Ol’ Pikachu isn’t remotely capable of addressing the challenges that are heading Google’s way. He isn’t even tough enough to stand up to his own SJW employees:
Google’s employees are openly revolting over the company’s handling of sexual harassment and controversial executives hires like Miles Taylor, the former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff who defended the Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban. Last month, 200 employees in San Francisco protested Google’s various contentious decisions. Shortly after, four of the protesters were fired. Google has denied that the employees were fired for organizing. Now those former employees, dubbed the “Thanksgiving Four” plan to file charges against Google with the National Labor Relations Board.
Meanwhile, Google is investigating its own executives over inappropriate relationships they may have had with subordinates, CNBC first reported last month. That includes Chief Legal Officer David Drummond, who recently married an employee in Google’s legal department and faces a string of damaging allegations from another former employee with whom he had an extramarital affair.
Next, there’s YouTube, which has faced controversy after controversy in recent years, ranging from pedophiles lurking in video comments where underage children appear, to the spread of conspiracy theories about victims of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, last year. (We’d be here all day if I listed every recent YouTube crisis and failure.)
And then there are the dollars and cents. Growth in Google’s core digital advertising business is slowing, and the pressure is mounting for the company to find new areas of expansion. While its cloud and hardware businesses are showing some promise, they still make up a tiny fraction of Google’s overall revenue. At its core, Google is still an advertising company.
But that’s just the internal stuff. Outside the company, nearly every state attorney general in the country is looking into antitrust violations related to Google’s ad business. CNBC reported last month that the probes may expand into Google’s search business as well. The FTC and Department of Justice are also said to be looking at Google’s potential antitrust violations.
With so much scrutiny from regulators and attorneys general, there will almost certainly be some sort of action taken, and Pichai is now the one who has to steer the ship as various government agencies seek to punish his company. Page and Brin picked the perfect time to step down and protect themselves.
It’s informative to see how the founders of the last wave of Silicon Valley giants are all running for the exits as the markets hit a historic peak. The smart money is getting out while it can.