Comment by modeless

Waymo and DeepMind and the TPU program all predate Sundar as CEO.

IMO Google should have invested more in Waymo and scaled sooner. Instead they partnered with traditional automakers and rideshare companies, sought outside investment, and prioritized a prestige launch in SF over expanding as fast as possible in easier markets.

In other areas they utterly wasted huge initial investments in AR/VR and robotics, remain behind in cloud, and Google X has been a parade of boondoggles (excluding Waymo which, again, predates Sundar and even X itself).

You could also argue that they fumbled AI, literally inventing the transformer architecture but failing at building products. Gemini 2.5 Pro is good, but they started out many years ahead and lost their lead.