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Comment by throwaway5959 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine running a company that's making billions of dollars a quarter and all you and your CFO can offer in terms of growing revenue/profits is laying people off and cutting back on paperclips. Must be nice to have that kind of job security.

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Of all the FAANGs Alphabet is the most mismanaged now. He either needs to wake up or go the way of Steve Ballmer. The unfortunate disease is that some share holders only care about continued short term profits.

He needs to get fired. The job of a CEO is to steady the ship during temporary economic anomalies. The inability to see life and policy under Covid as such an anomaly and to get misled into a hiring binge demonstrates shocking incompetence.

2019 Net Income - $36B

2022 Net Income - $60B

Yeah the number of people who seem to forget that Google is among the most profitable companies on the planet both in absolute numbers and in terms of margin is wild.

Yes, Google's revenue and income growth rates aren't stratospheric like they used to be. It seems to have more competition for core products than in the past. But like, it makes an absolute shitload of money.

For now!

People have been saying this for years. Maybe it'll happen and Sundar will go down in history as a disaster, but its not there yet.

I don't think he will be a disaster, steve ballmer wasn't . The concern is it will be mediocre. Profits but just enough to make investors happy in the short term. You can be very profitable and not be #1 or a leader.

And keep in mind, google's winning strategy has been to overhire and drain the talent pool from its competition. Laying off people to follow a trend is utter incompetence when those people are your ultimate winning strategy.

You're proving my point. MS was profitable under ballmer as well but lost many competitions. It could have been many times more profitable than apple.

Your point is purely speculation. This is a 65% increase in profit in 4 years for a ~20 year old company. The reason I think Pichai sucks is because he's firing people while profit is $60B.

MS was making a lot if profit too when it tanked several products trying to catchup with market leaders. Google has been a leader but it isn't just openai that has it playing catchup that just happens to affect it's core business.

Don't forget the real estate binge.. even as more and more people were WFH'ing.

Haha he might just be dropping random hints so that people stay on their toes. Pretty dumb, but then again so is the hire->months->fire cycle in the first place.

Negative manipulation tactics at scale

In past life Sundar owned a cow farm, and was very good at it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Sundar is forced to step down, his tenure at Google wasn’t that great

I try to remember what great product did Google release since he took over.

I fail to find one. Except milking the YouTube and Google search/ads cows that now are increasingly unbearable.

YouTube is worse than cable tv with ads every couple of minutes. Google search is polluted with seo optimized results. Ads are pushing plain scam companies without any due diligence.

So yes he increased the revenues, by putting the system in overdrive, but failed to release the next big thing. And now that the cash cows are running out of steam I am not sure where Google is going.

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