Google Executive Turnover and Role Changes Come as the Company Searches for New Identity

Key members of Google's old guard have been shifting roles or leaving the company as it searches for its new identity. From a report: The changes encompass high-profile executives such as finance chief Ruth Porat, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and employee No. 8, Urs Holzle, among others. Some say they have left their roles for a new challenge and others have left to seek opportunities in artificial intelligence. In February, Wojcicki -- one of the most prominent women in Silicon Valley -- announced that she was stepping back after nine years at the helm of the Google-owned platform that grew to be the world's most popular video service. She had been at Google for more than 25 years, after famously lending her garage to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to use as their first office.

While she'll still be in an advisory role at Google, she said she wanted to "start a new chapter." Wojcicki wasn't the only executive to leave YouTube. Robert Kyncl, the chief business officer for 12 years, stepped away to become CEO of Warner Music Group at the beginning of the year. In March, CapitalG founder and longtime Google employee David Lawee stepped down from his role after 17 years at Alphabet, saying he wanted to explore new areas of interest and spend more time with his family

New identity. How about..

[strUser_Name]

.."don't be evil"?

Re:"Don't be evil"

[Tablizer]

Suits just can't resist the urge. The honest ones are filtered out, as "overly frank" people are not welcomed up the ladder.

Plus, their competitors are evil, so it doesn't at face value appear to be a business hinderance.

Part of the problem is that Google can't decide if it wants to be an infrastructure company or a move-fast-and-break-things company. These are pretty much mutually exclusive, as orgs don't want their infrastructure randomly changing. Those good at managing infrastructure are probably not go

Re:"Don't be evil"

[Opportunist]

C-Levels favor psychopaths. Because if you stop to ponder whether it's right to do something, someone who doesn't even know why he should think that has already done it.

Re:

[geekmux]

C-Levels favor psychopaths. Because if you stop to ponder whether it's right to do something, someone who doesn't even know why he should think that has already done it.

And that kids, is why you can bet on a market crash or seven in your lifetime.

Aren't psychopaths just awesome? And just think, the worst of them are now Too Big To Fail. Ever.

Re:

[Opportunist]

The bankers that caused the Black Friday at least had the decency to kill themselves.

Re:

[Tablizer]

So it's corporate ladder Evilution: Survival of the Pathiest.

Re:

[sjames]

That and Google's habit of sending things off to the Island of Misfit Toys after a few years.

Re:

[Voyager529]

That and Google's habit of sending things off to the Island of Misfit Toys after a few years.

...which would be far more palatable if they released source code to those things and let a community take up the mantle if desired. Instead, things rot, and people get skittish about trying the new thing because Google wants the data and makes no indication of what will happen to that data if the service goes pear-shaped. The dance of "we're discontinuing the service within 90 days; here's a ZIP file containing an SQL dump of your records" gets old the first time you dance to it, by the third, it's basica

Re:

[phantomfive]

Google wants the data and makes no indication of what will happen to that data if the service goes pear-shaped.

That's what happened with Google plus. Facebook was telling advertisers they could tell you the name, age and gender of ever person. Google really wanted to be able to do that, too. Once they got the data, they didn't care about Google+ anymore.

Re:

[splitstem]

Google is a Day 2 company trying to masquerade as a Day 1 company., GCP would have a lot more people using it, if Google didn't have the reputation for abruptly killing projects. If Google kills GCP suddenly, it means businesses have to rebuild their infrastructure from scratch and pay companies to make some API translator to use Azure or AWS.

Overall, Google is an advertising/data harvesting company. They should consider doing what it takes to get unbanned in China, if they want any type of financial gro

Re:

[sconeu]

Google can't decide if it wants to be an infrastructure company or a move-fast-and-break-things company.

They're neither. When I interviewed there, I was told flat-out that they were an advertising company. Period.

Re:

[ceoyoyo]

Interesting. I thought they were still trying to hide it.

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[larryjoe]

Google can't decide if it wants to be an infrastructure company or a move-fast-and-break-things company

Google is an ad company. It wants to be other things, but it just dabbles. So, it's just an ad company, a really huge, very profitable ad company.

Wojcicki finally got fed up and left

[93 Escort Wagon]

She's been asking Page and Brin to get their crap out of her garage for the past twenty-five years!

New identity?

[Opportunist]

Well, it depends... what does it identify as now?

Re:

[Opportunist]

That wasn't even funny the first time I saw it, about a decade ago.

I mean, if you at least said "I identify as a Desert Eagle and I feel triggered", that would at least get close to something akin to comedy.

Re:

[buck-yar]

I still laughed at the attack helicopter line. It conveys just the right message.

Re:

[Opportunist]

It doesn't. It's just plain unfunny because nobody would actually claim anything even related to it. There isn't even a double entendre to it like with the Desert Eagle one (one being an animal, one being a gun with a notoriety of being hard to handle and fickle, and the double meaning of the word "triggered" in this particular context).

The attack helicopter is just ... blunt. Unrefined. Bland. Not even close to funny.

Officially Chaning Motto

[theshowmecanuck]

They will finally formalize on "Do Evil and Invade Privacy" to match their business practices.

Re:

[denny_deluxe]

I just assumed they'd replace that slogan with a villain laugh. Google: Moo Hoo Haa Haa Haa (TM).

Re:

[theshowmecanuck]

lol

Worry if/when Brin and Page "step back"

[alispguru]

Their presence is the only thing keeping Google(*) from going all the way down to Facebook's(*) level.

For those of you who think they're equally bad, consider that Google at least has two major products that could exist with minimal dependence on advertising - search and email.

If Google were broken up, with advertising separated from search and email, all the pieces would survive - search and mail could openly sell ad space, and advertising would have less opportunity to be a privacy rapist.

If Facebook were broken up along similar lines, the social part would hopefully be seen as the net-negative privacy suck that it is.

(*) Yes, Alphabet/Meta - we know what we're really talking about here.

Re:

[TheReaperD]

Agreed, this is the Wall Street MBAs wanting the old guard out so they can 'maximize returns on their investment' which these people are stopping due to things like 'customer satisfaction' and 'ethics' (a truly hated word in MBA world). Certain people have stopped them up till now, but they are no longer a problem. So now, it's time to clean house and turn this company into the money-printing machine it was mean to be! (Complete fantasy they'll ride until they drive the company into the ground.)

Semi-Retiring

[brunes69]

All of these people would be worth well north of $100M

If you were worth that much, and had been working at the same company for 15-20 years, wouldn't you also want to explore other things in life?

When did they go off the rails?

[end rant]

At the beginning, it seemed as though Google was an altruistic company willing to benefit its' users without expecting any significant personal gain. This mentality attracted many intelligent software engineers who believed in "saving the world" and "don't be evil" through the use of technology. At first, employees were willing to forgo many of the high salaries and dot-com perks being offered in the market for a chance to innovate (i.e. 25% of your time could be used for personal projects) and freedom from micro-management and corporate politics. Once Google started to scale, they didn't filter out the "opportunists" in the hiring process who took advantage of Google's reputation as a way to advance their careers and enjoy the perks for personal gain. These people were often pursuing their own interests without much consideration for the greater good of the user base. This is why I believe the "don't be evil" was dropped from the Code of Conduct mission statement and why we haven't seen any innovation from Google for years.

Re:

[Dan667]

once a company gets large enough often fiefdoms start cropping up. Once that starts happening then VPs and directors often start fighting each other for power. It takes strong leadership to continuously squash that and drive those people out of the company. I'm surprised google was able to do that as long as they did. Now they are just eating themselves like all the rest of the old tech companies are are starting to go the way of motorola and hp. Even if they understood they are driving the company int

I think we all know

[Anonymous Cward]

When they started filtering content resembling that which they put out themselves only a handful of years prior, that is when they started going downhill. Google at one point used video advertising featuring very brief clips of mass demonstrations, among other things, to illustrate how their services would help provide freedom to the oppressed.

These days, they are the one service you can reliably trust to screw you over at the behest of any government, legitimately elected or not.

Wait, I know!

[denny_deluxe]

Google has so many smart folks working for it and so much funding, maybe they could do something super useful to humanity! They could always revolutionize internet search engines! I mean, there used to be a really good one, but it was turned to shit by... oh.

The original article buried the lede!

[Peter in Rain City]

"[Google is] also staring down multiple federal lawsuits, including an imminent antitrust trial set to begin in September that alleges Google illegally maintained a monopoly by cutting off rivals from search distribution channels."

giant tar pit

[Walt Dismal]

Google is a giant bureaucracy now. They don't have a 'Human Resources' department, they have a 'People Operations' division.

Now a story. Recently I got an AI contractor job inquiry through an agency, and it had a link to a Google-mandated assessment test as the first screening stage. So I went to the link to take the test. In the link destination, I found 8 errors in the mandatory rules, making it impossible to do the test. When agency's Indian recruiter failed to respond to me I went to go tell Google why

What "new" identity?

[gweihir]

"Be evil, just not too openly" has been their motto for years. Also make as much money as possible and who cares about others?