[hlfshell]

Google is very much suffering from the classic Innovator's Dilemma [1]; a side effect of being too focused on stock price and not long term planning.

A better management with long term thinking would utilize Google's enormous base of talented engineers far better.

[1]https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=46

[zoogeny]

On the topic of better management, I can't believe they haven't replaced Sundar Pichai. Satya Nadella by comparison really seemed to have turned MS around.

Larry Page was making the rounds when all of this AI hype started. He seemed to have a much more aggressive stance, even ruffling feathers about how many hours Google employees should be working to compete in AI. And there is obviously Demis Hassabis who is the most likely contender for a replacement.

I doubt it is an easy position to fill. But Pichai has presided over this lackluster Google. Even if he isn't strictly to blame, I am surprised he hasn't be replaced.

[hlfshell]

Google (Alphabet's) stock price has generally gone up 200% in the past 5 years. That is the only reason he is there, and that is the only way he is judged.

[spankalee]

I do not think it's even innovator's dilemma.

Take chat, one of Google's biggest fumbles. They had a good thing with Gtalk. Really screwed things up with Hangouts (thanks, Vic!), added the weird Allo to the mix, almost turned things around, and then brought in Chat to compete with Slack as opposed to AIM...WhatsApp.

If they had just incrementally invested in chat, even if they swapped out back ends, they could have kept most of their user base, maybe even have grown it. Gchat was pretty popular, even during the rise of Facebook Messenger.

But they screwed around with the public-visible product side of things too much, and revealed their tech stack and org chart as product changes. There was no product-first, continuity-oriented planning.

[mtrovo]

The main problem with chat is that there are too many angles to communication, making it impossible to fulfil all requirements with a single tool. Apple does IM, period, they don’t want any of the Slack-type team communications and that's fine for them. Even Facebook realised that having multiple chat apps is fine as long as they offer value on their own. Meanwhile, Google has gone through several iterations, with internal groups competing for the top spot in defining what a chat app should be, but ultimately falling short because there's no single chat app for all requirements. They aimed too close to the average and failed to deliver anything useful enough for any specific group.

[whatever1]

Or we need to break it up. The ai search team should not be afraid of killing the traditional search engine.

Many of the decisions companies make are to ensure the cow they are currently milking very efficiently does not die. This is bad for the rest of us, specially if they place barriers to innovation.

[spankalee]

You couldn't break up the AI search engine and the traditional search engine. They're basically one and the same. The AI search engine relies on the index. The index uses AI in various places. The "traditional" side has long used AI for query understanding, ranking, and fact extraction.