Waiting for a delayed flight, some idle thoughts on what Google needs to fix itself:
Find a replacement for Sundar. This person needs to be both able if articulating a coherent vision for Google as a company, and inspire great engineers to want to work on great problems.
Google is a strange dysfunctional conglomerate. Search/Ads is/was one of the best businesses ever: Extremely high margin, network effects etc. - at the price of requiring heavy R&D for scale, search quality etc. -- a lot of early Google culture was built for such a business.
Many other businesses at Google (devices, cloud, enterprise docs) are very different: lower margins, more sales effort, tight qualitative customer feedback needed etc.
Neither early Googles culture nor pay scales are well-adapted.
Google has largely killed old Google culture as a result, and the cash cow will eventually suffer. So a key step to returning Google back to health is splitting up the conglomerate.
Cloud needs to be split off, possibly devices, possibly YT or Android. The exact shape is TBD.
Several fragments of Google would be significantly sized public companies in their own right.
Google has a huge amount of Parkinson's Law growth and empire-building to undo. The fastest way for mediocre people to get big salaries in the period 2011-2022 was to quickly grow...
... a small team into big orgs of 50-200 people. 2-4m TC as the carrot. Headcount and org size ballooned. Search/Ads success subsidized growth that was fat, benign tumors, or cancerous, and hiring quality suffered during the pandemic hiring acceleration.
This was a result of the incentive structure. People got promoted for building big systems where small would have worked, and big teams when small would have worked.
Undoing this is super difficult and super painful. But if there is one lesson from history: Cut once. Cut deeply. Then let new branches sprout carefully.
The rolling layoffs that currently happen are crazy. Demoralizing, and not dealing with the actual rot.
Most likely a ...
... lot of headcount reduction is needed. This might be more easily done after splitting the conglomerate, as cross-subsidies from search will become more visible.
A new CEOs role is to greatly diminish their role by breaking up the conglomerate and then leading only...
...search/ads, and finding strong CEOs for the fragments.
Search/Ads needs to restore the culture that it's the #1 place where people want to go to "make the world's information universally accessible". It needs to become the dream destination for technically ambitious ...
scientists again. This requires clarity of vision, and the sort of audacity that Larry articulated as CEO: He wanted Google engineers to work right on the boundary of the possible.
6) Google somehow infected itself with Microsoft-internal-warfare-disease: When a company has few external threats, it can spin into a strange mode where most effort is on internal strife.
Observing the frequency of strange reorgs with negative product or biz impact because ...
... some executive wanted a shiny piece of biz in their org/portfolio, Google has its own share of a similar disease. The loss of internal transparency exacerbates the issue. Whoever takes over needs to identify who the drivers for internal corporate warfare are, and take...
... an axe and a zero tolerance for bullshit approach to the problem.
@HalvarFlake a typical cycle of tech company leadership seems to be tech->ops->finance->tech. Not sure if many companies successfully revert from ops leadership back to tech without first trying handing over the reins to finance.
@againsthimself@HalvarFlake I don't even know many examples of companies returning to being technical or technology led (at least here in Europe). Weirdly enough the corollary of this that apparently you can somehow stay around as a rebadging operation.
@againsthimself@HalvarFlake good examples. I'm also pondering Siemens who appear to be much less a financial engineering construct these days. But this is a very superficial impression.
@bert_hubert@againsthimself@HalvarFlake my father in law worked over 30 years at Siemens. He always described Siemens as a bank with a manufacturing branch.
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