Google’s Leadership Change: Passing the Baton, or the Buck?
There’s a new sheriff in town at Alphabet/Google. This week, both Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped down from their roles and relinquished formal control of Alphabet/Google (A/G) to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who, like the founders themselves, is yet another engineer in the C-Suite.
Here’s the announcement on the Google blog. Not that Pichai wasn’t a good choice. As The Verge reported, “Pichai has gone on to grow Google into an even larger facet of daily online life, overseeing the launch of the Pixel brand and Google’s other hardware efforts in addition to the company’s immense investments in artificial intelligence and cloud computing.”
While the Google founders had stepped out of the limelight a while back, they couldn’t have chosen a better time to make it official. Noted AP, “Google has been facing pressure from privacy advocates over its collection and use of personal information to target advertising. It also faces allegations that it abuses its dominance in search and online advertising to push out rivals.”
But wait! There’s more! A lot more! According to CNBC, “In the last few months, U.S. and foreign antitrust regulators have increasingly scrutinized Google, naming Pichai along the way. The Department of Justice announced last quarter that it is opening a broad antitrust review of big tech companies including Google, while the DOJ launched a separate antitrust probe into Google. A potential DOJ case, backed by nearly 50 state attorneys general, multiplies that challenge.”
With Pichai, things are definitely changing at A/G. The behemoth had traditionally been a so-called ‘open’ company, holding weekly all-hands meetings with employees and was sensitive to employees’ concerns. As CNBC reported, “Over the summer, the company dropped a partnership with the Pentagon called Project Maven after employees protested its use for surveillance tools to analyze drone footage. Then, in October, Google dropped out of the competition for a different Pentagon cloud computing contract that could be worth $10 billion, saying the contract could conflict with its values. Employees also protested the company’s plans to build a censored search tool called Project Dragonfly, which resulted in the company scrapping those plans to reenter the Chinese market.”
Pichai was also the one who fired James Damore for his memo about why men are naturally better at computers than women. Over Thanksgiving, four worker-activists were fired by Google to quash them from organizing a union, which is in violation of federal labor laws (they are filing a federal lawsuit – how many lawsuits/inquiries does that make now, A/G?).
The weekly all-hands meetings have been suspended. As the Thanksgiving Four put it, ‘Google is no longer listening.’
Pichai will be facing Congressional inquiries again, and like Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, he’s adept at lying to Congress, as he did when the body was investigating Google’s censorship practices, “maintain(ing) a manually controlled blacklist against conservative websites that determines how and where their content appears in search results.” For the naysayers, the Wall Street Journal investigated How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results, reporting that “Despite publicly denying doing so, Google keeps blacklists to remove certain sites or prevent others from surfacing in certain types of results. These moves are separate from those that block sites as required by U.S. or foreign law.” Et a lot more al. Google also censors natural/holistic health news, and wonder if it has anything to do with their advertisers/pharma interests. And their purchase of FitBit, which is their first foray into wearables – and yet another avenue for tracking users.
So, a good time for Larry and Sergey to ‘officially’ turn the reigns over to Pinchai and seemingly walk away un-besmirched by the coming firestorms. Not sure if they’ve left him in the top spot or the hot seat. And note to self: they’re still majority shareholders (Page holds..26.1% of its voting power. Brin holds…25.2% of the voting power. Their total combined worth, according to The Verge: over $100B), and as they themselves noted in their departing memo, Google just turned 21. The company has literally come of age. The ostrich trick won’t work any longer, boys. Many of the alleged violations A/G committed happened on the two founders’ watch. They may be able to avoid the spotlight, but they won’t be able to bury their heads in the sand. While A/G has been able to seemingly hide behind the algorithm for quite some time now, at 21, they can officially no longer be considered youthful offenders, by any stretch of the imagination.
Turning a deaf ear to employees may not have been the wisest move at this juncture. With a whole different landscape having been created at A/G, employees not drinking the Kool-Aid as they once did. Given the number of leaks we’ve been seeing of late, careful there: Google, more than anyone, should know that search (sic) and ye shall find. Onward and forward.