harlysparks

They are getting slapped with anti-trust right now because they gave $10M to Kamala Harris and only $1M to Trump.

That's it.

Also, the AI race is a red queen race. There is no line on the sand that says "you are the ultimate winner", that's not how time works. And given that the vast majority of the internet is on AWS, NOT GCP, and that Gemini isn't even the most popular LLM among AI developers, I'm not sure you can even say that Google is the leader at this exact point in time.

Perhaps you need to first define "innovation" and maybe also rationalize why that view of innovation is the end-all of determining CEO performance. Otherwise you're begging the question here.

Google's stock performance, revenue growth, and political influence in Washington under his leadership has grown substantially. I don't disagree that there are even better CEO's out there, but as an investor, the framing of your question is way off. Given the financial performance, why would you want to replace him?

Google's headcount (and internal red tap) grew significantly from 2012 to 2025. You're highlighting the fact that at some point in its massive growth, Google had to stop relentlessly pushing R&D and allocate leadership focus on addressing technical debt (or at least operational efficiency) that was a consequence of that growth.

The duplicative functions and overlapping features is a product of how their perf annual review cycle works and the way you have to play the game to get promotions as a SWE there. I think they've changed the setup in the last few years, but historically Google rewards building lots of beta versions of stuff with some commercial potential, throwing it over a wall and seeing what sticks.