[deepdarkforest]

> Sundar is a really uninspiring leader

I understand, but he made google a cash machine. Last quarter BEFORE he was CEO in 2015, google made a quarterly profit of around 3B. Q1 2025 was 35B. a 10x profit growth at this scale well, its unprecedented, the numbers are inspiring themselves, that's his job. He made mistakes sure, but he stuck to google's big gun, ads, and it paid off. The transition to AI started late but gemini is super competitive overall. Deepmind has been doing great as well.

Sundar is not a hypeman like Sam or Cook, but he delivers. He is very underrated imo.

[modeless]

Like Ballmer, he was set up for success by his predecessor(s), and didn't derail strong growth in existing businesses but made huge fumbles elsewhere. The question is, who is Google's Satya Nadella? Demis?

[bitpush]

Since we're on the topic of Microsoft, I'm sure you'd agree that Satya has done a phenomenal job. If you look objectively, what is Satya's accomplishments? One word - Azure. Azure is #2, behind AWS because Satya's effective and strategic decisions. But that's it. The "vibes" for Microsoft has changed, but MS hasnt innovated at all.

Satya looked like a genius last year with OpenAI partnership, but it is becoming increasingly clear that MS has no strategy. Nobody is using Github Copilot (pioneer) or MS Copilot (a joke). They dont have any foundational models, nor a consumer product. Bing is still.. bing, and has barely gained any market share.

[com2kid]

People now days don't understand how genius MS was in the 90s.

Their strategy and execution was insanely good, and I doubt we'll ever see anything so comprehensive ever again.

1. Clear mission statement: A PC in very house.

2. A nationwide training + certification program for software engineers and system admins across all of Microsoft's tooling

3. Programming lessons in schools and community centers across the country to ensure kids got started using MS tooling first

4. Their developer operations divisions was an insane powerhouse, they had an army of in house technical writers creating some of the best documentation that has ever existed. Microsoft contracted out to real software engineering companies to create fully fledged demo apps to show off new technologies, these weren't hello world sample apps, they were real applications that had months of effort and testing put into them.

5. Because the internet wasn't a distribution platform yet, Microsoft mailed out huge binders of physical CDs with sample code, documentation, and dev editions of all their software.

6. Microsoft hired the top technical writers to write books on the top MS software stacks and SDKs.

7. Their internal test labs had thousands upon thousands of manual testers whose job was to run through manual tests of all the most popular software, dating back a decade+, ensuring it kept working with each new build of Windows.

8. Microsoft pressed PC OEMs to lower prices again and again. MS also put their weight behind standards like AC'97 to further drop costs.

9. Microsoft innovated relentlessly, from online gaming to smart TVs to tablets. Microsoft was an early entrant in a ton of fields. The first Windows tablet PC was in 1991! Microsoft tried to make smart TVs a thing before there was any content, or even wide spread internet adoption (oops). They created some of the first e-readers, the first multimedia PDAs, the first smart infotainment systems, and so on and so forth.

And they did all this with a far leaner team than what they have now!

(IIRC the Windows CE kernel team was less than a dozen people!)

[DrScientist]

There was some innovation - and some good products ( MS office stands out for me ) - however what MS did relentlessly well, as you mentioned, was sales, distribution and developers.

They also leveraged their relationship with Intel to the max - Wintel was a phrase for a reason. Companies like Apple faltered, in part, in the 90's because of hardware disadvantages.

Often their competitors had superior products - but MS still won through - in part helped by their ruthlessly leveraging of synergies across their platforms. ( though as new platforms emerged the desire to maximise synergies across platforms eventually held them back).

That aggressive, Windows everywhere behaviour, is what united it's competitors around things like Java, then Linux and open source in general which stopped MS's march into the data centre, and got regulators involved when they tried to strangle the web.

[modeless]

> the Windows CE kernel team was less than a dozen people!

It showed

CE was a dog and probably a big part of the reason Windows Phone failed. Migrating off of it was a huge distraction and prevented the app platform from being good for a long time. I was at Microsoft and worked on Silverlight for a bit back then.

[com2kid]

Windows phone 7's kernel was amazing. It was a complete rewrite from the old kernel and had incredible performance, minimal resource usage, and an amazing power profile.

IMHO the reason for Microsoft's failed phone venture was moving onto the windows kernel and 2xing system requirements.

[modeless]

Strongly disagree. Optimizing for resource usage above all else was the wrong thing. The developer experience was beyond awful. Terrible tooling. And poor resource isolation meant that it didn't recover from errors during development, needing constant reboots, like the bad old days of Windows 3 or classic Mac OS. There was no chance of building a decent app platform for third party native code on top of it because of that.

Phone hardware was exploding in capability at the time and the right thing was to lean into that and offer the same developer experience as on desktops with the same OS kernel, like Apple did from the beginning with Darwin and Android with Linux. Microsoft only realized too late.

[liamwire]

Really? It’s always felt to me like it was app availability — for all the efforts, the app marketplace was a fraction of a fraction of the competitions’, and much like the network effects in social media, if you can’t catch up quickly, it can be almost impossible to ever do so. Haemorrhaging billions per quarter takes a strong stomach and a long vision, one that’s likely to put any executive’s tenure at risk. Nevertheless, it interesting to think what things might’ve looked like had Microsoft persisted another decade.

[akoboldfrying]

> some of the best documentation that has ever existed.

You have got to be kidding. The 90s was my heyday, and Microsoft documentation was extravagantly unhelpful, always.

[com2kid]

Compared to today's documentation it is amazing.

One of my internships was at a company writing an example app for SQL server offline replication. Taking a DB that had changed while offline and syncing them to a master DB when reconnection happened. (Back in 2004 or so, now days this is an easier thing).

The company I interned at was hired by MSFT to write a sample app for Fabrikam Fine Furniture that did the following:

1. Sales people on the floor could draw a floorplan on a tablet PC of a desired sectional couch layout and the pieces would be identified and the order automatically made up .

2. Customer enters their delivery info on the tablet.

3. DB replicated down to the delivery driver's tablet PC when the driver next pulls into the loading bay with all the order info.

4. After the delivery is finished and signed for on the tablet PC, the customer's signature is digitally signed so it cannot be tampered with later.

5. When the delivery truck pulls back into the depot, SQL server replication happens again, syncing state changes from the driver back to the master DB.

That is an insane sample app, just one of countless thousands that Microsoft shipped out. Compare that to the bare bones hello world samples you get now days.

[radialstub]

> Azure is #2, behind AWS because Satya's effective and strategic decisions

I am going to have to disagree with this. Azure is number 2, because MS is number 1 in business software. Cloud is a very natural expansion for that market. They just had to build something that isn't horrible and the customers would have come crawling to MS.

[modeless]

You could just as easily make the argument that cloud is a very natural expansion for Google given their expertise in datacenters and cloud software infrastructure, but they are still behind. Satya absolutely deserves credit for Microsoft's success here.

[kridsdale3]

I just listened to the Acquired podcast guys talk to Balmer. Steve actually deserves a huge amount of the credit for Azure that Satya enjoys today.

- Created the windows server product

- Created the "rent a server" business line

- Identified the need for a VM kernel and hired the right people

- Oversaw MSFT's build out of web services (MSN, Xbox Live, Bing) which gave them the distributed systems and uptime know-how

- Picked Satya to take over Azure, and then to succeed him

[danielmarkbruce]

No, you couldn't. The natural extension is related to customer relationships, familiarity, lock in (somewhat).

Google is not behind capability wise, they are in front of MSFT actually. The customer relationships matter a whole lot more.

[modeless]

Microsoft has become a lot more friendly to open source under Satya. VSCode, GitHub, and WSL happened during his tenure, and probably wouldn't have happened under Ballmer. Turning the ship from a focus on protecting platform lock-in to meeting developers where they are is a huge accomplishment IMO.

[bitpush]

> Microsoft has become a lot more friendly to open source under Satya. True, but that's just few open source projects, albeit influential ones. There are soo many other companies doing influential open source projects.

I dont disagree with anything you said because turning a ship around is hard. But hand-to-heart, what big tech company is truly innovating to the future. Lets look at each company.

Apple - bets are on VR/AR. Apple Car is dead. So it is just Vision Pro

Amazon - No new bets. AWS is printing money, but nothing for the future.

Microsoft - No new bets. They fumbled their early lead in AI.

Google - Gemini, Waymo ..

I think Satya gets a lot more coverage than his peer at Google.

[modeless]

Waymo and DeepMind and the TPU program all predate Sundar as CEO.

IMO Google should have invested more in Waymo and scaled sooner. Instead they partnered with traditional automakers and rideshare companies, sought outside investment, and prioritized a prestige launch in SF over expanding as fast as possible in easier markets.

In other areas they utterly wasted huge initial investments in AR/VR and robotics, remain behind in cloud, and Google X has been a parade of boondoggles (excluding Waymo which, again, predates Sundar and even X itself).

You could also argue that they fumbled AI, literally inventing the transformer architecture but failing at building products. Gemini 2.5 Pro is good, but they started out many years ahead and lost their lead.

[DrScientist]

Apple - have you used a Macbook recently - their ARM based product line is a big step forward - sure it's not self driving cars - but it's been the biggest jump in standard PC's for quite a while and has required innovation up and down the stack.

Microsoft - No new bets. Really? Their OpenAI deal and integrating that tech into core products?

Amazon - No new bets? It's still trying drone delivery, and it's also got project Kuiper - moving beyond data centres to providing the network

[coliveira]

> a lot more friendly to open source under Satya. VSCode, GitHub, and WSL

This is all the 1st step of embrace and extinguish.

[kccqzy]

Diversifying Microsoft away from the traditional cash cow of Windows and Office is the single most important strategy for Microsoft and he executed it well.

[throwaway422432]

His genius is really just making good bets on people, and letting them do their thing.

People like Scott Guthrie who was a key person behind dot.net, and went on to be the driving force behind Azure. Anyone who did any dot.net work 10+ years ago would know the ScottGu blog and his red shirt.

Google similarly bet on Demis, and the results also show. For someone who got his start doing level design on Syndicate (still one of my all-time favourite games) he's come a long way.

[bogtog]

> If you look objectively, what is Satya's accomplishments?

Managing to keep the MS Office grift going and even expand it with MS Teams is something

[echelon]

> who is Google's Satya Nadella? Demis?

100% it's Demis.

A Demis vs. Satya setup would be one for the ages.

[oh_fiddlesticks]

Demis has the best story arc. The path from bullfrog and lionhead games to the tip of the spear in biological research. You can't make this up

He's also happens to be a really nice guy in person.

[geodel]

This is kind of bullshit. One can equally say Satya was setup for success by Ballmer as he stepped away graciously taking all the blame so new CEO can start unencumbered.

[deodorel]

He might have delivered a lot of revenue growth yea, but Google culture is basically gone. Internally we're not very far from Amazon style "performance management"

[linotype]

To upper management types that’s a feature not a bug.

[cyberax]

> Last quarter BEFORE he was CEO in 2015, google made a quarterly profit of around 3B. Q1 2025 was 35B.

Google's revenue in 2014 was $75B and in 2024 it was $348B, that's 4.64 times growth in 10 years or 3.1 times if corrected for the inflation.

And during this time, Google failed to launch any significant new revenue source.

[SV_BubbleTime]

I like that you are writing as a defense of Google and Sundar.

[gjvc]

Tim Cook is the opposite of a hypeman.

[CuriouslyC]

He delivered revenue growth by enshittifying Goog's products. Gemini is catching up because Demis is a boss and TPUs are a real competitive advantage.

[khazhoux]

Demis reports to Sundar. All of Demis's decisions would have been vetted by and either approved, rejected, or refined by Sundar. There's no way to actually distinguish how much of the value was from whom, unless you have inside info.

[luma]

The Nobel Committee seemed fairly sure who was responsible for what around those parts.

[bitpush]

You either attribute both good and bad things to the CEO, or dont. If enshittifying is CEO's fault, then so is Gemini's success.

[fwip]

Why? We've all seen organizations in which some things happen because of the CEO, and others happen in spite of them.

[jama211]

But you don’t just get to pick which is which willy nilly just to push your opinions

[fwip]

Right, of course, but I don't see any evidence from which to assume that they're picking "willy nilly."

[bitpush]

Read back what you just wrote. It is literally "willy nilly".

"Somethings are because of CEO, and some things are in spite of CEO"

And it was "willy nilly" attributed that enshittification was because of CEO (how do we know? maybe it was CFO, or board) and Gemini because of Demis (how do we know? maybe it was CEO, or CFO, or Demis himself).

[mattigames]

Not really, pressure to move into AI is so vast that it in reality the CEO had little saying about moving into it or not, and they already had smart employees to make it a reality, vastly different that what happened with enshitification which Gemini is part of, just recently people were complaining that the turn off button was hijacked to start Gemini in their Android phones.

[agumonkey]

Their brand is almost cooked though. At least the legacy search part. Maybe they'll morph into AI center of the future, but "Google" has been washed away.

[bitpush]

World is much.. much bigger than HN bubble. Last year, we were all so convinced that Microsoft had it all figured out, and now look at them. Billion is a very, very large number, and sometimes you fail to appreciate how big that is.

[agumonkey]

Oh I'm conveying opinions other than mines, tech people I work with, that are very very removed from the HN mindset actually, were shitting on google search for a long time this week.

[lukan]

Google ads are still everywhere, if you google or not.

The question will be, when and how will the LLM's be attacked with product placements.

Open marked advertisement in premium models and integrated ads in free tier ones?

I still hope for a mostly adfree world, but in reality google seems in a good position now for the transition towards AI (with ads).

[tiahura]

Maybe they'll morph into AI center of the future

Haven't you been watching the headlines here on HN? The volume of major high-quality Google AI releases has been almost shocking.

And, they've got the best data.

[agumonkey]

who didn't ? I meant in the future, if this becomes a long term fruitful economic value (sorry but video and image generation have no value, it's laughable and used for cheap needs, and most of the time people are very annoyed by it).

[oceanplexian]

> The transition to AI started late but gemini is super competitive overall.

If by competitive you mean "We spent $75 Billion dollars and now have a middle of the pack model somewhere between Anthropic and Chinese startup", that's a generous way to put it.

[mattlondon]

Citation needed. Gemini 2.5 pro is one of the best models there is right now, and it doesn't look like they're slowing down. There is a LLM response to basically every single Google search query, it's built into the billions of android phones etc. They're winning.

[deepdarkforest]

By competitive, i mean no.1 in LM arena overall, in webdev, in image gen, in grounding etc. Plus, leading the chatbot arena ELO. Flash is the most used model in openrouter this month as well. Gemma models are leading on device stats as well. So yes, competitive

[oceanplexian]

Except coding, where it’s essentially middle of the pack. Which is the only thing that you can build objective benchmarks around. The fact that people on LM arena prefer the output has no relationship to how intelligent the model actually is.

[gordonhart]

Gemini 2.5 Pro is excellent. Top model in public benchmarks and soundly beat the alternatives (including all Claudes and that Chinese startup’s flagship) in my company’s internal benchmarks.

I’m no Google lover — in fact I’m usually a detractor due to the overall enshittification of their products — but denying that Gemini tops the pile right now is pure ignorance.