Whew boy you hit the nail on the head. Google just seems to be aimless at this point, and now with the layoffs (despite their immense profitability) they're going to have a much tougher time hiring and retaining top talent.

Where is the top talent going to go? Seems like a vast majority of FAANG* ended up laying folks off.

I would make the argument that top talent wasn’t the contingent that was laid off.

You would be provably wrong.

> provably wrong

How so? I don't see any examples of top talent being fired (barring the scuffles at Twitter, but that isn't FAANG). Most people on my LinkedIn feed being let go are new grads or middle management who ostensibly didn't perform to company expectations of perfromance.

I don't understand why the board hasn't ousted Sundar yet -- has he even spearheaded a single successful initiative that wasn't sunsetted within a few years?

Seems like you could make an LLM generate product ideas and it would be about equally effective.

> I don't understand why the board hasn't ousted Sundar yet

They didn’t realize they were at war until about 3 months ago. That’s why. It takes time.

This is why I think Google is in real trouble. They really don't recognize that they could fail. It's kinda like you can't smell yourself and don't realize you stink, until everyone leaves the party because of it.

Chrome and ChromeOS come to mind. But he wasn't CEO then.

As I recall (someone correct me on timing?) he was actually in charge of Chrome for a long time.

Offhand, I don't remember who's on Alphabet's board, but let's take two other leading candidates for Worst Board of All Time:

Yahoo's: had an offer from Microsoft for ~$33B in 2004 or so, declined, and later hired Marissa Mayer. Eventually sold to Verizon for ~$4B.

HP's: hired Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd, Léo Apotheker, and then Meg Whitman

Modern boards rarely act in any sort of timely manner.

> Yahoo's: had an offer from Microsoft for ~$33B in 2004 or so, declined, and later hired Marissa Mayer. Eventually sold to Verizon for ~$4B.

The former Yahoo assets that Verizon didn't purchase -- Yahoo Japan, plus a large stake in Alibaba, and several other investments -- were liquidated for a ~$40B total return to shareholders over the course of several years. So combined that's a 33% increase over Microsoft's offer. Obviously not a great return over like 15 years, but far from "worst board decision of all time" level either.

Microsoft's 2004 board, on the other hand, I have to wonder what they were thinking...

Microsoft's GitHub, which is apparently at the forefront of the "LLM revolution" with Copilot, also announced significant cost-cuts. What's your point?

Totally unrelated point to the person you're replying to

The topic of "layoffs" is, in fact, directly related to the topic of "layoffs and other cost-cutting".

Google being "aimless" is pure speculation.

Sounds like Ben Horowitz's peacetime CEO/wartime CEO, which even uses google as an example - https://a16z.com/2011/04/14/peacetime-ceo-wartime-ceo

> Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture.

Beautifully put.

I knew there was some reason why I'm so irresistibly drawn to books about warfare.

Patton in WW II was the quintessential wartime general. Even though it WAS a war, his style was too much for Eisenhower. Until the Battle of the Bulge.

You touched on something else I wanted to mention - that there is nothing wrong with a peacetime general as long as you're not at war. Your point about Patton is spot on, he needs a war or his style is too much.

I see this in startups. The people/leadership you need to go from 0->1 are often not the same people to go from 1->N.

To bring this back around to Google. People are talking about the CEO, but does Google have the rank and file ready to go to war?

having been out for 5 1/2 years, I can't say for sure. But even in 2017, there were a large number of "born on third base and think they hit a triple" people.

I consider Grant the ultimate when the rubber hits the road guy. In his interbellum years he was kind of an aimless loser but when the stakes could not be higher, he stepped up and lead the union to victory.

See also Buggins' Turn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buggins%27_turn

I hadn't heard that one, and having read all 20 of the Aubrey/Maturin books twice, I'm not unfamiliar with the Royal Navy. Thanks!