> Sundar's comments in the main video seem like he's trying to communicate "we've been doing this ai stuff since you (other AI companies) were little babies" - to me this comes off kind of badly
Reminds me of the Stadia reveal, where the first words out of his mouth were along the lines of "I'll admit, I'm not much of a gamer"
How about we go further and just state what everyone (other than Wall St) thinks: Google needs a new CEO.
One more interested in Google's supposed mission ("to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"), than in Google's stock price.
I've been making this exact comparison for years at this point.
Both inherited companies with market dominant core products in near monopoly positions. They both kept the lights on, but the companies under them repeatedly fail the break into new markets and suffer from a near total lack of coherent vision and perverse internal incentives that contribute to the failure of new products. And after a while, the quality of that core product starts to stumble as well.
The fact that we've seen this show before makes it all the more baffling to me that investors are happy about it. Especially when in the same timeframe we've seen Satya Nadella completely transform Microsoft and deliver relatively meteoric performance.
Balmer made Microsoft the most profitable it had ever been. He didn't grow them into big new areas, but he improved the focus, trimmed the costs, and vastly improved the bottom line. A successful company may need vision and expansion, but at some point it also needs to be able to actually convert that into profit, otherwise you turn into Sun - or indeed recent Google, who've come out with some great products but never managed to convert any of them into profit centers.
The dude shipped Windows 8! He insisted on this insane mishmash of tablet and windows that made sense to nobody. Somehow they shipped this, which tells me the emperor wears no clothes.
I completely agree with Satya Nadella, I haven't seen a turnaround since Steve Jobs came back to Apple. He took a company that couldn't seem to get out of its way and turned it into an innovative, exciting, and insanely profitable company.
He's also totally transformed the public image of Microsoft, from ruthless monopolist to one of the least evil, most open giant tech companies. With actions, not words.
It's not all perfect and wonderful, but they're miles away from the Gates/Ballmer era, it's remarkable.
Are you all on drugs? This is the company that published a poll speculating on the death of a missing woman. The one that asks you to explain yourself when you try to close OneDrive, and ignores/resets your browser preferences while also forcefully installing crapware like the Bing bar. They're the ones about to create a mountain of ewaste by making Win11 unusable on older hardware. They're also the ones fighting government (and winning) in order to consolidate the game industry to further reduce competition and hurt consumers. I could keep going, but it's a very long list.
There seems to be some small pocket of tech people who are permanently enthralled by this organization. Does Nadella have is own reality distortion field? If so it must be pretty damn strong in order to pierce the smell of dog shit surrounding his employer.
I'm wondering why they're keeping him around. Maybe they feel like they've got more control when Sundar is in charge, since he's less likely to make any rash decisions or sudden movements (or any movements at all...)
Your comment history is exclusively limited to posts about Google product releases and stock performance (and one about Sergey Brin's airship), so I'm sorry if I don't consider you an unbiased observer. And sure, maybe you honestly believe in the company, and that's why you invest in it. But just because you think you've aligned your incentives (stock portfolio) with those of the company, doesn't mean you've accurately assessed its health and future outlook.
For those of us closer to the ground - the "HN hive mind," if you will - in the same industry but not at Google, the signs are far from positive. Top line revenue looks good, but Microsoft grew more in the past decade than Google. There is a massive dependence on advertising revenue, which is so large that it's basically an existential threat to the company (although admittedly, GCP is beginning to show promise after recently posting its first profitable quarter). The rest of the industry is actively fighting Google's ability to display ads to their users. The quality of the flagship Search product is possibly the lowest it's ever been. YouTube is driving users away while picking pennies up off the floor. Employees are leaving to build startups like OpenAI with the tech they researched at Google. Morale is extremely low. Recruiting pipelines are likely suffering; most developers with an offer from Google and a company paying equivalent salary (in other words, the best developers) will not choose Google. Public perception is hostile, amidst both the general public and early adopters like developers. Governments are litigating, potential anti-trust breakups are on the horizon. But most importantly: Google has failed to fundamentally innovate since about 2005; if you disagree, please name an innovative product created from scratch at Google since that time.
The Waymo self-driving car product seems like it will be quite transformative to entire industries once they get clearance to deploy it further than San Francisco where it is already providing rides day in and day out. Or does that not count for some reason?
Disclaimer: I own Google stock simply by virtue of being invested in mutual and index funds, as are most people.
Isn't that the product that had to scale back recently because it required an average of two humans per car to remotely operate it?
I'm (mostly) genuinely asking. I might have it confused with another company, and I have to admit I don't follow self-driving closely.
But also, Waymo was an acquisition (slightly arguable, since Google merged it with its own self-driving efforts, but the founding team was acquired). I asked for an example of an innovative product created from scratch at Google.
You're thinking of Cruise. Waymo has not scaled back in any way, and in fact is in the process of expanding to LA with a limited pilot through the winter.
I don't think the fact that some of the first people on the team had worked together previously makes Waymo not "created at Google". The project they worked on before, the DARPA challenge, was not a commercial product, and at the time no company was seriously investing in self-driving cars as a viable technology. This isn't like YouTube, which was a well-known brand and viable business pre-acquisition. It was Google resources that made it possible to build the rest of the Waymo team, lobby governments to allow self-driving cars on the road, work with hardware manufacturers, and leverage the rest of Google's software stack, ML expertise, street view data, and datacenter capacity to build and train the driver.
You're thinking of Cruise, which had to stop operations for malfeasance. If you want to tell me that the Google Self-driving Car Project, which is what Waymo was called before it was spun out from Google, didn't come from Google, I'm not sure what to say.
Reminds me of the Stadia reveal, where the first words out of his mouth were along the lines of "I'll admit, I'm not much of a gamer"
This dude needs a new speech writer.