[pinkmuffinere]

> Pichai has been a very poor CEO

Why do you say this? I’m not familiar with him, and really haven’t paid much attention to Google’s strategy beyond cultural awareness, but I think Google has done well with staying competitive in AI, is dominating the self driving battle with Waymo, and has mostly kept its good brand intact (no small feat when you are so big). Are there some big mis-steps I don’t know about?

[tombert]

Not the person you're replying to, but something that has bothered me about him (and a lot of SV tech), is how they did rapid over-hiring in 2022, then a year later fire a bunch of people, while he claimed he took "full responsibility", but still got a nice happy bonus that year. I'm not sure I know what "taking full responsibility" actually means, because to me it seems like if you have to lay off thousands of people in a year, that would be a good reason to not get a bonus.

These are peoples' lives. People almost certainly quit decent jobs because there was a prestige factor in working for Google, potentially moved to the overpriced world of California, just to be fired less than a year later because apparently Pichai thought that interest rates would never increase and there would be free money for forever. These people have families, and they almost certainly thought that moving to Google would be a "stable" position, because it's one of the biggest SV companies.

I don't know if he's good for the stock price, that's tougher to gauge, but I do think he's a short-sighted jerk.

[rkomorn]

The "I take full responsibility" thing has been entirely meaningless.

I guess it's supposed to convey that it's not the laid-off folks' fault, and that it was "his decision", but as you said: "taking full responsibility" without any real impact to his life? I may as well take full responsibility for the layoffs. It'd mean just as much.

[tombert]

Yeah, that's the thing; if he's acknowledging that it was his decision to do this, then maybe he shouldn't be getting bonuses and maybe be fired? Why are the regular schmucks the ones being punished for his terrible decisions and not him?

[tasuki]

Maybe it was the right decision at the time to lay them off? I think that's why he got the bonus, actually! I'm sure the layoff was difficult for him as well: he certainly lost a lot of goodwill with his workforce and I'm sure the internal politics were tricky for anyone involved.

No one is getting "punished" - there was no promise of ten years of employment from Google. Like when an employee leaves, you wouldn't say they're "punishing" the employer.

[tombert]

> Maybe it was the right decision at the time to lay them off?

It probably was the right decision to lay everyone off. What was not the right decision, and this should have been obvious, was hiring 10+k more employees than you actually need because you assume that this free money will last forever. He was almost certainly aware and signed off on this mass hiring. Other companies didn't make this mistake; Tim Cook didn't take a bonus that year to avoid mass layoffs.

> he certainly lost a lot of goodwill with his workforce and I'm sure the internal politics were tricky for anyone involved.

He probably did, because he's a bad CEO. He was right to lose goodwill.

> No one is getting "punished" - there was no promise of ten years of employment from Google.

No, there isn't a legal promise or anything, but people go to these BigCos primarily for stability. If you want an exciting job with lots of interesting new things, it's much easier to find that in a startup, but startups can be frustrating because they're inherently unstable. This is partly why startups tend to be made up of very young people; it's much easier to deal with volatility if you don't have a family.

You're obviously not "entitled" to a job, but the people who run Google aren't complete idiots; they know people are joining BigCo because they think it's going to be relatively stable. They depended on that in order to do all this overhiring.

[tasuki]

> they know people are joining BigCo because they think it's going to be relatively stable

And after all this, people will think twice whether BigCo is stable. Just as well! If you want stability, look into small family-run companies.

[turzmo]

I would argue that Google has had declining quality in search results, bordering on completely unusable in the past few years, and that has resulted in people using LLMs for things that they would have searched for years ago. Although they are competitive in AI, I think it is surprising that their product continues to frustrate people and that they are a distant second place.

[pinkmuffinere]

Without taking a stance on whether their search has improved or degraded, we can observe that the same claim (“search is so degraded it’s unusable”) has been common for like 5 years at this point. If it’s really such a problem, why haven’t people already switched? Google’s search is at 90% market share [1]. Surely if it was perceived as a problem to customers there should be some measurable effect?

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

[jordanb]

The only real competitor is bing (other search engines like DDG are just repackaged bing) and Microsoft is pursuing the same strategy as Google.

[replooda]

What about Kagi?

[pinkmuffinere]

No offense to Kagi, but they don’t rank in the top 6. They are behind even Baidu, which I had forgotten exists. I think they have good mind-share among power users, but probably not in the general population.

[replooda]

But the question is whether or not Kagi is a competitor — not just in regards to the market share it currently holds, but what it could come to hold. Let's see where it is next year.

[turzmo]

Google has succeeded in enshittifying their search in a way that the vast majority of users (not customers -- those are the advertisers) have not noticed.

[usrusr]

Do they go away or do they use the weak but good enough (for many) Google LLM response instead?

[pinkmuffinere]

If the users aren’t bothered by the “enshittification”, does that reflect poorly on the CEO? The CEO is supposed to make money, and maybe has personal aspirations to improve the world. They’re not making art.

[turzmo]

Like I said originally, I think the rise of ChatGPT is a partly a consequence of this. It’s not that people are choosing a different search engine, they’re not searching at all because LLMs will give a better answer faster.

Also, whether it’s ChatGPT or something else, five years is really not that long. Time will tell, but does it really seem like decreasing quality in the name of profits is such a good long-term strategy?

[rybosworld]

Sundar was at the helm when the decision to worsen search results for the sake of ad revenue was made.

Previously, the two concerns were "firewalled" so as to prevent the money-generating side of the company from eroding the user experience.

This is a theme that's been at the core of every Titan of Industry's decline. That is: chasing of short-term results with disregard for the long term consequences. Alphabet is just so big and dominate in search that it will likely take quite a long time for the negative effects to appear. And they have other large businesses that haven't been as aggressively enshitified (Youtube, GCP).

See Intel, Boeing, GE etc.

[gtowey]

It's like when the Titanic struck the iceberg and the crew mostly thought the ship would be fine.

Just because they're still making money doesn't mean the company hasn't already been damaged beyond repair. But in this case by the time it's clear the damage is fatal, those at the helm have jumped ship with piles of cash.

[fragmede]

They missed the boat with ChatGPT, the research paper for it initially came from Google. There's no real focus between Android, ChromeOS, and Fuschia. The AI results box was possible a decade ago, but not giving money to the sites the info was gotten from was too far a stretch. How I feel is that the company doesn't really know what it's doing, there's no real leadership. KilledByGoogle is a website. With Stadia the technology was there but didn't have the right backing to make it in the market. Though it turns out those GPUs are useful for GCP for AI, so that might have been the real reason. He's just not much of a leader. He doesn't need to go full Elon, but some amount of character would be nice.