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Comment by Laremere | Hacker News Reader

I'm racking my brain trying to remember where I heard it, but I've heard it roughly summarized as: Companies are founded by people who are loyal to a vision, but tend to promote people who are loyal to the company. Eventually the people who are loyal to the company have all of the power. The people loyal to the vision are only left in the lower ranks, if at all.

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"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy"

He said it first, but I think your paraphrase is at least as good as the original formulation.

At least people who are loyal to the company care about the long term viability of the company. I think Cook, Nadella and Jassy (my skip*7 manager) care about the company. I don’t know what the hell Pichai cares about.

Google has the focus and the vision of a crack addled flea.

Google was organized such that the founder didn't have to do much, but that also means that the CEO doesn't have much power to run things so Pichai would need to rebuild the whole company to start to change how things are run.

This is the reason why Google can launch so many products, but also why they can cancel so many products: there is no person holding the reins and instead middle managers just go off and do their own thing. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook all have a clear power center created by the founders, Google doesn't have that which is why they are so much more unpredictable.

Unpredictability and no consolidated central authority can be good. Prevents stagnation.

It can also mean rampant unchecked spending and a plethora of dead projects resulting in a tarnished reputation.

It can also mean introducing three incompatible messaging apps in one year.

It seems like the best model of Sundar Pichai's behavior is someone who myopically cares about his own career. He puts most of his effort into looking smart and avoiding offending people.

Honestly, Ruth Porat seems to run most of the impactful decisions at the C-level, and that's a good thing.

What impactful product has Google introduced in the last 10 years?

I see no real conflict between "making impactful decisions" and "not introducing any new products of any kind".

Marc Andreessen said something very similar on a podcast with Sam Harris: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/290...

This rings a bell for me too... have you read Developer Hegemony? It reminds me of that book.

Amen to that.

I am living that particular dream (nightmare) as are a handful of us 'vision loyalists'.

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