Comment by addicted

Nadella is as much of an MBA type as Pichai. Their education and career paths are incredibly similar.

The difference is Nadella is a good CEO and Pichai isn’t.

Part of it could also be a result of circumstance. Nadella came at a time when MS was foundering and he had to make what appeared to be fairly obvious decisions (pivot to cloud…he was literally picked because of this, and reducing dependence on Windows…which was an obvious necessary step for the pivot to cloud). Pichai OTOH was selected to run Google when it was already doing pretty well. His biggest mandate was likely to not upset the Apple cart.

If roles were reversed, I suspect Nadella would still have been more successful than Pichai, but you never know. I’d Nadella introduction to the CEO job was to keep things going as they were, and Pichai’s was to change the entire direction of the company, maybe a decade later Pichai would have been the aggressive decision maker whereas Nadella would have been the overly cautious guy making canned demos.