Board is not exactly leadership. They meet infrequently and get updates directly from management, they don't go around asking employees what they're working on
Going into detail in a talk and discussing AGI may have provided crucial context that wasn't obvious from a PowerPoint bullet point, which is all the board may have seen earlier.
Google was so busy milking its search lead it forgot it needed to be outstanding to win consistently in the long term.
As far as I'm concerned, Google's key, meaningful homegrown products are Search, Maps, Gmail and Chrome.
Those products (and everything else they have acquired, including Android) exist for one single purpose: selling ads. Funnily enough, those products have also degraded in quality over time as their ability to sell ads has increased.
Unfortunately for Google, it is hard to imagine a GPT chatbot that is aligned with that One True Objective, so the organization can't help itself. Sure, it's a quote-unquote "tech company", but it's far from nimble. As it scrambles to come up with a response to ChatGPT, it looks more like GE or IBM than it looks like OpenAI. Changing course of such a massive ship is damn near impossible.
I don't think the decisions made by Alphabet today are as engineering-driven as they were in the early days. I'm sure the talent is still there (or was there, pre-pandemic), but maybe it's just not calling the shots.
Google is no different from any other entrenched monopoly. It's hard for the organization to care about anything outside its core revenue enough to put significant weight behind it. How many technologies were passed on by Kodak, AT&T or Xerox in favor of their existing businesses that wound up being wildly financially successful.
The problem isn't Google here. It's how all potential competitors or even just any interesting tech startup is gobbled up by the big 4 (?) and then extinguished. Imagine if companies like IBM had been able to or allowed to do any of what Facebook or Google does to reduce competition.
