Arguably one notch worse than that, since he’s effectively asking them to do his job; but without his authority to either adjust incentives to encourage more maintenance and improvement of existing products and less NIH/‘I only do greenfield dev’ emergence of redundant new ones; or, if it comes to it, just knock the heads of a couple of dueling teams together and tell them that we are adopting a coherent strategy now. The CEO has the ability to just call the shot, people lower down the food chain, not so much.
It’s also cute how he puts ‘minimize distractions’ and ‘raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity’ in the same sentence, as though the primary issue for Google’s product lineup is distracted engineers wasting time on reddit rather than actually working; rather than a culture of institutional distraction where more or less focused and productive people work on a stable of products that’s incoherent and gets changed all the time without obvious reason.
