Why Alphabet’s days could be numbered under its new CEO
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/12/5/20995520/alphabet-obsolete-sundar-pichai-ceo-page-brin
Reported today in The Verge.
Why Alphabet's days could be numbered under its new CEO
The Interface is a daily column and newsletter about the intersection of social media and democracy. Subscribe here.
The tech world has gone a long time since a day like Tuesday, where the industry's tectonic plates shifted in a fashion sudden and dramatic enough to send newsrooms into momentary turmoil. Being sent into momentary turmoil is half the fun of being a reporter, of course, and so I didn't even mind when I had to throw out a half-written column about political ads (that hoary old topic again?!) in favor of a send-off for Google's departing co-founders.
Now that we've had a day to consider the implications, it seems striking that there are only two real lines of thinking emerging.
The first is: remind us who Sundar Pichai is, and also can he possibly resolve the many challenges in front of him?
The second is: why does Alphabet exist again?
Let's take them in order.
Sundar Pichai is the 47-year-old CEO of Google, and as of yesterday, the CEO of its parent company, Alphabet. He comes from humble beginnings, as Mat Honan captured beautifully in this profile from a few years back. Pichai joined the company in 2004 and ran Chrome and Android before being named CEO in 2015. He attended the 2013 Google holiday party while still a Chrome executive and was very nice to me personally, which is consistent with virtually all other reports of his behavior.
Pichai also has a lot on his mind, as my colleague Dieter Bohn points out:
His most important job lies within Google still, and it's not just cleaning up the effects of Google's culture on its products. Instead, it's stabilizing the culture itself. After that, it's navigating the new world of regulation, antitrust, the techla