The company's market cap stands at around $1.7 trillion, up from just over $400 billion in 2015 when Pichai took the helm. However, 80% of Alphabet's revenue still comes from advertising, and the company has struggled to diversify. This has led to a growing sense that preservation has replaced innovation as Google's chief form of currency. The company has also been criticized for its bureaucracy, with 45% of employees in a 2023 survey saying it was slowing down their work.
Key takeaways:
- Google's new AI model, Gemini 1.5, has been overshadowed by OpenAI's Sora, and the company has faced criticism for racially inaccurate depictions generated by its image tool.
- Despite being described as an AI-first company, Google has struggled to turn its foundational research into impressive products, leading to perceptions of the company becoming stale and boring.
- Google has faced issues with bureaucracy slowing down work, a decline in the quality of its search results, and a lack of successful product launches in the past decade.
- There are concerns that Google's cautious approach to launching new products has allowed rivals to take the lead in areas such as generative AI and voice assistants.