You could blame him for not changing the culture, but Google has a long history of killing off new products that precedes 2015

>>> current company culture of nurturing new products left and right just to kill them off after 3-5 years?

This predates Sundar's stint. Reader was only the first one, but this culture of killing products is in Google's DNA itself.

My impression is, Sundar has perfected it? I remember the post the other day that listed all the products that were killed over the years, that has been going on for a while. It would be interesting to see products launched vs. products killed, and average lifetime of products.

That's 8 years. If he wanted to turn that culture around, he's had plenty of time to at least make a visible effort.

Satya Nadella took the helm at Microsoft in 2014, right after Ballmer and basically brought the company back from the brink of irrelevancy. Even if we can't point to Pichai as the person responsible for Google's dysfunction, he had time to steer the ship.

As much as I hate Google killing off its products, I think the alternatives are worse, i.e., either launching fewer new products or supporting products that are not sustainable (which would ultimately lead to launching fewer products).

> Would it be a stretch to blame him for the current company culture of nurturing new products left and right just to kill them off after 3-5 years?

“More wood behind fewer arrows” was Google’s direction from Larry Page starting in 2011, which was when they slaughtered a lot of existing and (from Google’s perspective) marginal projects and became a lot more prone to demanding that new efforts prove themselves adequately or be terminated, so Pichai isn’t responsible for starting it, at least.

That's interesting, never knew the history behind that!

Not a stretch. He's the only CEO that could be blamed for it.

Eric let a million products bloom, and Larry was too gutless to make the hard calls.

Sundar gets credit for heeding Wall Street (and his CFO's) call for fiscal responsibility, but the implementation has been poor.