Google's biggest problem is lack of good strategic decisions at higher levels of management, their higher up management are not committed to anything and the company is run as chaos without any clear goals.
They are often late to the game and then they try to do a rip off of the other tech companies services and they fail.
Those that are really good services, they don't have the vision to stick with and improve until it works. They expect to get to a billion users in 2 years else the project goes on resource deprivation and then cancelling.
They are starting to hit the cap on advertisement market, filling Search results and YouTube with crappy ads, hurting user experience. YouTube had turned into a house of pain because of the number of ads. You cannot keep growing Ads revenue year after year by 20% indefinitely.
Their Deepmind folks overpromise and underdeliver. Their Gemini model is not even as good as GPT3.5 in benchmarks, let alone GPT4. And their folks don't really care about the products, they want to work on cool AGI stuff instead. They have been promising AGI next year for the last 10 years if not more, yet their model cannot even compete with GPT4.
Bard has few daily users, and no paying users, while OpenAI has over 100 million daily users.
No one is really responsible to user experience, the company is built from a bunch of dysfunctional silos don't their own thing competing with other got resources, no one knows how many chat apps they have launched to users and then killed. People get promoted through a dysfunctional system by hoarding resources and growing org sizes without delivering value to users.
Internal incentives for engineering and project folks are set towards launching new things, not delivering value to users.
They don't execute well because of mismanagement at higher levels and they are trying to address execution problems by laying off people who ended up working on the wrong project that the upper management was highlighting a while ago in their earnings call.
Their Cloud is doing ok, but they are far behind AWS and Azure from market share perspective and Azure seems to be growing much faster.
Their CFO is stepping down after cutting a lot of projects and investing and losing billions of dollars in real estate during covid and doubling the number of employees in 2020.
There are rumors that Sergey Brin came back to help Sundar Pichai deal with challenges but it doesn't seem to be working so far.
The relationship between their higher management and general employees seems broken and dysfunctional. The employees do not believe in the upper management.
Overall Google seems to be in big trouble. The future for Google doesn't look bright. They are likely going to end up like Yahoo!
It is a good story, but facts seems to indicate that essentially the rest of the board wanted Sam out before he was not keeping them in the loop for things they didn't want to hear. They got Ilya on their side.
Now they have got rid of Mira as well. Mira and Ilya and 500+ employees are threatening to quit if the board doesn't back down.
So it seems Ilya was not the main driver of the coup but essentially went along with it initially but changed his opinion after seeing what that would do, but the rest of the board were not willing to back down.
It must have been Ilya. His AGI hype went ridicule. His safety project went nowhere, so Sam had a 2nd team to do it better without telling him. Sam didn't tell Ilya that his approach sucked, only another board member.
They are often late to the game and then they try to do a rip off of the other tech companies services and they fail.
Those that are really good services, they don't have the vision to stick with and improve until it works. They expect to get to a billion users in 2 years else the project goes on resource deprivation and then cancelling.
They are starting to hit the cap on advertisement market, filling Search results and YouTube with crappy ads, hurting user experience. YouTube had turned into a house of pain because of the number of ads. You cannot keep growing Ads revenue year after year by 20% indefinitely.
Their Deepmind folks overpromise and underdeliver. Their Gemini model is not even as good as GPT3.5 in benchmarks, let alone GPT4. And their folks don't really care about the products, they want to work on cool AGI stuff instead. They have been promising AGI next year for the last 10 years if not more, yet their model cannot even compete with GPT4.
Bard has few daily users, and no paying users, while OpenAI has over 100 million daily users.
No one is really responsible to user experience, the company is built from a bunch of dysfunctional silos don't their own thing competing with other got resources, no one knows how many chat apps they have launched to users and then killed. People get promoted through a dysfunctional system by hoarding resources and growing org sizes without delivering value to users.
Internal incentives for engineering and project folks are set towards launching new things, not delivering value to users.
They don't execute well because of mismanagement at higher levels and they are trying to address execution problems by laying off people who ended up working on the wrong project that the upper management was highlighting a while ago in their earnings call.
Their Cloud is doing ok, but they are far behind AWS and Azure from market share perspective and Azure seems to be growing much faster.
Their CFO is stepping down after cutting a lot of projects and investing and losing billions of dollars in real estate during covid and doubling the number of employees in 2020.
There are rumors that Sergey Brin came back to help Sundar Pichai deal with challenges but it doesn't seem to be working so far.
The relationship between their higher management and general employees seems broken and dysfunctional. The employees do not believe in the upper management.
Overall Google seems to be in big trouble. The future for Google doesn't look bright. They are likely going to end up like Yahoo!