[potatolicious]

Ehh, I would not be hasty in blaming things on Sundar as a "caretaker CEO". My impression has been that this inability to ship started well before Sundar's reign, and goes into a core belief that the company has been built around since its early days.

The problem with Google is that far too much product authority is devolved into leaf node teams. But this isn't a quirk of Sundar's leadership, this is practically a shibboleth built into the DNA of Google itself. The idea is that autonomous teams of very smart people, given maximum freedom to pursue what they think is necessary, produces the best products.

This is one of the fundamental buildings blocks of Google and long pre-dates Sundar as CEO. And it is the thing that is failing.

What we're witnessing is IMO a repudiation of the idea that if you take smart people and "free range" them, they will spontaneously invent world-changing products. FWIW, I think the strategy has been clearly failing for a long time - the only product that came out of this system was Gmail. Quite literally everything else at Google that has survived the test of time was acquired (see: YouTube, Maps).

I think Sundar may end up taking the fall for being caught flat-footed, and surely as CEO he should rightly shoulder some of the blame, but Google's problems far pre-date him. It's also why I don't think the triumphant return of Larry and Sergey will necessarily fix things - they're the ones who instituted the system of autonomous teams.