
Google's CEO is increasingly boxed in by regulators, critics, and employees - mastazi
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-19/everyone-s-mad-at-google-and-sundar-pichai-has-to-fix-it
======
ColanR
So what is this? A big PR piece so we'll feel all sorry for 'that poor Google
CEO that's got such a tough job'? (first paragraph, he talks about how he's
"not good at multitasking", and some things are "difficult".)

At least, that's what I'm thinking after reading the article. it kinda makes
sense, too, that Google is looking for a bit of a breather after this much
coming against them. Still, I think the stuff they're dealing with is pretty
much what they asked for.

\- ads next to "unseemly" youtube videos: this is their core business, and in
every other place you buy ads it matters where those ads are placed and who
sees them and in what context. This problem is exactly what Google is expected
to solve.

\- gender inequality: this seems to come with the territory. every other CEO
in the US, not to mention North America & Europe (etc.) is dealing with this
too.

\- staff protest about Trump immigration policy: the CEO was on their side. In
his words, "the fight will continue." He doesn't get to say this is a headache
he's got to deal with when he takes that kind of approach.

\- a big regulatory fine. From what I've heard, it's almost impossible that
Google wasn't rather careless in letting this happen. 'ask forgiveness, not
permission' seems to be a mantra that Google follows, and this seems to be an
instance where they're now asking forgiveness.

\- and finally, Google is 'too big' and people are worried about its power.
"boo hoo, we were too successful."

[sources for everything are in the main article or linked from it]

Deal with it, Sundar Pichai. You've got the same job every other CEO has got,
and the same pressure. Buck up.

~~~
cisanti
Indeed, the public and regulators are not pushing enough, the floor needs to
be hotter for the CEO, whoever is in charge.

Google has lost its cute startup image long time ago and people have realized
companies are never out there for the social / greater good, just for profits.

It's time to break up Google.

~~~
ProAm
> It's time to break up Google.

Just like Apple, Facebook and Amazon?

~~~
cisanti
Apple and Amazon actually sell you a product, they are not in the business of
selling yourself to others.

~~~
blowski
Why would that mean they are less deserving of regulation? Microsoft sold
products during their regulatory troubles, so did the Rockefeller empire.

------
raldi
_> Google has historically stumbled in the difficult business of hardware,
despite several multibillion-dollar attempts, including the $12 billion
acquisition of Motorola Mobility (since sold off for $2.9 billion)_

Are we really _still_ repeating this nonsense? The $2.9B number quoted above
was merely what Google sold Motorola Mobility's _handset_ division for. It
also sold the company's set-top box division for another $2.35B, plus it kept
the $2.9B cash hoard that came with the acquisition, and additionally $2.4B in
tax credits and a patent portfolio valued at around $4B.

Add those numbers up, and you get $14.55B.

Source: [https://seekingalpha.com/article/1987261-googles-
acquisition...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/1987261-googles-acquisition-
of-motorola-not-such-a-failure-after-all)

Another source, with somewhat different numbers, but in the same ballpark and
an order of magnitude above what Bloomberg reported:
[https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/did-google-really-
lo...](https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/did-google-really-lose-on-its-
original-motorola-deal/?_r=0)

~~~
shawn-furyan
> Are we really still repeating this nonsense?

I get the sense that this "fact" was used BECAUSE it's "well-known". It serves
the narrative purpose of showing that Google is fallible, rather than sinister
(truth be damned).

The article begins by describing the CEO of one of the 10 largest companies in
the world's office furniture. It was clear from the outset that this was not
going to be an article terribly troubled by a sense of duty to present a
completely neutral reading of the relevant facts.

------
ch4s3
The article title is "Everyone’s Mad at Google and Sundar Pichai Has to Fix
It"

The very short TL:DR is that Pichai is beset on all sides by people who expect
Google to move mountains, reinvent itself. It goes on to discuss Pichai is a
leader/person and ends on the quote "As Pichai has learned, Big Tech companies
can no longer skate by on faith in their fundamental benevolence"

~~~
yahna
> Pichai is beset on all sides by people who expect Google to move mountains,
> reinvent itself

TIL not showing fake news or having your advertisers associated with ISIS
videos is "moving mountains".

~~~
packetslave
While you're considering zaphar's post and mentally designing your "get rid of
ISIS videos" system, remember that YouTube gets 400 hours of video uploaded
every _minute_

~~~
dragonwriter
So, you’d only need an average of 18,000 people on duty around the clock to do
review of everything uploaded to YouTube.

At $15/hour pay, that's only about $2.4 billion/year for reviewers; all told,
with supervision and other overhead, maybe on the order of $7.5 billion/yr.

It's probably not _impossible_ for Google, and it wouldn't even make Google
unprofitable. But it would make _YouTube_ unprofitable.

~~~
spacemanmatt
TIL there are still people who think Google brute-forces anything.

~~~
dragonwriter
The post you are responding to does not indicate anything about my belief in
what Google currently does (well, except that it makes the amount of money
it's financial reports say it makes.)

------
maxxxxx
I am actually happy that life becomes more difficult the bigger companies get.
It was a good thing that Microsoft got some heat in the 90s and stopped
dominating the market. I hope that Facebook and Apple also will also get more
scrutiny.

~~~
miniapp
All those firms you've mentioned are already too big. Anything they do will
generate scrutiny so they've stopped innovating. That's why Google is trying
to take up role as an 'angel investor.'
[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/13/google-and-amazon-are-
ready-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/13/google-and-amazon-are-ready-to-
disrupt-small-business-lending-former-obama-advisor-says.html)

~~~
stingrae
What is your evidence that Google has "stopped innovating"? In my opinion
Google is very focused on making sure that innovation doesn't stop, because if
it stops they will lose.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Google acquires innovators, it doesn't innovate much itself. Everything new
Google has launched since like... Chrome, has been an acquisition, or an
integration of a couple of acquisitions together. (Sure, that work is not
small, but at the point Google got involved, the innovative part was mostly
over.)

Self-driving car team was picked up wholesale from a university, DeepMind was
an acquisition, most of what Google Lens is was from an acquisition. Projects
like Ara, Jacquard, and Tango were all from Motorola's ATAP division, which
they acquired. Almost anything you see coming out of Google can be traced back
to an existing thing that Google purchased, rebranded, and relaunched.

cromwellian's comment probably lends to explaining some of why:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15519220](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15519220)

~~~
stingrae
You miss some key products (>1B Users) Google has created completely within:
Search, GMail, Maps, Calendar, etc.

Many of Google's products did start from acquisitions. Though those startups
can't claim all the credit. Most wouldn't have become as big as they are now
without the capital and talent that Google brought to them.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I specified: 'Since Chrome'. All of those products predate Chrome.

------
throwaway187234
Recent Xoogler. My observations/opinions:

\- To many inside, the company feels like it lacks direction. It feels like
the leadership doesn't know where to take Google and this pervades pretty much
everything;

\- There is a lot of discontent at the the amount of money Google throws at
executives. I mean Sundar got paid ~$200m LAST YEAR. Levandowski got $120m+.
Back in the day, Patrick Pachette was parising the benefits of scrappiness,
which saved $40m in travel costs that year. Incidentally, his was paid ~$40m
extra that year;

\- It feels like there are constant reorgs going on. This plays into the
directionless point above but is also symptomatic of politics run amok and
middle managers creating work for themselves and covering their asses. I mean
a decision can never be judged good or bad if it lasts at most 6 months before
another reorg.

\- Some units were deliberately keep apart from Google. Most notably Youtube,
Android and X. This exacerbates a cultural drift such that Google is really
becoming autonomous and separate business units;

\- Internal mobility is harder than it used to be and also less advisable for
your career, as a general rule.

\- It takes too long to do pretty much anything, particularly anything UI
related. This is in part because UI work is looked down upon by the
engineering leadership and the tech stacks are like 10 years behind the rest
of the world.

\- Sundar came up through Chrome and still seemed to me see everything through
a Chrome colored lens. Chrome in particular had (has?) a bad rep for hazing
and their retention numbers for women engineers in particularly aren't great.

\- Google promotion culture seems to value individual technical ability above
all else. I can see how this breeds the views of the likes of Damore. Worse,
it seems like a lot of PAs tolerate someone being an ass if they're a high
performer, which is an unfortunate reward loop.

\- This all said, there are a lot of talented and great people and projects at
Google. At the same time you could probably get rid of half the company
because they don't really seem to have anything to do.

\- Left to their own devices teams will create work for themselves. This is
most apparent in Maps, which definitely went through a period of new work and
features making the experience decidedly worse by, say, unifying data
pipelines because consistency to some is an absolute good.

\- The effects of Vic's disastrous reign can still be felt and Larry needs to
take the ultimate blame for that.

\- There seems to be little or no regard for the harm in burning user trust.
This comes in many forms but includes announcing projects and then cancelling
or abandoning them.

~~~
Jerry2
> _Google promotion culture seems to value individual technical ability above
> all else._

If I was at a company that promoted people on anything else but their merit
and skills, I'd leave immediately because of misalignment of values. If hard
work and skills are not valued, the company itself is doomed.

~~~
throwaway187234
Superficially what you say might be right but the truth is far more insidious
than that.

For one your prospects are tied to how well your project does. Sounds
reasonable right? But what this results in is many teams battling to "win"
with politics often playing a large role in who is the victor, rewrites of
existing code essentially to prove your technical prowess and make your
promotion case and little to no valuation of team value rather than individual
value, namely that teams are (or can be) greater than their sum of parts.

The last point is a key one and an area where the likes of Damore go wrong.
The best team isn't one simply that's the sum of the people who individually
had the highest "merit".

Put another way the cynical view is your shit never breaks no one notices but
if it breaks in a big way and you fix it, well that's impact. Likewise adding
a feature isn't nearly as much impact as rewriting the whole thing from
scratch.

~~~
cromwellian
A better way to put this is, in general, refactoring code to make it
healthier, or improving product excellence by fixing some long running bugs,
does not get the same visibility as launching something.

However, to be fair, I haven't been at many companies where "cleaned up code
base with large scale refactor and improved documentation" gets you noticed.
It's just not as sexy as a customer facing launch.

------
nugget
Google should learn from old Microsoft's mistakes and voluntarily become more
partner-centric before they are forced down that road by the Government.

~~~
jayd16
In what way is Microsoft more partner friendly than Google?

~~~
rainbowmverse
You can install Linux distributions and run them in Windows from Microsoft's
own store. The bulk of .NET is open source. VSCode is pretty good. No one
seems worried Microsoft will suddenly shut Azure down or lock non-Windows
operating systems out. They did a lot of work to make git work on huge,
complicated projects (for Windows) and shared it.
([https://github.com/Microsoft/git](https://github.com/Microsoft/git))

Meanwhile, Google is...well, where are they? They never did give us that Linux
Google Drive client they promised. They announce products then shut them down,
so no one can really trust their products. Even the ones we had before Google
lost its way (I miss Reader's trends feature). Aside from whoever's on the
Takeout team, Google seems to have stopped caring about sharing and working
with others.

~~~
icebraining
There's plenty to criticize in Google, but this idea that MS is suddenly so
much better is absurd, in my opinion.

Microsoft open sourced .NET. Meanwhile, Google... open sourced Android,
Chromium (including V8), Tensorflow, Go, Dart, Angular, Kubernetes, and
literally hundreds of other projects. They also fund Let's Encrypt and
contributions to third-party OSS projects on their annual Summer of Code.

And Microsoft was discontinued plenty of products:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Microsof...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Microsoft_software)

Finally, MS still uses patents as attack weapons, which AFAIK Google has never
done.

~~~
kuschku
Android is a very bad example in that list. Most of the rest makes sense, but
Android doesn’t.

Android is a project where nowadays not even the dialing app is open source
anymore, nor the calendar, email, home screen, nor camera.

Android is a project where OEMs are banned from shipping competing forks of
Android as long as they ship a single device with Google’s Android.

~~~
spacemanmatt
Sounds like a complaint that Google has open-sourced the OS they derive their
product from, rather than open-sourcing their proprietary product.

~~~
kuschku
Google had open sourced all of Android, until 7 years ago.

In 2010, even the Google Search and Google Talk apps were open source.

But Google is moving every year more of these features into the proprietary
apps.

Nowadays you can’t even use the OpenGL ES drivers anymore without going
through the proprietary Play Services.

------
ithilglin909
With great power comes great scrutiny. And rightly so.

------
Gatsky
I don't get why Google cops so much flack. Other companies which are
considerably less useful (facebook), more intrusive (facebook), actively
manipulate user psychology (facebook), sell highly addictive harmful products
(Snap inc, big tobacco) or are destroying the planet (the frackers,
Schlumberger), seem to escape much criticism.

------
whatyoucantsay
Putting Sundar Pichai in this highly public position was a great move for the
founders.

------
sosuke
I didn't know that Sergey Brin and Larry Page still held 51% of the company.
That feels unreal.

~~~
hemancuso
51% of the voting shares

~~~
wonder_bread
If they still owned 51% of the company their respective net worth would make
even Bezos seem paltry

~~~
maxxxxx
Market cap is around 700 billion at the moment.

------
Khaine
This just sounds like whining from someone who gets paid a metric shit-ton of
money to run google. Frankly, he should just shut-up and get on with his job,
If its too f __king hard, resign.

------
narrator
With political power comes political problems.

------
known
Once a company gets listed in NYSE, govt should impose tax on its revenues,
not profits;

------
yahna
> Discussing the issue, Pichai deploys the vocabulary of an apologetic CEO
> that’s become de rigueur in Silicon Valley since last November. He says the
> word “thoughtful” 13 times and “deeply” (feeling, listening, en

I'm reminded of the BP CEO on South Park. Not that he's actually anything like
that guy, it's just what comes to mind.

> Pichai’s solution to the gnawing problems of fake news and illicit content
> that slip through Google artificial intelligence is, no surprise, more
> artificial intelligence

Of course it is. What do they say the definition of insanity is again?

> has stirred general alarm about AI; he thinks computers that make their own
> decisions and are smarter than people could enslave humanity.

at least google isn't saying this.

------
dogruck
Oh no, the internet search-driven-advertising monopoly is getting some static
from regulators. Not Fair!

Maybe the CEO should have a 3 martini lunch with some Investment Bank CEOs.

------
notsbrin
if we as a society idolized our leaders less, leaders would not have it this
hard. But we idolize them in big part because they are encouraging it. So
that's where perhaps leaders should start: don't idolize me, I am a person,
with similar deficiencies that you all have.

------
dingo_bat
Awww... the poor multi-millionaire has actual hard-work to do! How pitiful!

------
wonder_bread
Headline is pretty clickbaity

~~~
dang
We've changed it to language from the subtitle.

------
buttsu
This is a pretty funny headline

------
losteverything
Paywall

~~~
Jesus_Jones
open the link in anonymous mode and it works.

------
faragon
What about Elon Musk or John Carmack running Google? I would love it.

------
alexnewman
Pretty easy. Google will innovate like a startup or die slowly. All the other
stuff is noise

~~~
maxxxxx
They will probably end up like Microsoft or Oracle. Solid companies but the
magic is gone. Same probably for Apple after Jobs.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Agreed. Mostly because the amount of cash companies like Google and Apple have
mean they can afford to not be magical for a long time. They have plenty of
cash they can burn while trying to regain that magic.

After Microsoft lost it's pedestal, it didn't go anywhere remarkable until
Nadella's big cloud services push, where they have changed up quite a bit and
reentered the marketplace in a big way.

There may just be a point a company becomes too large to ever completely die,
since they have enough cash to spend decades looking for a way to revitalize
themselves. Though I say that as we've seen former giants like Sears be
brought to the brink of death.

~~~
cromwellian
I don't know why this was voted down, but there is merit to it.

Successful, world changing product launches are mostly serendipity, luck, and
timing. You could have the right product at the wrong time, or the wrong
product at the right time, or both. Most of the home runs (Google Search,
iPod, iPhone, Windows 95, etc) happened because of simultaneous fit of product
and time. I'd argue the original Mac was too early, and Win95 was timed right.

In 1984, the vast majority of people weren't ready for a home computer,
especially at $5000+ in 2017 dollars. Computing was still highly technical and
reserved for specialists -- even though the Mac wanted to change that. It
wasn't until the mid 90s and into 2000s, where hundreds of millions of people
were ready to integrate computers as "must haves" as part of their life.
Microsoft rode that wave, the way Google rode the wave of the internet
explosion, and Apple rode the wave of the mobile that had been building.

Everyone's looking for the "next big thing", they're spending money like crazy
in a thousand different directions: AI, AR, VR, Health, Cars, etc. But no one
knows.

There's the assumption that it's AI, because of the scale, but does AI need a
big company? Part of the assumption is you need lots of data, an inherent
advantage for big companies, but what if you don't?

AlphaGoZero just proved, that unlike AlphaGo, you can start with nothing, and
still succeed.

Silicon Valley executives fear the big AI breakthrough will happen at a small
startup, come out of nowhere, and disrupt them. AI firms are being bought
almost as soon as they form with no product.

All the while, what if the next big breakthrough isn't even AI? What if it's
battery chemistry? If someone discovers a battery with just 10x the density,
it would change everything. For example, drones could fly for 5 hours instead
of 30 minutes. What would that enable?

It's hard to compute what the downstream effects of small disruptive changes
in tech will bring, and if history is any guide, new companies will come out
of no where with shocking results.

One of the things small scrappy startups can do is, ignore the bad rep and
government oversight. A large company that missteps will grab the world's
attention, so they have to be risk averse, which means slow. Google can't ship
a self driving car that kills people, but startups can ship self driving
aftermarket add-ons that do, because in the worst case, they lose the
investors money, and they start another company, they don't end up exploding
$200 billion in market cap.

~~~
ktta
>AlphaGoZero just proved, that unlike AlphaGo, you can start with nothing, and
still succeed.

There are various types of AI. The type of AI AlphaGo is something that needs
computing power and smart people. The kind of AI you see in Google Photos and
Translate is what needs large amounts of data.

------
jbob2000
I guess when you want to control everything and position yourself as the
controller of all things, then people expect you to do that.

Google's problem is that it's too big and some of their core values are
starting to become mutually exclusive of each other; you can't be a "you"tube
where anyone can upload anything but also pull in TV-level advertising
dollars.

