He was elevated to CEO of Google to keep things running as-is while the founders moved their exciting ventures up to Alphabet. When those other bets were abandoned, Sundar was left as the top engaged executive, but he's still only a caretaker when the company needs an actual leader with vision to navigate their competition.
So, no. He has not been a good CEO. He was a good middle-manager and a decent CEO at best, but he's not been what the company needed, and he's definitely not what they need today.
Leadership with actual visions is a rarity these days across the board. It's not just large companies who are getting their lunch eaten by startups left and right (cough Oracle), but also politics. Most people in high positions want the fame associated with the title (and for companies, the compensation), but not provide leadership beyond managing the status quo - and to make it worse, both shareholders and voters seem to prefer stability over progress.
He has brought no innovation and his fearfulness has ground Google down to a halt. What new successful products has arrived during his tenure? All he did was not fuck up.
He's lucky because the entire market has increased, but that's his doing. He could be replaced by any overly cautious algorithm and the results would have been the same.
Before he was CEO he led the Chrome, ChromeOS/Chromebook, Google Drive projects.
What is interesting though, according to Wikipedia, is that he is not a software engineer nor a computer scientist by training. He is a materials scientist with an MBA and apparently briefly worked at McKinsey.
Does this limit his tech vision? Hard to say.
Satya Nadella however has a Master's in Computer Science + an MBA comparatively.
Going to have to disagree with you on this. AirPods and the Apple Watch both came out under his watch. But the biggest area of expansion for Apple is going to be in software which has seen a ton of innovation in the past decade (Cloud services, payments and a whole slew of improvements to the OS) which all happened under Cook's watch.
Well he sat at the helm of a very powerful company during one of the largest and longest bull markets in history. Beyond being at the right place at the right time - did he do a good job?
I would say that he is thoroughly mediocre. I don't get the sense that he is very strong as a technically oriented leader or as a product oriented leader. He seems more of a political/consensus leader who is trying to keep the peace without any principle other than 'be respectful'. You can see the problems growing. Costs grow faster than revenue and irrelevant projects drag on, while nobody is providing a clear vision about why anyone should care and why these product are going to be the best. Google does fine without too much leadership so maybe this isn't the worst. That said I think he would be remembered more positively if he were to be fired in the next 6 months.
Stadia was a massive lost opportunity, they had no unique games (i.e. using server-side co-locality for multiplayer, etc.) nor a decent subscription to compete with MS Games Pass.
I feel like there is no vision for the future of Android there except chasing the iPhone. In the early part of the last decade, Android had its own identity which was part of the reason I used it. When it lost that, I moved to iPhone.
It doesn't seem like a good thing for Google in that they are trying to sell Pixel phones at iPhone level prices without having the fit and finish, battery life, or app ecosystem that iOS has.
Yes, these are unironically extremely difficult skills which were critical for a Google CEO over the last 10 years. Maybe the next 10 years will be different though.
