Sundar is just a poor fit for a top leadership role in an innovative and growing company. He comes across as a timid people pleaser, not a commander. It always felt like someone else was really in charge, like the company was actually being run by his reports managing up.
Stock was juiced by cheap money, cultural zeitgeist for magical mobile phone tech. Macro economic trends have nothing to do with Sundar.
Google is >20 years old and lacks history of diverse innovation and generational buy in of a company like IBM (I don’t feel IBM is relevant to tech anymore, but for many nostalgia seems to lead them to believe it is central to big tech economics).
Google may very well be entering a protracted death spiral. Without diversifying I doubt it will ever endear itself on people for 80+ more years the way IBM was able to[1].
IMO generational churn and new technologies are going to wipe out a whole lot of 2000s technology software-dev specific companies. Facebook and Google are my picks for biggest brands whose success is coupled to 2000s tech fetish explosion that may not exist in 10-15 years. Everything about tech corp is just straitjacketed “line go up” memes.
[1] (given the lack of competition IBM faced; government up and donated transistor technology to IBM to move them off vacuum tubes; IBMs history of success is a propaganda fueled mirage. It’s been propped up many times to serve the state)
I've actually met one of his high school friends once. He made a really interesting comment about Ballmer: He was the only guy who was on both the football team and the math club. In fact at Harvard, he was the manager of the football team and got a degree in applied mathematics. He was a nerd who was also really athletic or vice versa. Oh and he's a first generation college graduate. Maybe he wasn't the best CEO for Microsoft but he's still a really impressive guy on a personal level.
I think that's a rather low bar. Coming off of IE6, any browser that is advertised on the front page of Google just needs to not suck to be successful.
Feel in a few years he's gonna have a worse reputation than Ballmer in terms of squandering potential.