Sundar Pichai has no sense of leadership skills that I can note from outside of the company. He exudes no passion, no sense of optimism, and completely lacks vision. I’ve seen him speak at Google I/O and time and again, it’s just AI and people.

He needs to turn Google’s brand into Goodwill. Like Nike did. Like Apple did. Like his predecessors at Google did.

Pardon me if this is harsh, but literally being honest how I feel.

Sundar feels like an immature executive when it comes to building an image about himself and the company. Wallstreet probably likes his results and growth numbers, but there is more to stock price and performance to running a company. When he is gone, his successors will feel the pain and debt he has left behind.

Not harsh at all. I follow Google very closely. At one point literally 5-10 consecutive speeches/ keynotes/ interviews by Pichai over a period of 3 years appeared to be the same charismaless, PR written statements. It's fine if it's the same thing (in case you want to articulate a particular vision), the problem is it's dull, boring, no vision at all. Pichai is hailed as a great PM for stuff like Chrome etc.

But I don't see what he has brought to the table as the CEO. I feel like Google has a lot of great engineers who've stuck around for 15-20 years, that's their core asset, but they need more direction, vision, strategy. Apple has a solid team of designers and product people who've stuck around for decades. Google needs more product people or more importantly a strong directive from the top (Pichai) to dominate in an area like hardware, AR.

Like one thing which I am especially baffled by is Google's lack of action in the AR space. Meanwhile, Apple's been ramping up small acquistions over the past 3-4 years to assemble solid talent,IP. It's going to take a lot of time for Google to catch up in AR.