Google's former CEO on why the company was caught off guard by OpenAI

[Comment reused from a sibling submission]

> I’m sorry to be so blunt [...] But the fact of the matter is, if you all leave the university and go found a company, you’re not gonna let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete against the other startups. [0]

Hold up, so stuff like WFH policies are to blame for the company losing its edge and not being head-to-head with "other startups"?

I thought it was because Alphabet Incorporated wasn't directly competing with "startups" was because it was a structurally different kind of company that works in fundamentally different ways because it's publicly traded (GOOG) and employs ~150,000 people! How silly of me!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxDM8io4lUA&t=10m40s

>Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning. And the reason startups work is because people work like hell.

This doesn't work once people have families/lives. You're going to exclude a lot of more experienced people with this mindset.

You want a bunch of 20 somethings to hack a product together cool, but in my 30s I'm not working 70 hour weeks.

I have a dream of creating a 4 day work week company geared towards people who understand time is more important than money. We'd pay less than market, but encourage people to get things done while actually at work.

The modern workplace is outdated. Butt in chair != productivity. An adult who needs to take off at 3 to pick up their kids can be just as effective as someone who sits around making small talk until 6.

That sounds like sour grapes from a CEO that only and very simply got out-played at a CEO's main job of overall strategy. Even every employee working 80 hours a week still couldn't paper over complete CEO strategic failure. He's seriously going to plead that Google didn't have the man hours or resources to win with their PhD head-count and bankroll? Ridiculous.

Google sat on transformers, LaMDA for years before OpenAI. The engineers and researchers did their job. This was a case of complete strategic, i.e., leadership failure because they were more worried about getting sued.

If anything this shows you can have a good work life balance culture and deliver groundbreaking results but get it all fcked up by sht leaders.

Personally I think it's clear that with large bureaucracies personal incentives become disconnected from company outcomes, so instead of fostering innovation you get empire building and politics.

This is patently not true. The root cause of a lot of opportunity misses is lethargic and indecisive management that is focused on promotions and empire-building as opposed to studying technology and making something innovative out of it.

Regardless of WFH, Google VPs and Directors should have been spending time on understanding and capitalizing on opportunities. RTO won't fix that.

Eric Schmidt does not have good insight into anything happening on the factory floor at Google post-2013/2014. I'd take anything he says with a huge grain of salt.

I was at Google march 2011- dec 2018 and when I tried reading Schmidt's "How Google works", I had to put it down coz it was obviously so disconnected from the realities.

I think highly of Eric as a leader, and a smart person, but he has no clue about why Google has struggled to innovate from 2014-2015 onward.

Google settled for the status quo.

After covid, like many other organizations, they went too lean, concentrating on sustainable operations, expecting a tough market.

WFH was an effect of their adopted work-culture and not a phenomenon in itself.

Perhaps because they were too busy enshittifying everything they do so that they could milk more money out the of it ?

Google's former CEO demonstrating again how billionaires are useless and out of touch.