From an outside perspective, it’s not even just “generate profits”, but also morphed into “focus only on high-margin, high-revenue products and kill everything else”. Which makes perfect sense for shareholders, but pretty much turned Google into just another soulless BigCo.
The story is that, around the time Larry Page became CEO, he went to Jobs for advice, who gave him exactly this advice. Obviously Google never sunk as far as becoming Apple, but this fits the narrative of killing Google's soul to make it a little more like a place like Apple.
There is nothing similar to Apple’s business model to Google’s.
- Apple’s users are its customers. I give Apple money and they give me stuff. Google’s customers are advertisers and others trying to reach users.
- Apple is mostly concerned with its own platform and doesn’t have services across platforms with a few exceptions (iTunes on Windows, Apple Music on Android, Apple TV+ everywhere). Google wants to be ubiquitous.
Would you please elaborate what are the issues with Apple? From my limited perspective, they indeed focus on high margin products, and deliver them with a decent quality. I use a mid 2015 Macbook and an old iPhone 6S. Pretty reliable, both as hardware and as software. Given the 4+ years of continuous usage, they aren't even that expensive.
>Obviously Google never sunk as far as becoming Apple
I too would like to hear more about this idea. I have an iPhone but don't otherwise buy into Apple's ecosystem at all. Nonetheless, I would rank Apple ahead of Google in any favorability comparison that I can think of.
After that he seems to have burned out, spun a tale about being a capital allocator with the whole Alphabet charade, then retired.
Sundar Pichai's mandate has been plainly obvious: generate profits (that mandate became more explicit with hiring Ruth Porat as CFO).