Absolutely nothing about the structural discontent emerging in staff.
And nothing about the increasing sense of a loss of claimed ethical stance. I stress claimed, because the lack of concern at the top at its obvious demise makes it less likely it was actually held as a core belief.
As a former Googler who stays in touch, there doesn't seem to be structural discontent emerging in staff. There were a few news stories about people complaining, but Google employs about 100,000 people, so any news story involving less than 1000 of them being unhappy can't really count as "structural discontent".
The walkout referred to was over a year ago, so I wouldn't call that discontent "emerging". If anything, that demonstrates that discontent is diminishing, because there hasn't been another similar walkout.
I don't get the constant critiques of this. They fired employees who encouraged others to leave their jobs. That's not really "retaliation", is it? Were a competitor to do that, Google would have a case for tortious interference. Why is it any different when it's "organizing"? It's not like this was a unionization attempt, which might have some legal protection.
Actually, organizing around workplace conditions (in this case, alleged sexual violence by Google executives) is a protected action under US labor law. So, yes, it would be retaliation and no, they’re not allowed to do that.
You posted that someone needed to demonstrate "structural discontent" via a news story involving at least 1K employees. They linked to one involving 20K. And your response to that is: "This proves that discontent is diminishing?"
You set the challenge, they exceeded it 20x, and you've not made a believable case that this shows "content is diminishing." In fact exceeding your original demands by 20x seems to thoroughly show that the basis for the claim is true.
For anyone pointing to "structural discontent" at Google, you guys seem to be very out of touch with reality. Compared to 99% of other large corporations (in US, or worldwide), Google is heaven on Earth as a place to work at. $200k entry level comp, lots of perks, very smart people all around you, open culture, coolest stuff to work on, cutting edge tech stack and great tools, future technologies being invented right next to you (or by you!), etc, etc. There are problems, or course, because you're bound to have problems in any 100k organization, but at other places it's so much worse. Try working at any company on Fortune 500 list, other than FAANG, or at any government agency, and see how much tolerance for "discontent" is there. The amount of BS per $ you will have to endure there is simply incomparable.
Or maybe you want to hold Google to higher standards just because it's Google? Why exactly?
This has nothing to do with the post you replied to.
Plus this retort essentially boils down to "Google pays well and other companies are even worse so quit complaining!" Restating the compensation argument multiple different ways, and the cutting edge argument multiple times doesn't really address the actual underlying complaints being made (Google's partnership with distasteful foreign governments and other corporate immoralities).
If you want to talk corporate morals, sure, relevant. If you just want to brag that Google pays super well and is less evil than [more evil companies] this seems like a whole other discussion that sidesteps the issues. Which isn't to say it is untrue, just irrelevant.
Ok, let's talk about specific issues that cause complaints. Google is a for-profit company, and it answers to shareholders who want to make money. Why would Google not engage in those practices you deem immoral if that's what the shareholders want? I use Google products daily. So for me the question is - does Google need to engage in "partnership with distasteful foreign governments and other corporate immoralities", in order for me to enjoy using its products in the future? Will such activities hurt or help Google in the long run?
I would hope that every single person - including shareholders, managers, and employees - holds our fundamental values like peace, freedom, or justice higher than their desire to maximise profits.
The top question is not: will it hurt the company. The top question is: will it hurt humanity.
We liked Google because their founders did the right thing for a long time, and fended off profit-maximizing shareholders.
Sure we can hope, but in reality if Google is not profitable someone else will take its place. If Google does not cooperate with Chinese government someone else will take its place.
Will humanity benefit if, say, Comcast buys the morally pure but financially struggling Google, or if no one is challenging Baidu in China?
As long as Google cares, it is a net win for humanity. Even the worst-case scenario that Google is later bought by an immoral company is a better outcome for humanity than Google immediately becoming immoral.
I also find your argument about Google becoming unprofitable unconvincing. They were very profitable while they held the standards high in the past. Maybe not maximally profitable, but very profitable.
The walkout was a bait and switch. It was organized (using underhanded means --- for example, a rogue employee force pushing a desktop background update to everyone without authorization) on the basis of protesting Google's payout to Andy Rubin. Fine.
But at the same time, a small number of employees put together a document (without public input) making "walkout demands" and ever since, this small but very vocal group of employees has been going around claiming that 20,000 people support the list of demands in this doc. Not the case. Total lies, in fact.
Hey Lacker. I'd be curious about whether there is a bias around the seniority level/situation in the pool of people you keep in touch with. People I've talked to, ranging from new hires to old timers, have generally trended toward being more discontent and cynical about the company as a whole.
Unless it there is more behind the scenes, the letter is basically saying:
We don't want to deal, or like/enjoy dealing with this pesky employee stuff. We don't have the time, energy, or enjoy it, and they'd rather do something else with their time and money.
They are in a position where they either crack-down on their culture to more of a corp like, and appear to go full evil, or be even more lenient, and risk small 'intolerant' groups or activists taking over and creating disruptions to the business. Whatever they do at this point, they will be either painted as the bad guys in the media (if they go full on evil corp); or the 'dysfunctional' company, if they allow even more discontent and become more 'college/academic like'.
Basically, their employees situation is becoming such a PITA for them, they'd rather not deal with it and quit the company and do something else, more interesting, instead....
They realize that they just don't enjoy dealing with the creature/organization that they created.
Basically, it is the CEO's version of: "it is not you, but it is me" line of break-up, and we all know what that line means.
I think that's a cynical view of the situation. These guys have grown a college startup into one of the world's most valuable companies. They're rich beyond imagination. More importantly, they're getting close to being 50. Would you want a day job if you could retire 15 years earlier than most, especially considering Google has served as a vehicle to explore a ton of other projects they've been interested in (since maybe people would think, why not start another company?).
Makes total sense, I'm sure they're looking forward to spending time on their yachts with their families and not in meetings 8 hours a day.
I think they will regret it. Google was once a real special company. Their IPO filling, their stance on China, those were principled, courageous stands that came straight from Larry and Sergey. To see their beautiful baby turn into another mega-corp, as hypocritical as any, colonized by activists and careerists bent on distorting the social fabric to advance ideologies and profits? Contemplating that turn of events when you had the power to stop it but chose not to? That has to suck, even when you are doing the contemplation from your yacht.
I think what they learned in the intervening 15 years is that there are very strong structural forces pushing corporations towards the "traditional company" form that everybody hates, and that even as CEO, even as controlling shareholders, they were powerless to stop them.
At least, that's what I learned, having worked at Google during the period where "Don't be evil" was still taken seriously, engineers could still propose & develop their own projects, the public still liked them, and Larry was just beginning to take the reins.
For the stuff that actually sucks about Google, yes, they were powerless. I think they'd still be on top if they felt they could actually make Google into the company they want it to be. Larry in particular does not give up easily.
Take stock price obsession. Everybody knows the dangers of having quarterly earnings targets dictate the company strategy, and the moral compromises that companies make to meet those targets. Google's initial founders' letter said "If our earnings are lumpy, they'll be lumpy" (ironically, they were not - earnings went up monotonically and consistently exceeded analysts' targets until about 2013, for reasons I'm not going to get into here). And they took a lot of steps - like the dual-class share structure that gave Larry, Sergey, and Eric voting control over the company regardless of what Wall Street wanted - to avoid that.
The problem is that stock price affects a lot more than just investors' pocketbooks. When the stock was low, Google had trouble attracting talented new engineers, which is critical to making new products that are really excellent. Low stock price means negative PR cycles; the press is always happy to write glowing reviews of fast-growing rocket ships, but as soon as they start to flounder, the press will kick them when they're down. (For more recent examples of this, see Theranos, WeWork, and Facebook.) The press cycle in turn affects consumer attitudes towards the brand, which is the source of both power and revenue.
There were many other examples like this - another big one is the negative effect of company size on innovation, where once a company gets big enough new product ideas will always get killed, regardless of how good they are, because there is somebody with veto power or just enough social clout to discourage the innovator. I suspect this in particular was disheartening for Larry, who both identified with would-be innovators and had protected them when Google was smaller.
You're right. One of these forces is how in a sufficiently large organization you're practically guaranteed to attract a critical mass of bad actors, people with rare but extremely harmful personality types. In an open culture, these bad actors can find each other and coordinate, creating massive problems for the whole organization. Traditional big companies are robust against these bad actors --- unfortunately at the cost of many other desirable characteristics. Smaller companies (maybe up to 10k headcount) can get without the necessary safeguards because, due to their small size, they don't attract a critical mass of rare but extremely harmful personalities.
Google tried to remain an open, high-trust place well beyond the point when it became obvious that the company had attracted exactly this sort of toxic element. Now the company is paying the price.
I think you are misreading it, I am not judging Sergei and Larry negatively....
What I am saying is that their decision makes total sense, and there is no reason to chide on them on 'why they are not dealing with the employe' problems, but quitting' as the OP did.
Really, this is just a: Peace out guys, we are moving on...
And there is nothing wrong with it, as google is not really dealing with an existential threat right now....
Same as somebody quitting their job, when it is not enjoyable anymore... and they have been doing the same thing for years. Billionares are people after-all....
I judge them pretty negatively. People like Bezos, Jobs, or even Gates never really spent so much time building this PR image of being for the greater good, holier-than-though, "making the world a better place." Everyone knows "don't be evil", but how about their recruiting catch phrase "do cool things that matter." Even the "not a conventional company" tag line is relevant here.
Hypocrites just irk me more than people open about their intentions and motivation, and to me Larry and Sergey belong in the hypocrite category. They ultimately were billionares with total control over Google, this idea that somehow things just got out of their control is absurd. It didn't get out of their control, what happened is that whenever push came to shove on difficult issues, they always went with the decision that they felt would lead to the higher stock price. After years of telling everyone who would listen they were non-conventional leaders interested in more than just money, they always purely pursued the lucre. And why? They are literally amongst the world's richest people already.
I was at the TGIF where Sergey tried to sell the company on Maven, and then what happened was, internal google groups are a bit like public URLs, in that they were basically visible to all full time employees if you knew the link. So Sergey would say one thing on stage and then someone would stumble up on the link about the real strategy, and that what they said on stage was "messaging" to appease dissenters. It was total dishonesty, and it was all for big fat contracts, that's it. They did not care one bit about the dangers of weaponized AI or the dangers of being an international company building military technology for one company, or the general growth of the military industrial complex and how the biggest tech company becoming part of it it could snowball its size and dangerous impact on society. And Maven is just one example, but censorship in China is another, and there's many more. I do get that they struggle with some truly difficult decisions that are ethically ambiguous and they can't please everybody, but there are plenty of spots where it was abundantly clear that the only thing Larry and Sergey cared about was filling their already overfilling coffers with more gold. And when Bezos does that, at least he never pretended otherwise, but when Larry and Sergey do it, they are totally backtracking on a public image they spent years selling to people.
The difference between Amazon and Google is that google controls access to information and in some respects can shape public opinion. When Bezos gets greedy, its through some better product like faster cheaper shipping.
Reasonable people differ on all these projects. It's not "abundantly clear" at all. What you feel strongly about might be another's subtle trafeoff. You don't get to decide which disagreements you'll allow and which you'll prohibit. That's the privilege of the people who own the company. The main problem with Google over the past few years is this idea among a small but vocal group of employees that they have the right to run the company merely because they feel strongly about certain issues.
I think it's impossible to be cynical enough about a guy who blacklisted a company from his search engine because they used his service to show a picture of his backyard as a way of illustrating the privacy violations his company enabled.
Does a CEO of a 100,000 employee company ever have this kind of low level management?
Larry and Sergey have been obviously taking on less of a role since Sundar took over as CEO of Google. They've been at Google for more than two decades and are mega billionaires. Do people really think that this has anything to do with agitation among employees?
Wow - big news! It seems better to have a CEO who is “All in” rather than one who is and one who isn’t. This is more work Sundar. I hope he has a strong bench.
It's a line-item hack, the way that Hollywood studios structure films to be separate sub-corporations with their own fixed budgets.
So if a film crew, say, accidentally blows up a small town somehow, there's a firewall between the assets that were dedicated to making that one film and the entirety of, for example, Sony Pictures net worth and capital.
I'm not sure that firewall is well-tested in American law, but it's a well-used approach and I've always assumed the Google / Alphabet arrangement was for similar reasons (so that worst-case scenario on any 'bet is always "Alphabet cuts bait and shuts it down, liquidates it, and debtors go after the assets of the 'bet" without risking the performance numbers of the Google cash cow directly).
It's a line-item hack but I believe it's for a different purpose: investors are asking for more details on revenue and expenses of the various units. Splitting the monolith Google into Alphabet + stuff provides line-items along "objective" lines that are still chosen by the company.
One of the things people were anxious to see was the financials of YouTube. Guess who's not a separate "bet"?
Also allows the other Alphabet companies to have independent investors who may not want to invest in "Google" itself. Niantic is the prototype for this: it's success with Pokemon Go couldn't have happened without the partnership with, and investment by, Nintendo. It's doubtful that Nintendo would've wanted to invest directly in Google, though, and Niantic's $3B in lifetime revenue would be rounding error for Google as a whole but is still a very substantial return on Nintendo's $30M investment.
Isn't it the opposite of a line-item hack? Instead of being able to hide the losses of their other bets in the profits of their ad division, the alphabet structure gives their investors visibility into exactly how much money the non-google parts of the company are losing.
The hack is (and I can't explain why because I don't get it) a lot of investors still look at Google and only Google and don't care how much money the 'bets are losing.
Eric Schmidt had step down long before that, and Larry Page was the CEO. In 2015, Alphabet was formed and Page became the CEO of Alphabet, leaving Sundar as the CEO of Google.
Honestly, part of Google's approach is to kill products. They're a company with a startup-incubation-emulator running inside them. Things that seem worthwhile get resources, but if a product can't make its way to profitability in some amount of time, it dies.
They should probably be more up-front about the messaging around this, but if you step back and look at their practice, that's how it appears to work. User numbers don't matter; profitability matters. Not unlike startups in the long-run.
I find it stunning that of all of the communities it seems to be HN that has jumped on this idea the most. Surely people entrenched in the startup world understand the value of pivoting and dropping products that aren't working.
Yeah it's just not that valuable for the end users to be dropped. Just like a startup. Why would anyone add startup or startup-like products to your workflow?
I think this is good news. Google has sometimes felt like it was pulled in two different directions - making the core business successful, and providing spinoff cash for the crazy projects. Having the same person run both of them seems like it will make management more efficient.
It probably means that a number of Larry and Sergey "pet projects" will become deprioritized. Good. Self-driving cars seem like they have great potential. I think that technology has the potential to make the entire Alphabet structure worthwhile. But it also seems like it should no longer need the Alphabet structure to protect itself.
Yes, this is the announcement that Page and Brin are stepping down.
I wouldn't really call it "incredibly subtle" - most similar announcements are wrapped in a bunch of corporate language as well. This is a pretty standard way to announce this sort of thing.
I'm not sure how long these sort of antitrust cases take to litigate (I was young during Microsoft's high profile case), but I'd say this is one of the most rational explanations as to why, seemingly out of nowhere, they'd parachute away together.
It looks like an attempt to try to distance themselves, their personal images, and their assets before it gets too ugly. I would certainly do so unless my personal financial analysts told me otherwise.
I've seen this explanation multiple times in this thread, but I find it incredibly hard to believe Alphabet was created to shift Sergey and Larry's time away from Google. It seems like there are far easier (and cheaper) ways of accomplishing this without creating a conglomerate.
Well, what they did is install a "CEO" for the main business, so they weren't operationally involved in that part of the business anymore and focused on different side businesses. Now the crown prince takes over everything operationally and the founders move to the board ... No idea if that was the primary plan, but certainly one of the options considered back then.
They've made other major moves together. This is apparently part of a slow fade they've been doing at least since they started Alphabet. The reasons behind that remain mysterious.
Mysterious? I'd personally retire to enjoy my millions long before I got to the point of having billions, so I don't think there's much explanation needed about why they'd want to not have to worry or work anymore.
> I'm not sure how long these sort of antitrust cases take to litigate
They typically take years, often over a decade. I'm talking about the entire process, not just the litigation (which is the easiest and fastest part). With Microsoft, it took 19 years from start to end.
My hunch would be that they are just bailing before they get mired in something like an antitrust suit. They strike me as the type of person that enjoys the fun of a fast startup environment, and a big Co under an antitrust suit is pretty much the opposite of that. I doubt they are driven by money as much, in comparison.
That's why they can cash out at 10% per year because they cases will last a -minimum- of 5-7 years. Google has the best lawyers in the world. Definitely a slow Homer recession into the bushes.
I guess I just don't believe this. Google is one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. Having both people step down like this is incredibly strange.
I mean, neither of them even tried the ol' "I'm stepping down to spend time with my family" thing.
Larry and Sergey are basically best friends. Their involvement with Google, as a pair, has been receding for quite some time. Today's announcement was foreshadowed by the creation of Alphabet Inc. as a parent company in 2015.
Details in Sergey Brin and Amanda Rosenberg: Inside the Google Co-Founder’s Romance with the Google Glass Marketing Manager | Vanity Fairhttp://archive.is/kQvuR Febr 2015
Nah, anyone used to reading Google press releases knows that a subject line of, "An Update on X" always means X is being shut down, and thus, "A letter from Larry and Sergey" could mean nothing else except they're stepping down.
I remember Google's earlier days when they shutdown projects and people praised them for iterating fast, not carrying weight, etc. The only difference now is that they have more users but I think they have given enough warnings about their shutdowns, IMHO.
Now that Google Is Evil (tm), we don't seem to appreciate that behavior as much as we did in the past.
This company has to die. It's time. It used to be cool to steal people's information for profit, but no more.
Edit: I'm sorry...it appears theft is still the coolest thing ever.
Edit: Real cowards downvote! They also look for other people's postings and downvote all those too! What a "great" forum for the sharing of "free-thought"!
>Today, in 2019, if the company was a person, it would be a young adult of 21 and it would be time to leave the roost. While it has been a tremendous privilege to be deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the company for so long, we believe it’s time to assume the role of proud parents—offering advice and love, but not daily nagging!
From the outside, it feels much more like the company is hitting a midlife crisis (feeling unsettled, not as agile as they used to be) than a young adult.
Company lifespans these days are a lot shorter than human lifespans. 25-40 years seems typical, making a company-year 2-3x a human year.
By that yardstick, Google was in its young adolescence when it IPO'd (seems reasonable), was an idealistic young adult when I joined in 2009 (also reasonable), is now hitting a midlife crisis, and will die sometime around 2040.
Yep I'm down with your timeline. I joined in 2012 and it felt like a person in their late 20s or 30s in an energetic but responsible part of their career, just settling down to have kids... But before all the buying of sailboats and sports cars and treatments for baldness...
The funny thing is: If you are used to coporate speech, then immediately after you read the headline "A letter from Larry and Sergey" you know that there is a resignation coming up.
It's not subtle at all. Anyone who knows the current state of affairs (i.e. Sundar being CEO of Google) will have deduced this based on the myriad of titles on this topic alone.
> Nonetheless, Google’s core service—providing unbiased, accurate, and free access to information—remains at the heart of the company.
How is it ok to just say clear lies like this?! Without making any value judgements at all this is blatantly false. The ranking algorithms specifically encode a bias into search results. This is actually explicitly what users want, too! To be clear this is distressing to me because very powerful people can throw around words uncritically in this way for niche political points without being challenged.
EDIT: It seems people are taking this comment in a way I didn't intend for it to be taken. Another example is that they are applying biases by sorting and displaying results on news.google.com. Personally I really like how this is done, but I think we need to be honest that it is a bias so that we can move on to a more productive conversation about what is or isn't a good bias.
I would have accepted this, yeah. The difference is important because there is a relevancy calculation that determines what's on top of news.google.com at any given time and that encodes types of bias. Personally, in fact, I believe they're mostly good sorts of biases in that they wont generally show you InfoWars or something like that, for example. But we need to be honest when we talk about this stuff.
Don't be too pedantic. By your definition, what even is unbiased? A list of all the sites on the web, A to Z? Words are what we make of them, and there's clearly some distinction between Google and, say, Baidu that is entirely appropriate to capture with the word "unbiased".
I dont think this is pedantic and my point is exactly as you describe! There is no such thing as "unbiased" and people who are in search of that are living in a dream world.
but surely people mean something when they say "unbiased", right? (I'll take a stab at it: something like "conveyed without the intention to deceive me, especially politically/financially/etc...")
I get your point, and it's an important one -- but ime conversations are a lot more productive when they're about the ideas, not the words. :)
> something like "conveyed without the intention to deceive me, especially politically/financially/etc...")
That isn't even close to the definition of "unbiased" that I use. To me, something is "unbiased" if it based on facts without being interpreted in accordance with some preexisting belief or worldview.
For what it's worth i agree with this. A realistic example of what i would describe as unbiased is, say, telemetry data from a radio telescope, or a neutral reading of a poem or story.
Tools are unbiased.
I think the real danger is actually in the notion that "bias" is something done to deceive, and I have encountered people who imply this quite a bit in real life
By way of example: I have a strong bias towards the nationalization of infrastructure. Many of my opinions and arguments are designed to support this end because, for reasons I would love to explain I believe it's the best course of action. I am, if anything, prone to never letting anyone leave my company without droning on and on about this! There is not deception involved. People certainly do hide their biases, or lie about things in order to support their arguments, but this is not something inevitable with bias.
Ultimately I think everyone needs to deal with the reality that we ALL have biases and we ALL inject them into our work. This is actually ok, because its part of how we work to build the world we want to live in.
> I think the real danger is actually in the notion that "bias" is something done to deceive, and I have encountered people who imply this quite a bit in real life
I agree entirely. Bias is typically not something that is intentionally done in an attempt to deceive. It comes naturally to people because they look at the world through the lens of their own experiences and beliefs.
Everybody has a bias. The trick is to understand what sort of bias people (including ourselves) have, so we can properly understand what they're saying.
> I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias
You're reading far too much into what im saying. I'm not calling google a bad actor (though certainly I think they can be for reasons that have little to do with the search algorithm.) I'm saying that there is bias encoded here and, further as i thought was clear, im not saying this is a bad thing.
I think people are missing your point. As we all know, removing unbiased and false information is an unsolved problem, so I find it a bit odd that they claim to be able to do this. Not only that, but now they will be held accountable in this regard. I can't see how this statement made it through PR.
I see a few comments praising Sundar. As someone who doesn’t follow closely, but feels that Google has deteriorated dramatically under his watch, does someone mind explaining the reasoning for said praise?
Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. That's the simplest reason.
Personally I think a lot of their products have gotten better recently, like the experience of using voice-controlled Google Maps in my car, and Google Cloud is superior to AWS in many ways, but the company really offers so many different product lines that it's hard for personal experience to be a great representation.
> Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO.
It’s hard for me to say that this is because of Sundar and not just because the whole market has grown size and google already had a massive moat to capture it. Apple, MS, Facebook, Amazon all have grown massively in the past 5 years.
However Google seems to continue to be a one trick pony - GCP lags behind the competition despite the fact that Google invented cloud computing. Even Apple is weaning off its iPhone revenue with its fast growing services division.
I see this meme all the time. What does GCP lag on? What is it missing?
I see a proliferation of AWS services, yes, but many seem to be replicating things that GCP has had since the start, in multiple different formats without clear direction. Bigquery covers most of the use cases of Redshift, Kineseis, Athena, EMR, and others. It is at once decoupled from and well integrated with their object storage, allowing reads and writes with clear translation when necessary. I find myself reaching for Bigquery like semantics all the time and having to cobble two or more AWS tools to get similar. I see the same pattern repeated constantly - If I click "ECS" in the Amazon Console, it wants to sell me ECS, ECR, Fargate, and EKS - All of which overlap in non-obvious ways.
Disclaimer: I'm Ex-google, and was a poweruser of dremel
I used GCP before and liked it better than AWS. The current startup I work for has a prior business relationship with AWS, and every month, it gets harder to move off to GCP. AWS gave a generous credit to the type of startup we have, and with the relationship-building from the solutions architect and account manager, this probably won't go away.
There are a lot of technical refinements in GCP that makes life a lot easier than AWS, but nothing strategically compelling enough for the cost (in cash, developer time, and burning relationships) to jump ship. So I make-do with the not-as-great technology. They are pain-points but not deal-breakers.
I think if our startup were doing AI/ML, or even heavy data processing as our core technology, there's probably enough compelling reasons to invest in a move to GCP. But it isn't.
If I were greenfielding a new launch at a new startup, I'd push for GCP.
I've seen this several times by now. It's pretty ridiculous. One of my clients was an AI startup. They got $100K in AWS credit. So yeah, of course they aren't going to move off AWS until that credit runs out, even though GCP's offering for GPU is much better: for one thing on GCP you can vary the number of cores allocated to a machine with a GPU (or several). Inexplicably on AWS you can't do that. One GPU - you get 8 cores. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. As a result, you can't use that V100 fully if you do any significant data augmentation - CPU is often a bottleneck. IO and networking are faster on GCP as well. And if your GPU is not "free", you can cut costs by running on preemptible instances (few of their training runs are longer than 8 hours). On top of that if scale is needed (which it was), you can wrap it all into k8s, too.
Disclosure: ex-googler (left 4 years ago), own no GOOG, use GCP to run my own business. Clients use whatever they want.
Totally agreed. Many places don’t even run their AWS environments particularly well, but talk themselves into a most of their own making.
AWS is just another IT vendor. The weird dependency, reminiscent of 1980s IBM thinking, is bad for any company, at some point you become more of a vassal than a customer.
My understanding is that GCP lags on developer trust, specifically when it comes to support. Several years ago I was excited about GCP, but have mostly lost interest after reading various stories about account lockouts here on HN.
This. Unless you are a big, important account, do not put anything you value on any of Google's platforms. There is a small, but non-zero, chance they'll randomly destroy it and ghost you.
This is accurate form my perspective. I work for a company that made a big bet on Google Cloud and we spent the last 4 years building on it. We are now moving to Azure because of the number of times Google kept dropping support for things forcing us to rewrite our libraries. We should have never went with PaaS (App Engine) but thats a different issue all together. App Engine Flex was a nightmare to work with because Google couldn't help themselves with the constant urge to change things by ripping out things and replacing them instead of having a vision and improving on the existing offerings.
I think that GCP is obviously better for people working inside Google. I was amazed when on my third day I took the all day end to end class and was blown away by how “not difficult” it was to use Borg, the global file system, web based dev tools, etc.
But, I have always enjoyed using public GCP more that AWS.
I was a user of GCP. Documentation lied to me back in January and cost me over $1000 of my personal money. I got assigned a support case, and had absolutely no reply until April, when I had confirmation that there was indeed a bug in the system from Google engineers, and that they planned to fix it. In the meantime, I switched off of GCP. Their only consolation was a coupon that insisted that I keep on using GCP, which would have eaten through my money again.
I somehow got CC'd to an internal Google system, Buganizer, which has done nothing but leak a bunch of internal communications, including some small code patches to GCP infrastructure itself.
My support request has not been updated, but Buganizer has let me know that they supposedly updated the documentation mid-November to fix it, but the rephrased advice still was not correct based on my interpretation of the issue. The bug is still open.
But hadn't it grown more in the preceding 5 years than in the 4 years headed by Sundar. Looking at the share price, it seems it has roughly doubled every 5 years since 2005.
I can name only one: mobile. OTOH Ballmer spearheaded Azure and Office/Exchange as a service, both of which are the major reasons why MS is a trillion-dollar company on an upswing today. No amount of Satya would save it, if Ballmer didn't beat the internal Microsoft "deep state" into submission on Azure and SaaS first. And a serious beatdown was required before Office and Windows apparatchiks received the message.
I think you're confusing him with Gates. Although Ballmer did refuse to buy Google when he could. Would have been a drop in the bucket. I forgot, BTW, he also spun up the ad and search businesses: the only reason there's any alternative to Google at all.
Arguably, if he would've bought Google, we wouldn't have the internet as we have it today: people would've payed for search, as for the OS and Office suite: $10 per 1000 queries per month.
I have also been appreciating their products lately: Play Books and Movies, the Google iOS app that does a good job of showing my article that interests me, and until I retired (just writing now) I really always preferred Google Cloud over AWS. Even with potential privacy issues, YouTube, GMail, and Calendar are also good.
In the past have been I have been a vocal supporter of FSF (still am, but...) but I look at the world situation now with people in China quickly losing freedoms but excelling in AI and other tech, here in the USA corporate fascism is unstoppable. With the political problems around the globe getting crazier and with chaotic climate change, I think now that people in different countries should do two things: embrace their own culture and values, and to do what they can to make their countries competitive in AI and other tech, especially tech that will help with climate change and generally increase productivity. Those on top will get bigger and bigger pieces of the pie, so we better grow the pie rapidly so regular peoples’ share is sufficient for a good life.
Honestly, I'm with you on this one. Sundar seems like a good maintainer of the status quo and that's probably wise since the business keeps growing (growing revenue, growing market cap and growing free cash flow), but Google's evolution on cloud infrastructure/services and hardware are honestly kind of lame.
I mentioned those two because they seem to be their big bets now.
When compared to Satya who is thriving with Microsoft, Sundar looks mediocre at best.
I don't mean that in a bad way. Perhaps Google doesn't need to have those tectonic changes to produce value. In that case, Sundar's reserved and low-key profile makes more sense, but don't expect a high profile, exuberant and innovation-driven leadership. I think it's clear he is not that type of leader.
To be clear - I'm not criticizing this particular post or person (whoisjuan, anyways? :) ), but I think it's worth noting these little hints that outgoing and extroverted are thought to be synonymous with "good leadership" (in the US, at least)
Leadership is a skill to learn, just like programming, writing, or most other things really.
People who are introverts at heart can learn to become just as good managers as those who aren't. It may come less naturally, I couldn't say, but it's definitely possible.
I think their point is that it's a hard skill for introverts to learn because they don't enjoy it. It values things they don't care about (or usually don't). In that way, when you have an introverted manager, it's usually the bad kind.
That's the real tragedy - nothing he can do will fail google at this point. He could do a live stream of oral sex on Youtube, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference. He's already lied through his teeth to Congress.
Perhaps Tim Cook-ing forward is a more modern/relevant way of describing the phenomenon? (Pichai and Cook are both competent empire caretakers. Innovation is suffering though...)
They've done very well from a product perspective as well as dollars and cents. And I think he hasn't absorbed much blame for the culture problems. At least not yet.
He's a good businessman, but that "deterioration" that you (and me and many many others) see is because he's not driven by the same morals and beliefs that Larry and Sergey had when they were running the company. The "old Google" everyone loved was the pre-Sundar Google.
I can't really blame Larry and Sergey for wanting to do something else, and leaving the company in the hands of someone that they know will maximize profits. But that doesn't change the fact that modern Google does a lot of scummy and downright evil stuff today that likely wouldn't have happened during the "old Google" days.
He's a Type-2 CEO [1], a Ballmer, Sculley, or Cook figure. These types of personalities are generally incapable of innovating, but they're very good at maximizing the growth, efficiency, and profit potential of existing product lines. Wall Street loves them because they lead to higher EPS; the general public generally considers them mediocre because they don't lead to awesome new toys to play with.
Personally I thought Sundar was a very good manager (much better than Larry, who honestly sucked as a CEO) but a poor innovator. As a HN commenter you're probably looking for an innovator. The average user (who just wants Google to stay up) and the average investor (who just want to make more money) are quite happy having a good manager who can optimize operations, though.
It seems most people are probably praising him for bringing up the Google stock price, whereas people who actually care about products/culture/technology realize he hasn't actually contributed anything worthwhile. Yet another classic case of a CEO riding out momentum set forth by predecessors and maximizing value to fiduciaries while selling out the user base.
The heat is on Google and its founders. It goes beyond anything that’s in the press right now. The real question is if regulators and others will allow Sundar to take the heat for everything and keep Larry and Sergey from the “hassle” of having to testify about anti-competitive practices and a whole range of other issues. And then there are the “hobbies” of the early Google crew and founders which are a problem in the #metoo era...
There is way more to this than a retirement goodbye.
Yeah it also seemed like an Irish exit to me. Especially with all the scrutiny over data collection policies and other political issues happening internally.
Well it isn't everyday you hear the original CEOs of FAANG companies stepping down these days.
First you heard Gates, then Jobs (Twice) and now Page and Brin. We'll see if whether if Pichai can continue this now that he has been crowned King of Alphabet and Google.
It is literally the job of PR people to write things like these. I’m confused by your statement. This is effectively a press release, of course it was written by a PR person.
I agree that ideally you wouldn’t notice that … however I do think there are pretty clear constraints around how you can announce such a thing to avoid harm.
You will always end up with a text like that. It tries to reduce risk and harm and companies will nearly always want to pick that trade-off: rather sound bland and cliched instead of risking undue negative effects.
This has to be a green light for TK to take Cloud and really run with it.
There's no way Sundar can give as much attention to Google and all the other bets simultaneously. Curious what side projects of Larry and Sergey get turned down now.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 323 ms ] thread> And remember… don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!
Even without factoring in self-justifying rationalizations, people can have significantly different ideas of what counts as evil.
When a company is large, it bumps up against the problem that humanity as a whole has a difference in definitions on the subject.
> people can have significantly different ideas of what counts as evil.
And those people, who need someone to explain to them what is or isn't evil, aren't welcome.
That's why I personally loved that motto. Too bad that whole ethos got dropped like it was a recently-launched product.
If you too find it interesting, you may enjoy doing a literature search on the topic.
Do no evil seems stricter than don't be evil. How much evil can you do before you are evil? Or can you be evil while doing no evil?
be evil
And nothing about the increasing sense of a loss of claimed ethical stance. I stress claimed, because the lack of concern at the top at its obvious demise makes it less likely it was actually held as a core belief.
the fact that 4 out of 7 of the organizers of the walkout left the company[1], some with more than 10 years working for Google, is rather telling.
I don't think your comment holds water.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/most-google-walkout-organizers-l...
You set the challenge, they exceeded it 20x, and you've not made a believable case that this shows "content is diminishing." In fact exceeding your original demands by 20x seems to thoroughly show that the basis for the claim is true.
Or maybe you want to hold Google to higher standards just because it's Google? Why exactly?
Plus this retort essentially boils down to "Google pays well and other companies are even worse so quit complaining!" Restating the compensation argument multiple different ways, and the cutting edge argument multiple times doesn't really address the actual underlying complaints being made (Google's partnership with distasteful foreign governments and other corporate immoralities).
If you want to talk corporate morals, sure, relevant. If you just want to brag that Google pays super well and is less evil than [more evil companies] this seems like a whole other discussion that sidesteps the issues. Which isn't to say it is untrue, just irrelevant.
The top question is not: will it hurt the company. The top question is: will it hurt humanity.
We liked Google because their founders did the right thing for a long time, and fended off profit-maximizing shareholders.
Will humanity benefit if, say, Comcast buys the morally pure but financially struggling Google, or if no one is challenging Baidu in China?
I also find your argument about Google becoming unprofitable unconvincing. They were very profitable while they held the standards high in the past. Maybe not maximally profitable, but very profitable.
But at the same time, a small number of employees put together a document (without public input) making "walkout demands" and ever since, this small but very vocal group of employees has been going around claiming that 20,000 people support the list of demands in this doc. Not the case. Total lies, in fact.
[1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/30/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-sup...
We don't want to deal, or like/enjoy dealing with this pesky employee stuff. We don't have the time, energy, or enjoy it, and they'd rather do something else with their time and money.
They are in a position where they either crack-down on their culture to more of a corp like, and appear to go full evil, or be even more lenient, and risk small 'intolerant' groups or activists taking over and creating disruptions to the business. Whatever they do at this point, they will be either painted as the bad guys in the media (if they go full on evil corp); or the 'dysfunctional' company, if they allow even more discontent and become more 'college/academic like'.
Basically, their employees situation is becoming such a PITA for them, they'd rather not deal with it and quit the company and do something else, more interesting, instead....
They realize that they just don't enjoy dealing with the creature/organization that they created.
Basically, it is the CEO's version of: "it is not you, but it is me" line of break-up, and we all know what that line means.
Makes total sense, I'm sure they're looking forward to spending time on their yachts with their families and not in meetings 8 hours a day.
At least, that's what I learned, having worked at Google during the period where "Don't be evil" was still taken seriously, engineers could still propose & develop their own projects, the public still liked them, and Larry was just beginning to take the reins.
Take stock price obsession. Everybody knows the dangers of having quarterly earnings targets dictate the company strategy, and the moral compromises that companies make to meet those targets. Google's initial founders' letter said "If our earnings are lumpy, they'll be lumpy" (ironically, they were not - earnings went up monotonically and consistently exceeded analysts' targets until about 2013, for reasons I'm not going to get into here). And they took a lot of steps - like the dual-class share structure that gave Larry, Sergey, and Eric voting control over the company regardless of what Wall Street wanted - to avoid that.
The problem is that stock price affects a lot more than just investors' pocketbooks. When the stock was low, Google had trouble attracting talented new engineers, which is critical to making new products that are really excellent. Low stock price means negative PR cycles; the press is always happy to write glowing reviews of fast-growing rocket ships, but as soon as they start to flounder, the press will kick them when they're down. (For more recent examples of this, see Theranos, WeWork, and Facebook.) The press cycle in turn affects consumer attitudes towards the brand, which is the source of both power and revenue.
There were many other examples like this - another big one is the negative effect of company size on innovation, where once a company gets big enough new product ideas will always get killed, regardless of how good they are, because there is somebody with veto power or just enough social clout to discourage the innovator. I suspect this in particular was disheartening for Larry, who both identified with would-be innovators and had protected them when Google was smaller.
Google tried to remain an open, high-trust place well beyond the point when it became obvious that the company had attracted exactly this sort of toxic element. Now the company is paying the price.
What I am saying is that their decision makes total sense, and there is no reason to chide on them on 'why they are not dealing with the employe' problems, but quitting' as the OP did.
Really, this is just a: Peace out guys, we are moving on...
And there is nothing wrong with it, as google is not really dealing with an existential threat right now....
Same as somebody quitting their job, when it is not enjoyable anymore... and they have been doing the same thing for years. Billionares are people after-all....
Hypocrites just irk me more than people open about their intentions and motivation, and to me Larry and Sergey belong in the hypocrite category. They ultimately were billionares with total control over Google, this idea that somehow things just got out of their control is absurd. It didn't get out of their control, what happened is that whenever push came to shove on difficult issues, they always went with the decision that they felt would lead to the higher stock price. After years of telling everyone who would listen they were non-conventional leaders interested in more than just money, they always purely pursued the lucre. And why? They are literally amongst the world's richest people already.
I was at the TGIF where Sergey tried to sell the company on Maven, and then what happened was, internal google groups are a bit like public URLs, in that they were basically visible to all full time employees if you knew the link. So Sergey would say one thing on stage and then someone would stumble up on the link about the real strategy, and that what they said on stage was "messaging" to appease dissenters. It was total dishonesty, and it was all for big fat contracts, that's it. They did not care one bit about the dangers of weaponized AI or the dangers of being an international company building military technology for one company, or the general growth of the military industrial complex and how the biggest tech company becoming part of it it could snowball its size and dangerous impact on society. And Maven is just one example, but censorship in China is another, and there's many more. I do get that they struggle with some truly difficult decisions that are ethically ambiguous and they can't please everybody, but there are plenty of spots where it was abundantly clear that the only thing Larry and Sergey cared about was filling their already overfilling coffers with more gold. And when Bezos does that, at least he never pretended otherwise, but when Larry and Sergey do it, they are totally backtracking on a public image they spent years selling to people.
I think it's impossible to be cynical enough about a guy who blacklisted a company from his search engine because they used his service to show a picture of his backyard as a way of illustrating the privacy violations his company enabled.
Larry and Sergey have been obviously taking on less of a role since Sundar took over as CEO of Google. They've been at Google for more than two decades and are mega billionaires. Do people really think that this has anything to do with agitation among employees?
What do you feel they should be saying, when they make public communications?
So if a film crew, say, accidentally blows up a small town somehow, there's a firewall between the assets that were dedicated to making that one film and the entirety of, for example, Sony Pictures net worth and capital.
I'm not sure that firewall is well-tested in American law, but it's a well-used approach and I've always assumed the Google / Alphabet arrangement was for similar reasons (so that worst-case scenario on any 'bet is always "Alphabet cuts bait and shuts it down, liquidates it, and debtors go after the assets of the 'bet" without risking the performance numbers of the Google cash cow directly).
One of the things people were anxious to see was the financials of YouTube. Guess who's not a separate "bet"?
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/googles-constant-pro...
They should probably be more up-front about the messaging around this, but if you step back and look at their practice, that's how it appears to work. User numbers don't matter; profitability matters. Not unlike startups in the long-run.
Such self congratulatory nonsense.
It probably means that a number of Larry and Sergey "pet projects" will become deprioritized. Good. Self-driving cars seem like they have great potential. I think that technology has the potential to make the entire Alphabet structure worthwhile. But it also seems like it should no longer need the Alphabet structure to protect itself.
> ... Going forward, Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. ...
Not knowing the internals of Google, it seems as if this is the announcement that Page and Brin are stepping down. Is this correct?
If so, what an incredibly subtle way to announce a high-profile pair of resignations.
I wouldn't really call it "incredibly subtle" - most similar announcements are wrapped in a bunch of corporate language as well. This is a pretty standard way to announce this sort of thing.
It looks like an attempt to try to distance themselves, their personal images, and their assets before it gets too ugly. I would certainly do so unless my personal financial analysts told me otherwise.
At least at the operational level. I'm sure Sundar has had much contact with them. But regular Googlers certainly have not.
They typically take years, often over a decade. I'm talking about the entire process, not just the litigation (which is the easiest and fastest part). With Microsoft, it took 19 years from start to end.
I mean, neither of them even tried the ol' "I'm stepping down to spend time with my family" thing.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/13/alphabets-larry-page-has-lar...
Now that Google Is Evil (tm), we don't seem to appreciate that behavior as much as we did in the past.
Edit: I'm sorry...it appears theft is still the coolest thing ever.
Edit: Real cowards downvote! They also look for other people's postings and downvote all those too! What a "great" forum for the sharing of "free-thought"!
>Today, in 2019, if the company was a person, it would be a young adult of 21 and it would be time to leave the roost. While it has been a tremendous privilege to be deeply involved in the day-to-day management of the company for so long, we believe it’s time to assume the role of proud parents—offering advice and love, but not daily nagging!
By that yardstick, Google was in its young adolescence when it IPO'd (seems reasonable), was an idealistic young adult when I joined in 2009 (also reasonable), is now hitting a midlife crisis, and will die sometime around 2040.
How is it ok to just say clear lies like this?! Without making any value judgements at all this is blatantly false. The ranking algorithms specifically encode a bias into search results. This is actually explicitly what users want, too! To be clear this is distressing to me because very powerful people can throw around words uncritically in this way for niche political points without being challenged.
EDIT: It seems people are taking this comment in a way I didn't intend for it to be taken. Another example is that they are applying biases by sorting and displaying results on news.google.com. Personally I really like how this is done, but I think we need to be honest that it is a bias so that we can move on to a more productive conversation about what is or isn't a good bias.
He meant to say "personal bias."
I get your point, and it's an important one -- but ime conversations are a lot more productive when they're about the ideas, not the words. :)
That isn't even close to the definition of "unbiased" that I use. To me, something is "unbiased" if it based on facts without being interpreted in accordance with some preexisting belief or worldview.
Tools are unbiased.
I think the real danger is actually in the notion that "bias" is something done to deceive, and I have encountered people who imply this quite a bit in real life
By way of example: I have a strong bias towards the nationalization of infrastructure. Many of my opinions and arguments are designed to support this end because, for reasons I would love to explain I believe it's the best course of action. I am, if anything, prone to never letting anyone leave my company without droning on and on about this! There is not deception involved. People certainly do hide their biases, or lie about things in order to support their arguments, but this is not something inevitable with bias.
Ultimately I think everyone needs to deal with the reality that we ALL have biases and we ALL inject them into our work. This is actually ok, because its part of how we work to build the world we want to live in.
I agree entirely. Bias is typically not something that is intentionally done in an attempt to deceive. It comes naturally to people because they look at the world through the lens of their own experiences and beliefs.
Everybody has a bias. The trick is to understand what sort of bias people (including ourselves) have, so we can properly understand what they're saying.
My understanding of Google's history is their algorithms started as providing answers that the world already knew but could not find easily.
Over time they had to handle multiple lawsuits, harassments by entrenched groups that were upended by opening up of knowledge.
These adjustments / reactions made the algorithm look biased.
This disputed quote by Cardinal Richelieu comes to mind when I think of people claiming Google is a bad actor.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him"
Personally I think a lot of their products have gotten better recently, like the experience of using voice-controlled Google Maps in my car, and Google Cloud is superior to AWS in many ways, but the company really offers so many different product lines that it's hard for personal experience to be a great representation.
It’s hard for me to say that this is because of Sundar and not just because the whole market has grown size and google already had a massive moat to capture it. Apple, MS, Facebook, Amazon all have grown massively in the past 5 years.
However Google seems to continue to be a one trick pony - GCP lags behind the competition despite the fact that Google invented cloud computing. Even Apple is weaning off its iPhone revenue with its fast growing services division.
I see a proliferation of AWS services, yes, but many seem to be replicating things that GCP has had since the start, in multiple different formats without clear direction. Bigquery covers most of the use cases of Redshift, Kineseis, Athena, EMR, and others. It is at once decoupled from and well integrated with their object storage, allowing reads and writes with clear translation when necessary. I find myself reaching for Bigquery like semantics all the time and having to cobble two or more AWS tools to get similar. I see the same pattern repeated constantly - If I click "ECS" in the Amazon Console, it wants to sell me ECS, ECR, Fargate, and EKS - All of which overlap in non-obvious ways.
Disclaimer: I'm Ex-google, and was a poweruser of dremel
There are a lot of technical refinements in GCP that makes life a lot easier than AWS, but nothing strategically compelling enough for the cost (in cash, developer time, and burning relationships) to jump ship. So I make-do with the not-as-great technology. They are pain-points but not deal-breakers.
I think if our startup were doing AI/ML, or even heavy data processing as our core technology, there's probably enough compelling reasons to invest in a move to GCP. But it isn't.
If I were greenfielding a new launch at a new startup, I'd push for GCP.
I have never worked for Google or Amazon.
Disclosure: ex-googler (left 4 years ago), own no GOOG, use GCP to run my own business. Clients use whatever they want.
AWS is just another IT vendor. The weird dependency, reminiscent of 1980s IBM thinking, is bad for any company, at some point you become more of a vassal than a customer.
But, I have always enjoyed using public GCP more that AWS.
I somehow got CC'd to an internal Google system, Buganizer, which has done nothing but leak a bunch of internal communications, including some small code patches to GCP infrastructure itself.
My support request has not been updated, but Buganizer has let me know that they supposedly updated the documentation mid-November to fix it, but the rephrased advice still was not correct based on my interpretation of the issue. The bug is still open.
Microsoft grew similarly under Ballmer, despite losing a lot of their strategic advantages and missing the boat in a handful of important ways.
Hmmm, maybe that've been for the better.
I have also been appreciating their products lately: Play Books and Movies, the Google iOS app that does a good job of showing my article that interests me, and until I retired (just writing now) I really always preferred Google Cloud over AWS. Even with potential privacy issues, YouTube, GMail, and Calendar are also good.
In the past have been I have been a vocal supporter of FSF (still am, but...) but I look at the world situation now with people in China quickly losing freedoms but excelling in AI and other tech, here in the USA corporate fascism is unstoppable. With the political problems around the globe getting crazier and with chaotic climate change, I think now that people in different countries should do two things: embrace their own culture and values, and to do what they can to make their countries competitive in AI and other tech, especially tech that will help with climate change and generally increase productivity. Those on top will get bigger and bigger pieces of the pie, so we better grow the pie rapidly so regular peoples’ share is sufficient for a good life.
I mentioned those two because they seem to be their big bets now.
When compared to Satya who is thriving with Microsoft, Sundar looks mediocre at best. I don't mean that in a bad way. Perhaps Google doesn't need to have those tectonic changes to produce value. In that case, Sundar's reserved and low-key profile makes more sense, but don't expect a high profile, exuberant and innovation-driven leadership. I think it's clear he is not that type of leader.
To be clear - I'm not criticizing this particular post or person (whoisjuan, anyways? :) ), but I think it's worth noting these little hints that outgoing and extroverted are thought to be synonymous with "good leadership" (in the US, at least)
I don't think it's synonymous, but it's required. To be a good leader, you need to enjoy being around and understanding people.
Most introverted people don't really enjoy either.
I've had many introverted managers and they all were horrible: lack of communication which went hand-in-hand with passive aggressive behavior.
People who are introverts at heart can learn to become just as good managers as those who aren't. It may come less naturally, I couldn't say, but it's definitely possible.
Ballmer wasn't competent.
I can't really blame Larry and Sergey for wanting to do something else, and leaving the company in the hands of someone that they know will maximize profits. But that doesn't change the fact that modern Google does a lot of scummy and downright evil stuff today that likely wouldn't have happened during the "old Google" days.
I’d say it was the pre-Google+ Google. That change happened under Larry Page.
Personally I thought Sundar was a very good manager (much better than Larry, who honestly sucked as a CEO) but a poor innovator. As a HN commenter you're probably looking for an innovator. The average user (who just wants Google to stay up) and the average investor (who just want to make more money) are quite happy having a good manager who can optimize operations, though.
[1] https://a16z.com/2010/12/16/ones-and-twos/
The heat is on Google and its founders. It goes beyond anything that’s in the press right now. The real question is if regulators and others will allow Sundar to take the heat for everything and keep Larry and Sergey from the “hassle” of having to testify about anti-competitive practices and a whole range of other issues. And then there are the “hobbies” of the early Google crew and founders which are a problem in the #metoo era...
There is way more to this than a retirement goodbye.
edit: i think it was this https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-employees...
First you heard Gates, then Jobs (Twice) and now Page and Brin. We'll see if whether if Pichai can continue this now that he has been crowned King of Alphabet and Google.
You will always end up with a text like that. It tries to reduce risk and harm and companies will nearly always want to pick that trade-off: rather sound bland and cliched instead of risking undue negative effects.
Sundar is now the CEO of both Google and Alphabet, and Larry and Sergey have taken a seat on the backbench.
There's no way Sundar can give as much attention to Google and all the other bets simultaneously. Curious what side projects of Larry and Sergey get turned down now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kurian