shacrw

Not harsh at all. I follow Google very closely. At one point literally 5-10 consecutive speeches/ keynotes/ interviews by Pichai over a period of 3 years appeared to be the same charismaless, PR written statements. It's fine if it's the same thing (in case you want to articulate a particular vision), the problem is it's dull, boring, no vision at all. Pichai is hailed as a great PM for stuff like Chrome etc.

But I don't see what he has brought to the table as the CEO. I feel like Google has a lot of great engineers who've stuck around for 15-20 years, that's their core asset, but they need more direction, vision, strategy. Apple has a solid team of designers and product people who've stuck around for decades. Google needs more product people or more importantly a strong directive from the top (Pichai) to dominate in an area like hardware, AR.

Like one thing which I am especially baffled by is Google's lack of action in the AR space. Meanwhile, Apple's been ramping up small acquistions over the past 3-4 years to assemble solid talent,IP. It's going to take a lot of time for Google to catch up in AR.

Google has no brand sense left. This is an app used by so many kids, who love it, and they are shutting it down. Instead they shouldn't have launched it. I understand user studies, but this makes no sense. And no matter how they brand it ( they literally opened a new division Area 120) which speacializes in killing products. lol), this is BS.

Where's the product strategy? vision? If they wanted to study the demand and then move it Assistant eventually, then they should've launched it on the Assistant in the first place.

The mass userbase of the native app doesn't validate whether people will find the assistant experience frictionless.

Anyways, i am just spitballing (maybe this time they have a strategy!), but one thing is quite clear that they're actively destroying brand value across demographics.

I love google products so this is kind of frustrating. I've been wondering for past 2-3 years whether they even realise how brand image damage stuff like this causes?

Also, I am just a college student and I'd love to know from SV folks if you think that apart from the old Google products, their is lack of vision in new products? lack of vision in new PMs? Is Google not able to attract good talent anymore in terms of Product Strategy, Mgmt, Branding? Is it deteriorating? I've always felt that Google is terrible at perception management.

Happy to be corrected in case something above didn't make sense :)

Your email input box might need some tweaks. I entered my email and had a space after it ( i actually used a text expander to quickly input it resulting in the extra space), it showed "Invalid Email"

Then, I obviously removed the space and got the login link, BUT others might get confused leading to unwanted churn ( in case they also put an extra space)

"Stupefy by Spotify as a Service" : a mentorship service to protect those who get stupefied by spotify

The above China concern is legit but a lot of the issues in the above links have been fixed in the updates ~2 months back.

curious to know, what's the term which people in the infosec community use then? pen-tester? cybersecurity researcher?