[cholantesh]

The decline of search can largely be attributed to Adwords and propping up the SEO industry, which happened under Page. Gmail was indeed revolutionary - and mostly the vision of Paul Buchheit. I'm not sure what your beef is with Maps and Android; both seem to work fine, certainly when compared with their peers - certainly monetizing reviews has hurt Maps and it doesn't always perform as well as I'd like but the only alternative I'd consider is Waze, a Google product and one that addresses a single use case.

It's been intimated that Gates has remained a fairly important advisor in the years since he passed the baton on. This would suggest that he has a hand in Ballmer and Nadella's legacies, however they're coloured. Particularly wrt the pivot to AI in the past five years this is becoming hard to dispute. And considering how rapidly the polish is wearing off of that particular apple, it may yet turn out to be a mistake on the order of his dismissal of the internet and choosing to save Apple from bankruptcy. But I mean, companies of such gigantic market caps have survived worse.

Quite honestly, your being right on this would be some nice schadenfreude, but I don't think it'd be because of Pichai. That's not because I'm fond of him but because it's just Whig history applied to big tech.