employee perks and salaries at Google, at a time when VCs were throwing blank checks at startups who in turn were poaching the best people with whole-number multiples of their current compensation. This destroyed arguably Google's single greatest asset — its public image as a "dream employer".
The lack of innovation and risk aversion are just second-order effects of losing the ability to execute (especially in the context of its ambitions) by being known as a second-rate employer in an industry primarily limited by the cost and ability to attract quality labor.
This doesn't excuse Sundar of course, because he was ultimately the CEO through all of this.
I think he cares deeply about the company and its mission, he just lacks the ability to be a bold and decisive leader. This can be a good thing in some cases (he is good at building consensus for example), but can also be harmful.
A quick Google (natch!) suggests that the company mission is: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Does he "care deeply" about this? If we look at the direction they've taken in recent years, and the products they've launched (and/or killed) - how many of them demonstrate a "deep care" about this mission? How many of them are even tangentially related to this mission?
(The projects that Google undertook in the early days --Earth, Maps, Mail, digitising whole libraries, photographing the world for StreetView-- definitely showed a dedication to this mission statement.)
The notion of organizing private information (VS the public internet) helped me shift my perspective a bit, thank you. It also dramatically amplified my feelings about other Google products, like Drive, which do an absolutely terrible job organizing and making private information accessible. It's almost maliciously bad.
What argument are you trying to make here? This feels very “I’m going to logic you into my view”. Google is a large, nuanced organisation. The measure of Sundar “caring deeply” doesn’t have to be filtered through a marketing slogan.
The previous poster wrote (of Sundar): "I think he cares deeply about the company and its mission..."
I'm not trying to make an argument; instead, I was:
1) Checking what Google's mission is these days (as I'm not clear if the mission statement I found is indeed still their mission, and/or the one that the previous poster said that he cares deeply about)
2) If that is the correct mission statement, testing the premise that he cares deeply about it, by exploring the direction the company under his leadership has taken.
