Notably, go look at Intel's Pat Gelsinger. Prior to his firing, lots of articles talking about how he was one of the highest paid CEOs (citing numbers in excess of $150M). They'd fail to mention that it was over several years and only if he met targets.
Well, he didn't meet those targets. His actual compensation was about $10M/year.
Sundar misses the mark on these things. AI is a good example. Google invented the transformer architecture, but simply published it for its competitors to use. It took a code red in 2023 to finally push Google to develop products based on this.
Cloud. Years late to the game. All it would have taken is a letter similar to the famous Bezos memo to eventually get all of Google's world-class scaled infra pointing externally and generating revenue. Instead, Google Cloud started late, and couldn't reuse much of the internal infrastructure.
Stadia, another example. That architecture is probably the future. It's not clear how gamers in developing countries are going to afford thousands of dollars in hardware that sits idle 90% of the time.
- Google will be #1 because of sher data amount
- Anthropic will be #2 because of the best product (whatever this may mean in the future)
- Microsoft will be #3, because of enough cash to follow
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?
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.
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.
Gemini keeping pace with Claude and ChatGPT is clearly some kind of management victory, because Zuckerberg and Musk don't seem to be able to do it despite having limitless cash to spend.
Sundar's enshittification has also juiced short term share prices at the cost of long term health. It might turn out to be a decent decision for search because it's in the midst of being disrupted, but that's a happy accident for Sundar, not 4d chess (and you can argue the enshittification hastened the disruption).
Like they removed the youtube dislike button
what else?
Everything seems to be getting better. Tying incentives to Waymo is almost unfair because Waymo is amazing and just keeps getting better.
Isn't it a CEO's job to make sure the company's position is strong among other responsibilities?
I did not know this about Pichai and if true, it makes me feel rather better about his leadership.
I was shocked they kept him around. He’s very much just a money manager like Tim Cook or Steve Ballmer.
Those types are great in the short term but risk the entire company’s future long term
That's about Google, though. The picture about Sundar specifically is harder to evaluate. The pessimistic take is that Google had that position already and Sundar failed to proactively lead through a fundamental product shift, forcing the company onto the defensive for some time. The optimistic take is that Sundar, having occupied the top spot since 2015, prioritized investments in the company's overall technology development, then successfully executed a rapid product pivot when the market changed, securing a dominant position in both research and product that nobody else can compete with long-term.
Giving him 700m in stock to keep him around is worth it for both the investors and employees.
Upper management isn't paid based on how smart or productive they are. Google has like 400 billion yearly revenue. A CEOs decisions have enormous consequences, if a CEO can make slightly better decisions than another, it'd be easy to justify $692m in pay.
That said, I don't believe Sundar Pichai is a great CEO. He's might be an ok bean-counter, not sure, but I'm pretty sure one can get cheaper bean-counters.
> they could hire thousands of engineers for that money.
Yes and pray what would they do with them?
I understand it's insulting to be paid less than other CEOs, and I get that it's a way of keeping score.
All the same I think he's doing it for the power, the respect, the fame. Would he have walked away if the number was only $100m? Would that have been rational?
I think the confusion stems from mapping normal people money usage on people, that have much more money than they can use on themselves: They don't do that. You can use excess money to make things happen as you see fit.
Money enables you to do things in the world, and if you want to do things in the world, a few hundred million are very easily spent. I am sure most people around here would have no trouble allocating that amount of money towards something they would like to see happen or improved, and that's how a lot of money, that someone does not feel they need, is used.
This type of concentration makes it so that there’s no working competition element to the economy. Mega corps should be broken up and also charged absurdly high tax rates to fix this.
They have the people, the models and the chips. And Sundar helped achieve that.
That's what he said on some podcast.
I don't think Demis wants to be CEO of all of Google. He wants to focus on DeepMind and AI. He has a life goal of inventing AGI and using that to solve the world's biggest problems. Leading Google gets him further not closer. He doesn't give a shit about ads and ads is Google's biggest money maker.
Bring back experimental culture.
We should be grateful for funding of the research, and that it didn't pay off in market results. More of this!
Experimental culture is inherently risky though, and risk is not something you want too much of as a public company as your shareholders can and will be very loud.
They do still experiment but in their R&D divisions so as to shield their cash cows from risk as well as to be able to better conceal how much money they’re pouring into moonshots so as not to spook investors.
Waymo is the most recent moonshot I can remember going out of Google X, and they’re arguably a leader in the space. There are other projects in the works, and many more failed ones.
Unfortunately, most people seem incapable of attacking what actually needs to be attacked, instead of getting hung up on things that are perfectly legitimate.
They are a public company
We need to find alternatives to Google - that giant is out of control now.
1. DDG (Duckduckgo) 2. Kagi 3. Brave (Independent) 4. Ecosia (Looking to be independent with Qwant in future) 5. Startpage 6. Marginalia (Independent and creator is on HN) 7. Mojeek (Independent) 8. Yandex.ru (Russian, Independent)
I personally use DDG (Duckduckgo). I think its a decent option fwiw, yes I know it uses Bing internally but it works really great.
> Evil pays well.
It isn't that Evil pays well although one can say that but rather that, Short term profits seem to pay well.
Although Google now has a decent AI model, Their search engine which I don't use aside from some image search sometimes, is getting worse, (maybe because that somehow helps them short term) because fwiw, their stock price isn't really correlated anymore with how good their search is, because you can bet that if that was the case, Google would throw everything to become best search engine.
These corporations are so locked in/monopolistic that unless you change your search engine/(In case of Microsoft operating system), they don't really care about how much worse their product becomes and sometimes even if people stop using their product, short term, they still don't care.
[0]: what I did: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=47232986
Kagi is great if you need great customizability and filters and if you wish to support the future of Kagi/products like these.
And Duckduckgo is great if you need a Google alternative which "just works" without costing money* if you are frugal.
Either way, both options are good and its best to leave Google if/when possible.
The best feature of both of these and brave-search to some degree is that all three support bangs. !yt leads to youtube and !hn leads to hn.algolia.com :) and !sr and so so many more. Bangs might be the best feature that google users might be missing. It just saves so much time.
2: Space for activities, such as being able to host large parties, friends, family, etc..
3: Convenience and time saving from having a lot of things in-house: gym, pool, tennis courts, etc.
4: Security. When everyone knows who you are, they begin to make up excuses to get close to you and yours. Even if you don't want seclusion, you may be forced into it.
5: The people who you hang out with most have big mansions too - you want them to be just as comfortable visiting you as when you are when you visit them.
If you have many shares concentrated in a particular company that you can't or don't want to sell for legal or tax reasons, you can borrow money to buy a house. As long as you service the interest you get a house without having to sell too many shares and trigger tax obligations.
Home loans are also nice because they are a form of leverage that is secured against an asset but is not subject to margin calls if the value of that asset falls.
Right?
99% of his pay packet should be redistributed among workers.
It's not disconnected from its value in the market, I don't think. I think the great scam is telling people that capitalist values are in any way attached to human values.
There is no common currency.
Executives are not workers, no
