Sundar is neither a founder nor has been a practicing Engineer. That's gotta hurt a company like Google which is mostly Engineering driven.
I guess Google at this point just keep churning through systems because Engineers are incentivized to show impact and rarely end up creating new good products.
Adding tons of new engineers is also probably hurting their overall quality and velocity.
I've read somewhere that Sundar's biggest achievement (and rise in power structure) relates to the saving of day by using practical business sense.
Back in around circa 2006, Microsoft one day suddenly decided to remove Google search and replace it with Bing on their default browser, IE (which was still number one back then). This threatened Google's revenues to a considerable extent as online search is one of the major source of their income.
At that time, it was Sundar Pichai who was in the forefront of managing some quick OEM contracts with Dell, HP, etc., so that Google toolbar was installed by default on all their computers. Google toolbar ensured that users were shown a confirmation dialog and were given the option to make Google search the default again! This later ensured Sundar's rise in power and respect that ultimately made him CEO one day.
One can of course argue that Google is such a superior engine compared to Bing that the users would have visited google.com anyway (which will also result in that option to make it default). However, its also true that most users will not take the pain of changing their setup if it already works! So who knows, if Sundar's intervention hadn't happened at that time, maybe Bing and Google would be on an equal footing today!
I'm not a Googler but read that Pichai oversaw the growth of Chrome browser from minor player to the dominant position it has today. And he also oversaw Android's growth after Andy Rubin's departure [1].
While he may not have written code that's two world-leading consumer adoption stories. So many great engineers build products that never achieve great adoption. So aren't Pichai's accomplishments worthy of CEO-level promotion?
Recruiting a world-class team, motivating them to achieve such domination, managing their egos amid a huge company full of talented people, executing across the behemoth that is Google... all these are vital skills and as a company grows maybe more of what you need from a CEO than one who is the most talented engineer. (I may be wrong; just a thought).
> oversaw the growth of Chrome browser from minor player to the dominant position it has today. And he also oversaw Android's growth
Couple of personal observations-
Would it have been same if Chrome was not advertised on every google property and google intentionally breaking google properties on competitor browsers?
Also there was really no competition for android.
But not sure if the these two products were not world class then they would have worked.
Did you just forget Windows Phone ever existed? Also Palm and a few others.
And Chrome originally swept the world because it was just so much better (most faster) than everything else. That’s why the tech industry migrated initially, and then the growth tactics probably just kept things moving to grab the number one spot.
In that he's transitively responsible for hiring, he needs to have some familiarity with Google's core competency in order to avoid a turtles-all-the-way-down situation
> Sundar is neither a founder nor has been a practicing Engineer. That's gotta hurt a company like Google which is mostly Engineering driven.
He might have not fought in the trenches of engineering. But I've seen his congress testimony. He is such a humble and kind guy while still being a nerd, one of us. If I worked at Google, I definitely would be glad about him being CEO.
As a former Googler I'd like Urs Holzle as a CEO. I might even consider coming back if he's at the helm. Dude is both a solid engineer, and an outstanding leader. I respect him a lot and so do most other current and ex-Googlers. Problem is, Urs probably doesn't want the job. :-)
Urs is decent at being a technical lead. He'd make a great CTO if Google had one (and in many ways I think he is the unofficial CTO), but he's not at all a good leader when it comes to non-technical things, for a variety of reasons. I think you'd very quickly realize you didn't actually want him as CEO.
To give him credit, from what I've seen, he's very aware of these shortcomings and as you say, he'd refuse.
Even on the "shortcomings" he'd be FAR better than Larry could ever hope to be, and Larry wasn't the worst CEO in the world. It's funny how the two very different companies go through the same tribulations, but it's true: Sundar is Google's Ballmer IMO, albeit a more polished version. Larry is Google's Gates, but less ruthless.
Compare this to the current Google which is basically run by an ex-McKinsey type of person who has no idea about the technical side of things and will sell his mom for a buck (as evidenced by Dragonfly). Of all the possible choices they have somehow converged on the worst one. I'd argue Urs, even with his shortcomings, could make Google a far stronger company in the mid- to long term. Urs has as good a bullshit filter and ethics as I've ever seen in an SVP, and he's not "slimy". Again, Sundar was a crap choice. I mean, it didn't even have to be an engineer. Nikesh Arora (sales) was pretty outstanding as well. Clearly CEO material, clearly one of the very best in his field, he had the internal respect. We will never know for sure, but he probably was angling for the CEO spot as well. And he'd be a better choice as a strong business leader. He left in 2014, shortly before Sundar took over.
> Urs has as good a bullshit filter and ethics as I've ever seen in an SVP, and he's not "slimy"
That's precisely why he's not CEO material (for that matter, this is why Larry was a shitty CEO as well). Being CEO of a large multinational requires an amount of dissembling and two-faced-ness that few engineers (and certainly not engineers with integrity) are comfortable with. You're trying to balance the interests of literally billions of people, many of whose interest are not aligned, many of whom have widely disparate power levels, and some of whom are driven by cutthroat ambitious egos who would promptly chop your head off if you let them. If any one of those groups had a true picture of what the other parts of the system really thought of them, they would promptly cease to do business with them (at best) or erupt in outright warfare (at worst). Thus, it requires telling a different set of truths to each group, based on what they want to hear, and hoping that they never compare notes.
When they do compare notes, you get news stories like Project Maven, Project Dragonfly, the compensation memo, and so on.
>He is such a humble and kind guy while still being a nerd, one of us.
Yes, but I'm only half joking when I say that that's how all the pod people make you feel. In fact the people who I would consider the most through and through "one of us" are often off-putting and completely antisocial by nature, not even by choice. I think that's the difference between being naturally reality-focused or people-focused.
It is a paradox that Google who boasts themselves to be very technical, gave CEO job to someone who was never software engineeer or written single line of code. His path to fame initially was product management of IE plugin. Smart enough to suck up to founders and give a perception of no threat to them, assured his path to the throne by kicking down others and grabbing successful projects from other leaders.
This is exactly what I thought when I saw that the guy that did those lame demos on ChromeOS during I/O had just became CEO.
And my opinion hasn't changed since that, yes, he's a non-threatening kind of guy and for most that aligns with their shallow definition of nice, but other that this? From the outside I can't really see anything else (and so maybe I should keep my opinions to myself).
I guess Google at this point just keep churning through systems because Engineers are incentivized to show impact and rarely end up creating new good products.
Adding tons of new engineers is also probably hurting their overall quality and velocity.