Over the past 4 years, GOOG's net income and earnings per share have fallen quite a bit. Revenue has been pretty flat. I don't get why Pichai is so well paid. Ballmer actually did preside over some impressive growth when he was CEO of MSFT. Pichai has not.

Huh?

Revenue 2019: $160bn Revenue 2022: $280bn

Net income 2019: $34bn Net income 2022: $60bn

Hmm. I was going by this chart, looks like it may be wrong: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/net-...

The macrotrends list of net income by year below the charts is correct. The trailing 12 month chart at the top you may have been looking at is not a chart of annual net income.

Thank you for the clarification!

Ballmer made bets on the windows phone, Zune, Bing (ads) etc in a bid to strengthen the moat around windows/Office. Most of these bets didn't pay, the strategy to build stuff to protect your core business does stymie company growth. I think Google has gotten itself into a similar position that Microsoft was in circa 2012.

Ballmer focused more on short term growth - pushing Windows, Office and related tools. The board was happy because revenues were up. They shouldn't have been happy. Tech companies have two choices: innovate or become irrelevant.

How is Google in a Microsoft position? Ballmer made wasteful acquisitions like Skype and Nokia, and wasted 3 years trying to compete with the iOS by building 2 separate ARM operating system (Windows RT, Windows Phone) only to kill them both and revert focus to the x86 Surface line.

Google hasn't done antything like that. Their product discontinuations have mostly been for niche applications.