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Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

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Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#221

https://abc.xyz/investor/news/releases/2019/1203/ Slightly more organized info in the intro bullets. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the CEO and President, respectively, of Alphabet, have decided to leave these roles. They will continue their involvement as co-founders, shareholders and members of Alphabet’s Board of Directors.

I'm curious what their continued involvement will look like.

For a while after Bill Gates stepped down as CEO, there was this awkward tension where Steve Balmer was CEO, but people still treated Bill like he was the one in control -- because he was.

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#222
post #214

A well deserved congratulations to Sundar's promotion! Larry and Sergey have spent the majority of their time on Other Bets for quite some time now, and it's good to see that this is finally being solidified / recognized within Alphabet's management structure.

Can someone please explain why it is well deserved? For example, when I was at MSFT it was very clear why Satya deserved to be the next CEO - for leading and growing the cloud business from irrelevance to a major pillar of MSFT. What about Sundar? Is this all because he led Chrome?

I don’t get it either. Google’s reputation has been lousy, there’s something weird going on among employees and the company isn’t clearly advancing in any particular area. Sundar strikes me as Google’s Ballmer.

Satya, on the other hand, has been outstanding. Microsoft has transformed and looks like a company that will be dominant for at least another 20 years.

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is something that I kind of admire about Bill Gates: As Microsoft's boss he was ruthless, and even anti-competitive, all to benefit his own company. But somehow, he is one of the "best type of person" that could become the richest man in our world. There are so many rich people that just look to be buried with their millions or pass it to their family. Hopefully Sergei and Larry will try to get the same type of…

So Gates is not alone. Buffet and Ellison have both pledged the vast majority of their wealth to the Gates Foundation. Somewhat unique to the US, our billionaires tends to be fairly philanthropic.

The latest Patriot Act episode did a great deep dive into why this is true, particularly in the US.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS9CFBlLOcg

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is something that I kind of admire about Bill Gates: As Microsoft's boss he was ruthless, and even anti-competitive, all to benefit his own company. But somehow, he is one of the "best type of person" that could become the richest man in our world. There are so many rich people that just look to be buried with their millions or pass it to their family. Hopefully Sergei and Larry will try to get the same type of…

So Gates is not alone. Buffet and Ellison have both pledged the vast majority of their wealth to the Gates Foundation. Somewhat unique to the US, our billionaires tends to be fairly philanthropic.

Also unique to the US. We have one of the highest infant mortality rates of any developed country. And our average life expectancy is one of the lowest for a developed country [0]. We could a lot less philanthropic billionaires and more economic policies that don't treat everyone as disposable cogs.

[0] http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/life-expectancy-b...

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#225
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this meme all the time. What does GCP lag on? What is it missing? I see a proliferation of AWS services, yes, but many seem to be replicating things that GCP has had since the start, in multiple different formats without clear direction. Bigquery covers most of the use cases of Redshift, Kineseis, Athena, EMR, and others. It is at once decoupled from and well integrated with their object storage, allowing reads…

I used GCP before and liked it better than AWS. The current startup I work for has a prior business relationship with AWS, and every month, it gets harder to move off to GCP. AWS gave a generous credit to the type of startup we have, and with the relationship-building from the solutions architect and account manager, this probably won't go away. There are a lot of technical refinements in GCP that makes life a lot ea…

I've seen this several times by now. It's pretty ridiculous. One of my clients was an AI startup. They got $100K in AWS credit. So yeah, of course they aren't going to move off AWS until that credit runs out, even though GCP's offering for GPU is much better: for one thing on GCP you can vary the number of cores allocated to a machine with a GPU (or several). Inexplicably on AWS you can't do that. One GPU - you get 8 cores. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. As a result, you can't use that V100 fully if you do any significant data augmentation - CPU is often a bottleneck. IO and networking are faster on GCP as well. And if your GPU is not "free", you can cut costs by running on preemptible instances (few of their training runs are longer than 8 hours). On top of that if scale is needed (which it was), you can wrap it all into k8s, too.

Disclosure: ex-googler (left 4 years ago), own no GOOG, use GCP to run my own business. Clients use whatever they want.

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#226
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone please explain why it is well deserved? For example, when I was at MSFT it was very clear why Satya deserved to be the next CEO - for leading and growing the cloud business from irrelevance to a major pillar of MSFT. What about Sundar? Is this all because he led Chrome?

he just released stadia, the greatest gaming console of all time

It is way too early to measure the success or failure of Stadia.

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#227
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Gates is not alone. Buffet and Ellison have both pledged the vast majority of their wealth to the Gates Foundation. Somewhat unique to the US, our billionaires tends to be fairly philanthropic.

Didn't Page and Brin pledge their fortunes to Musk?

I believe one of them said they were more likely to give their fortune to someone like Musk over a traditional charitable venture.

I feel that was expressing a desire for more transformative change over fixing the individual problems we have now. Change the world so much that the problems are no longer an issue.

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is something that I kind of admire about Bill Gates: As Microsoft's boss he was ruthless, and even anti-competitive, all to benefit his own company. But somehow, he is one of the "best type of person" that could become the richest man in our world. There are so many rich people that just look to be buried with their millions or pass it to their family. Hopefully Sergei and Larry will try to get the same type of…

So Gates is not alone. Buffet and Ellison have both pledged the vast majority of their wealth to the Gates Foundation. Somewhat unique to the US, our billionaires tends to be fairly philanthropic.

>Somewhat unique to the US, our billionaires tends to be fairly philanthropic.

slightly more philanthropic than the rest of the world which makes sense given how prosperous the US is, but overall US billionaires actually do not give much and Gates and Buffet are indeed outliers. The average billionaire donates barely more than the small fraction of a per cent annually. The average top 20 billionaire does in fact give less relatively speaking than the average American household.

https://twitter.com/gabriel_zucman/status/119842279460784537...

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#229
post #212
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. That's the simplest reason. Personally I think a lot of their products have gotten better recently, like the experience of using voice-controlled Google Maps in my car, and Google Cloud is superior to AWS in many ways, but the company really offers so many different product lines that it's hard for personal experience to be a great represent…

> Google's market cap has approximately doubled while Sundar has been the CEO. Microsoft grew similarly under Ballmer, despite losing a lot of their strategic advantages and missing the boat in a handful of important ways.

I can name only one: mobile. OTOH Ballmer spearheaded Azure and Office/Exchange as a service, both of which are the major reasons why MS is a trillion-dollar company on an upswing today. No amount of Satya would save it, if Ballmer didn't beat the internal Microsoft "deep state" into submission on Azure and SaaS first. And a serious beatdown was required before Office and Windows apparatchiks received the message.

Re: Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

#230
post #5

Absolutely nothing about the structural discontent emerging in staff. And nothing about the increasing sense of a loss of claimed ethical stance. I stress claimed, because the lack of concern at the top at its obvious demise makes it less likely it was actually held as a core belief.

Huh? Why would you expect any of that in this letter?

Who is the letter addressed to? If its to shareholders, or staff, or @gmail account holders?

What do you feel they should be saying, when they make public communications?

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