Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 637 posts

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

#241

Post by tehlike »

jm4 wrote: post #222
option wrote: 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?

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.

Google would be lucky if sundar was ballmer.

Ballmer doesnt get enough credit for pivoting msft into enterprise...

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

#242

Post by sharkweek »

jm4 wrote: post #222
option wrote: 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?

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.

I cannot believe the transition Microsoft has pulled off.

Living in Seattle, a notable % of my social circle was at Amazon for the last decade, but more and more are heading across the lake as MSFT reshapes itself.

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

#243

Post by hunteram »

jm4 wrote: post #222
option wrote: 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?

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.

I agree with your statement, but I'd say that at least Google has been advancing their machine learning/AI front under Sundar. But that's about it. You can clearly pinpoint the moment Google started going downhill the moment he took over, whether this has been the result of his leadership or due to the Alphabet restructuring, I don't know.

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

#244

Post by lonelappde »

nostromo wrote: post #221
footpath wrote: post #84

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.

Page and Brin have been out of the big picture for a long time.

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

#245

Post by H8crilA »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #205

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.

There's really no need for corpspeak here.

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

#246

Post by tyingq »

nostrademons wrote: post #182
organsnyder wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the outside, it feels much more like the company is hitting a midlife crisis (feeling unsettled, not as agile as they used to be) than a young adult.

Company lifespans these days are a lot shorter than human lifespans. 25-40 years seems typical, making a company-year 2-3x a human year. By that yardstick, Google was in its young adolescence when it IPO'd (seems reasonable), was an idealistic young adult when I joined in 2009 (also reasonable), is now hitting a midlife crisis, and will die sometime around 2040.

Ignoring the lifespan, they are pretty stodgy and conservative now, so middle-aged just seems a better fit.

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

#247

Post by gerdesj »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #108

Weirdly this feels like a non-issue. Google has not felt like it has a "personality" for some time - maybe it's a function of hitting mega-corporate size, but it also feels a bit like when Microsoft (a Computer on every Desktop) essentially achieved its goal, it then spent a decade in "goalless and soulless exploitation" mode - something that one suspects is the next step for the worlds largest personality-free platf…

"Weirdly this feels like a non-issue"

It is.

That page is awful with a hood that keeps flapping around up and down and text that is trying to be true to italics for quotes instead of lots of diacritics and ends up looking badly diseased. Then the letter sidesteps into a memo, which is equally odd and awkward. It's all a bit odd.

S and B (in my very opinionated ... opinion) did create a great thing in Google. I can't fault people trying to make a living and running with the ball to the point where the playing field is not just paved with gold but it nearly redefines what the concept of gold is.

I think they should have retired before "do no evil" was ditched. That would have cemented their status as internet demi-gods. Instead I think their legacy will be

wierdos whot spy on you

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

#248

Post by Spooky23 »

m0zg wrote: post #225
hosh wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Totally agreed. Many places don’t even run their AWS environments particularly well, but talk themselves into a most of their own making.

AWS is just another IT vendor. The weird dependency, reminiscent of 1980s IBM thinking, is bad for any company, at some point you become more of a vassal than a customer.

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

#249

Post by o-__-o »

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 wrote: post #157
lacker wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is the announcement that Page and Brin are stepping down. I wouldn't really call it "incredibly subtle" - most similar announcements are wrapped in a bunch of corporate language as well. This is a pretty standard way to announce this sort of thing.

I guess I just don't believe this. Google is one of the largest and most powerful companies in the world. Having both people step down like this is incredibly strange. I mean, neither of them even tried the ol' "I'm stepping down to spend time with my family" thing.

This has been well known for sometime now[0], it was a matter of when..

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/13/alphabets-larry-page-has-lar...

Post reply on HN