A CEO with a vision and passion for tech is what they need.
I thought they are invincible. Now look what’s happening under Pichai. Look at the blunders with their AI. Azure came out of nowhere and is better than Google Cloud. All the failed instant messaging clients. They are heading into irrelevance. Sure, ads are still printing money. But what’s their plan? Playing catch-up with their inferior AI? They lack quality product people and customer focus. You hear from everywhere how their dev culture turned into bureaucratic swamp. They have money to roll over anyone yet they are unable to show anything exciting. They can make ambitious bets.
Compare to Microsoft: under Gates, a tech person, rising. Ballmer, a bean counter almost ran it to the ground. Now with Satya Nadella they are thriving again. Embracing open source, Linux and collaboration with other tech companies rather than isolating their empire. I believe with Nadella, Microsoft could actually pull the mobile.
When I was in college, I dreamt about working at Google. If you offered me a job at Microsoft, I would scoff. Now it’s the other way.
Bean counters tend to focus on short term profits. Tech people can have actual strategy and see further than Q4 EBITDA.
From Ballmer’s wiki page:
> The company tripled sales and doubled profits, but lost its market dominance and missed out on 21st-century technology trends such as the ascendance of smartphones in the forms of iPhone and Android
This is happening at Google now.
