Sundar Pichai has firmly put down an employee rebellion at Google

livemint.com:

It has become clear over the last year that Silicon Valley companies, which could keep Wall Street happy with enormous growth alone, finally had to embrace the real world. This meant layoffs, cost savings and doubling down on profit. It also meant trimming wild moonshot ideas that sounded cool but burnt cash.

And it meant ending the myth that these companies cared about employees bringing their “whole selves" to work. That was the stern message from Alphabet Inc CEO Sundar Pichai’s recent memo to workers, sent amid the latest round of discontent at the company—this time over its $1.2 billion contract (shared with Amazon) to provide cloud services to Israel. At least 50 Google employees have been fired for involvement in protests at its offices.

Pichai’s tone was a stark departure from the company’s old touchy-feely approach to employee activism. Not now. Pichai wrote: “This is too important a moment as a company for us to be distracted." For most of his tenure, Pichai has been described in many quarters as a “peacetime CEO," a highly capable executive steering a ship whose course had already been set by the visionaries who came before him — in his case, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

That changed when OpenAI fired the first salvo in the artificial intelligence wars in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT, beating Google to that breakthrough. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who quickly invested in OpenAI, laid down the battle lines after that, making it clear he thought Google’s business model was now at risk. “They have to defend it all," he said.

With a fight on Alphabet’s hands, the pressure is on the mild-mannered Pichai to get things in order. This hasn’t been going altogether well. The company’s