Comment by bhawks

The author is going for an easy narrative (Gomes good / Prabhakar bad) but that is not reality.

The Search PA had numerous efforts in the air beyond the search results page (SRP) that were consuming eng resources, exec attention and cannibalizing SRP traffic. Assistant was probably the biggest but there were others as well. Why does this matter? Well Google IS the SRP for most users and most of the alternatives (especially assistant) had no clear monetization endgame. To top it off the core platform and infrastructure underneath most of the search/assistant products were legacy dungeons that was poorly invested in and in desperate need of accountable leadership.

Prabhakar was right to call out that things were not going well in Search and Gomes was right that Ads and Search orgs were working from two vastly different perspectives. It is nostalgic to say that 'there was a reason the founders kept ads and search separate' but that statement was made when google was ridiculously smaller and you could rely on both sides having a rough idea of the direction to push forward to. By 2019 the orgs were huge and there were clear gaps that cross functional leadership had failed to fill.

Having worked for both leaders they had tremendous strengths and were trying to do things right despite their blindspots. I don't think any person would have done much better and when I left Google one of the big reasons was the company had grown beyond the abilities for it to be managed efficiently.