Pichai may not have capitalized effectively on the impressive AI investments Google has made, but he has steered innovation in newer directions like AI and cloud. Technical victories, but questionable business decisions.
I think one possible moral here is, sometimes the best opportunity is the one you don't take.
They did invest in mobile from fairly early. Microsoft was selling smart phones (through third party manufacturers) in the early 2000s. They just executed very poorly on mobile by building the wrong thing for the wrong customers. By the time leadership figured this out and started to pour money into Windows Phone, they were too late to catch up.
App stores and app platforms became critical to the success on any mobile platform. Microsoft didn’t sufficiently cultivate the Windows CE based apps enough. Then they ditched that app platform for a new one in Windows Phone 7, losing what little they had. Companies that had built apps for iPhone and Android had no incentive doing so on Windows at that point.
Ballmer at least recognized the value of Azure, Office in the cloud and similar efforts. All the seeds of Satya’s success were planted during Ballmer’s reign. There was just so much fumbling.
I remember this basically as around the time that Microsoft bought Nokia and produced some really nice looking phones that people were excited about... they had also just reinvented their app platform and nothing could run on them.
In the interim, Microsoft built quite a few phones mostly with Samsung, HTC, and Huawei, but also oddball partners like Dell.
Like it has always broadly felt like they were very late to the party on comprehending where software was headed (caught up pretty well with O365, but that seems like leveraging then entrenched nature of Office successfully).
https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-...
Not exactly making a strong case.
AWS bills Amazon an internal rate. It’s a closely held secret that few employees know but supposedly it’s better than at-cost.
Everyone has access! Everyone I worked with at Amazon knew the prices they were spending for the different services they were using or thinking of using.
Ads + Twitch = 9.5B, AWS = 20.5B
Post-AWS launch, writing was on that wall that amortizing your (already large) infrastructure costs across paying customers would be the only way to afford a certain scale and geographic distribution of hardware that was a prerequisite to taxing future value.
The whole "selling excess Q4 capacity" was a myth.
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/Amazon-web-services goes into it in great detail.
It's a podcast first and foremost so the URL is still good for the direct links in various podcast players.
Last year google started warning some internal teams that they had to limit usage. It’s possible they’re running out of compute.
Culturally it didn’t get enterprise, e.g. “ditch oracle and move to spanner”.
Technology wise it was not setup for enterprise.
Staff wise it was paying way too high of a total-comp for non revenue roles. TAMs making 400k/year on accounts spending < 5M/year.
However it could have addressed all those. There were people inside advocating for those changes. Eng and Product leadership refused to listen. And the CEO refused to reward business success and instead rewarded product launches od multiple un-successful messaging apps.
What do you think is going to happen at peak of Amazon needs it’s own excess capacity at the same time customers need access capacity?
Even today, much of Amazon is not on AWS.
They’re the same CPUs they just use an internal API to provision and not AWS APIs. I’m pretty sure the internal APIs also just wrap ec2 et al at this point (for backwards compatibility)
Much of the Amazon infrastructure predates AWS and was built on homegrown systems. A lot of wasn’t ported over.
If you want to see what it looks like to have an Amazon product made available to AWS and that wasn’t designed specifically for AWS, look no further than Amazon Connect. There were no publicly available APIS for years to automate anything. Every AWS native service is API first.
S3 was built from the old image hosting designs, but better.
StepFunctions and SWF before it are re-designed based on the 5 internal workflow engines that existed (and still do exist).
SQS is a re-do of AMP.
DynamoDB is a re-do of Sable.
Redshift is a re-do of their internal partitioning and querying of Oracle databases but on non-Oracle databases. Their new iteration of Redshift is designed to replicate Andes + Dryad/Cradle.
The people responsible for writing and maintaining AWS Services are my coworkers…
Your comment above doesn’t seem to reflect that history, so I just wanted to make sure it was stated.
AWS is also entirely built on Amazons builder tools like Apollo and Pipelines. So it’s really unfair to say “AWS was built from the ground up”
But that doesn’t mean they just took a few extra computers they had to spare and start hosting external customers on the same metal used by Amazon retail.
The only product that I know of in recent history that came from Amazon to AWS without many changes (and without any API or automation story) is Amazon Connect.
You wouldn't say something is built "on" Github.
Your continuous deployment and continuous delivery toolset isn't really what's running a multi-tenant cloud environment.
Google’s main problem IMO is the lack of customer focus. The products are good, the experience is not as good.
The ONLY official channel they have where you can talk to someone that I am aware of, is sales and restricted to sales only.
This was probably a conscious decision they made, derp-derp if we eliminate everything we build value for the shareholder, except for the fact they didn't think it through all the way in the sense that they have competitors. Microsoft is also bad, but you can actually eventually get to an MS employee if there is a problem and MS does have official employees on Reddit to keep an eye on things, etc. So, if I was a business, I'd look to Microsoft first, NOT GOOGLE, because Google can't be trusted because they are just an automated chatbot with absolutely zero support.
I do use Google services, but I'd be frightened to rely on them for anything serious.
The only company I've ever dealt with which was worse at taking your money was IBM. In both cases, it was eerily similar: you could get a room full of people to do a demo but the salespeople seemed to assume their reputation meant success was inevitable and they didn't have to actually do anything like … eeew … work to close deals. In neither case were we the biggest deal in town but also far from the smallest, and in both cases the experience meant they missed out on larger sales later.
IBM was similar: we were trying to buy Opteron servers, let our rep know, had a bunch of people show up, ended with them saying they’d send us a quote, no reply to multiple requests. Maybe they weren’t interested in mere 6 figure purchases but they could have said so.
I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather a maturity of companies that no longer have founder CEOs and how that changes the nature of people's interactions from top to bottom.
They missed mobile. Apple (and later Android) delivered what average consumers wanted. Average consumers do not want to have to be a personal IT department to upgrade their software and manage backups of their settings/apps.
As someone who had a Windows CE iPaq and wanted to love it, the user experience was so frustrating. It was nicknamed Wince for a reason.
For example, since Windows CE was burned into the iPaq's ROM, you had to upgrade he ROM. To upgrade the ROM...
> This ROM update will Clean Reset the HP iPAQ Handheld device to factory settings. Performing a Clean Reset will return the device to its default settings, and clear all user applications and data. Before performing this ROM update, back up all your data.
To be fair, I think, in retrospect, the iPod and iTunes sync process and system gave Apple a multi-year headstart with building and developing a consumer-friendly backup and sync process.
Microsoft lost (not missed) mobile because the Windows team had been losing the ability to execute competently. iOS was essentially macOS for mobile, and Windows wasn't competitive with macOS on the desktop and still isn't today so it wasn't a big surprise that they couldn't pull off great results on mobile either. For as long as the mobile playing field didn't have the most competent companies doing software they could be the leader but once Apple/Google showed up the piles of tech debt and general apathy got the better of them.
So in a sense they had a lot of the parts of the winning recipe. They just didn't have capacitive touchscreens. Or decent batteries. Or affordable flash memory. Or gorilla glass. Or an on-screen keyboard you could usefully use without a stylus. And mobile data was slow and very expensive.
The rest of the phone market, at the time, was off doing weird things like WAP.
Microsoft missed the market in the sense they weren't on the flight when it took off - but they didn't miss it, in the sense they were at the right departure gate hours before any of the other passengers.
Microsoft obviously has it's own monopolies but it failed to leverage them on mobile. Shockingly, a great experience using Excel on a 4" screen isn't a huge selling point.
The Windows team didn't really care about slick UI until long after Apple beat them on that. And the reason they scrapped CE and tried to do UWP is because the Windows API was long ago on its last legs but they hadn't been able to upgrade it properly. Whereas Apple had managed the evolution of nextstep much better, and Android was free / a clean slate design with proper sandboxing, and better consumer apps.
Now that's not to say Microsoft doesn't hold any monopolistic positions or engage in monopolistic behavior, most large companies eventually do and Microsoft still does where opportunity presents.
But if you think Microsoft is a monopoly and Google isn't, you have a view of the industry that is two decades out of date.
Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Chrome and Android either have direct competitors in other ecosystem or are open source. YouTube and search are the only ones I can think of without direct competition. And the competition for these products come from Apple and Microsoft who are more/just as entrenched in owning and growing their entire platform.
Ironically, while ignoring all these huge monopolies, you claim search has no competition. Ironically, about a third of global search queries are serviced by Bing! I would go so far as to say the monopolies above are as powerful, or moreso, than Google's grip on search.
https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/most-used-email-clients
And “email is for old people”. How much important personal communication even goes over email?
Chromium and AOSP also aren't trivial contributions to open source and having the ability to fork those projects is much preferable to me than a proprietary solution that's more democratic once it achieves market dominance. Manufacturers building their own devices having nowhere to go was a problem pre-Android and a reason they'd rather license Google's OS rather than compete against Apple. And I think the decision of web standards has grown to be a bigger issue beyond what W3C or Google should be handling at this point, we treat the internet as public utility with the promise of standards without actual regulations and our browsers are an extension of that mess currently (not to say government is actually equipped to solve the issue).
I wasn't ignoring those other services I was doubting their monopolies unless we're changing the definition. I'd say the majority of dominant tech products have a large market share with few competitors but which are monopolies? I'd agree Android/Chrome was a monopoly if iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, Safari, Windows, Azure, AWS and I guess bing all start getting a look at for markets with seemingly only one/two other competitors, especially when you look at the fact they contribute little to nothing back for public benefit.
Microsoft recognized that GUIs were important enough to their future to make what were arguably the best mice available. If they had “caught” mobile, they would have done the same for phones.
Apple won/created this market on fit and finish, excellent marketing, singular focused execution, and supply chain genius.
With wince, Microsoft was running around farming out their OS to multiple 3rd party vendors, trying to create a commodity marketplace for their OS on other people's devices.
Apple won on vertical integration, created a focus product, and profited off the experiences and reputation they had with iPod in order to make a winner.
But people also forget that at this point in Apple's history, it was kind of... make or break. The iPod and then iPhone were huge gambles, that paid off in spades. If they had failed Apple would have continued to be a minority PC producer with poor profit margins and a reputation for being "weird" and "niche." Even after the success of the iMac in the late 90s, they were still in quite a bit of $$ risk.
The intense vertical integration and the product focus in the iPhone could also have failed. It was risky but it paid off for them. MS (and others) had a lot more to lose, and was more conservative.
> They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat
So...they missed mobile.
alphabet(google) and msft are own and steered by the same network of ppl from blackrock/vanguard.
No magic here.
Whatever Pichai's failures, the two anointed candidates given the space to ascend prior to him (Rubin and Gundotra) were so much worse, both at product vision and at not sexually harassing their employees.
And they still own YouTube, don’t forget.
(And by some stories I heard, “literally nothing” might even have been Pichai’s approach had it been his choice.)
The decline in Maps has been the most visible, mostly because it has negatively impacted my commute at times. Google Maps will frequently reroute me through slow, complex side roads and will often completely miss main roads. On routes that I already know, I've stopped following Google's directions altogether because its hilariously off-target.
This is why I never liked labeled inboxes, and modern email clients' seeming insistence to use them (at least by default). Cool, I've got 3 or 4 inboxes I need to check now, and often the important stuff is still in spam and the spam is still in important. These automated solutions companies have been pushing since ~2015(?) have overall led to more work for me, and at least in my anecdotal observation, older people simply disconnecting and relying more on simpler services like phone calls. At this point, just give me one inbox and let me look at it myself. It's time we as a society put Cortana and Bixby down.
Beats me how it was supposed to be a fuel saving road, other than doing that by virtue of destroying the car.
And it turns out Connie Sue is still out there, running desert tours except not now because of lingering Covid restrictions.
> Connie's work background started with 10 years of general nursing and midwifery, 14 years as a violinist in the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and has studied Computer Systems Engineering at TAFE part-time.
Interesting people!
If you're interested in the landscape those roads pass through, here's a 13 minute intro:
Good roads until 6:00 minutes in .. and then they take the David Carnegie Rd.
Desert Raid 2017 - Two Days From Death
In the extreme case, one route might take no fuel at all vs one that climbs a mountain before dropping
It feels like the sensitivity to traffic is turned up way too high.
While you are driving on the "closed" road Maps keeps insisting on turning back and suggesting silly alternate routes.
Had guests who trusted Google and took the Google alternate route losing 30 minutes in the process .
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33903016 [1] https://killedbygoogle.com/
see https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/08/tech/google-waze-maps-merge/i...
Nevermind the changes to the actual algorithm, it just blew me away that the actual result was below the cut.
Easy to forget but Pichai-led Chrome team ensured Search stayed dominant in face of an increasingly hostile Microsoft. Later, Pichai was handed the keys to all of Google Apps and Android with Rubin pushed out to Robotics. According to reports, Pichai was a key peacemaker in deals with Samsung and Xiaomi, who otherwise threatened to break away from the Open Handset Alliance. Pichai went to war and further tightened Google's grip on Android, dealt with Microsoft (CyanogenMod and patents), Amazon (FireOS), and Apple / Oracle (patents).
This is discounting Pichai's track record with hardware: Chromebooks and Chromecast. Probably hardware firsts for Google back in the day?
As an outsider, it seems like Pichai sustained most if not all of Google's consumer products, bar YouTube and Nest.
One difference with the previous leadership is how little decisive strategic action is going on. Google founders leaned hard on the company to steer it and "bet the farm" in clear areas. Pichai doesn't seem to.
That is no longer the case.
What bothers me is complete stagnation. I can tell you 5 things that must be fixed in Maps in 5 mins but hasn’t been for a long time. People who are working on it full time should be doing better.
How can companies the size of Google not stagnate at some point? Economically, they are at the scale of not-that-small countries, bigger than that and they take over the world. Maybe that's indeed Pichai's fault but no matter who is at the helm, stagnation must happen, and sometimes, just being able to slow down the fall enough so that the company can recover later when the stars align is the best thing to do, though not the most exciting.
Unlike Google, Facebook tried something. They went "Meta", going all-in on AR/VR, and that make me hate Facebook/Meta a little bit less (but only a little, I am still angry about the Oculus-Facebook account tie-in thing). This is a genuine attempt to break from stagnation, but unfortunately, and at least for now, it looks like "milking the same cow", would have been a better decision for the health of the company.
From the outside though, Google under Pichai increasingly looks like Microsoft under Ballmer in the late 2000s/early 2010s. Balmer was lauded for delivering good numbers from a dominant market position. That was fine - until it wasn't. Under his watch, Microsoft completely misjudged the internet and totally missed mobile. Gates still smarts about the latter.
Pichai looks like Google's Ballmer. He inherited a cash cow - search was already dominant and both YouTube and Android had been in the stable for ~10 years when he took over. Despite the investment in ML/AI (Google Brain, DeepMind) and notable advances that have come from there (e.g. the Transformer architecture), Google has stagnated with Pichai at the helm. The profit drop is indicative of that. There's only so long you can keep milking the same cow.
Of course, it's rarely those at the top of the tree that go first. Microsoft was staring over the precipice of existence before they finally got rid of Ballmer. OpenAI has grabbed the AI/ML limielight despite much of the formative work coming from Google. The recent "code red" looks a lot like a CEO who's been asleep at the wheel - and someone finally woke him up.
I don't know what's ahead for Google, but I'll wager it'll need a change at the top.