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0 pointsmorbicer1y ago0 comments

Google under Larry Page was a marvel od technology. Search that actually worked, Gmail was a revolutionary email client, GMaps, Android. Google I/O was something to look forward to.

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.

0 comments

cholantesh1y ago

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.

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