Long weekend here in the USA; not sure how many will read this, so will keep this one short.
Last week I wrote a post about my belief that any vision of Perplexity becoming the next Google is entirely misleading. Since then Google once again made a huge public blunder with its AI-assisted search. Examples are all over the web now - from glue in pizza to misleading statements about ideal temperature for cooking a chicken.
Examples are all over the web now - from glue in pizza to misleading statements about ideal temperature for cooking a chicken.
So is Google done? Should I take my words back?
The short answer is “No”. What Google is going through is a clear lack of product leadership. Anyone who has ever ran a great engineering team knows the feeling. A great engineer coupled with a great product leader is magic. Remove product leadership and I don’t care if you quadruple engineering, the team just won’t build anything good. They will be focused on the process - ultimately shipping something that is not for consumption. This is what Google is going through.
But there is actually a solution to such engineering problems: customers. Within limits, it is possible to avoid the need for strong product leadership by just putting the product in front of customers. From my experience, this won’t give engineers PMF-level feedback, but it will get them to dial down issues in architecture and AI. And basically this is what’s happening now with Google - on unprecedented scale.
Soon we will learn that Google does not need to innovate in the search, because they can just put the product in front of 10 million people, and watch feedback on twitter accumulate. Sensible strategy? Not really. Is it absolutely destroying my trust in Google’s talent pedigree? Yes - probably would not hire anyone directly from Google again. But will they recover? In search, yes!
Meanwhile, something else is happening. Devin AI is all about kissing up to Redmond’s executives like never before, and people are starting to make a bet that there is a strategy behind the scenes to execute a quick flip of Cognition to Microsoft.
If so, it would be a first in Satya Narayana’s awesome streak (LinkedIn, Github, OpenAI…). Anything is possible, of course. The last 4 years have shown is that we live in the upside-down times.
But what would actually make much more sense: Satya acquiring Perplexity.
Perplexity → MSFT
People nowadays have a very short memory, so it is easy to forget what exactly makes Google, Google. People tend to forget that in the late 90s the were many search engines. That it wasn’t clear that Google would win on just search itself. Yes, it had that thing called “PageRank”, but by early 2000s, that was neither the differentiator nor the core of its technical IP. Arguably, by the early 2000s the bigger things were: massive self-hosted server locations and brand. But, of course, the biggest differentiator of all: Adwords.
Will Perplexity discover its own version of Adwords? Dunno. This is not 2000. Ads are much more lucrative in social media than in direct search. And it is not even clear how receptive people will be to ads in AI-powered search. Also unclear how any paid model would be executed in the face of all the easy wrappers on top of ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, MSFT has all the ways to monetize search and actually has a pretty good mass-scale brand to go with it. Not saying this is a clear thing. Valuation expectations might make the whole thing impossible. Yet, this is actually what would make things very interesting, and would probably get me to become a loyal Perplexity/Bing user.
Have a good weekend! And, as always, let me know what you think..
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Perplexity is the next great buy for MSFT (not Cognition's Devin AI...)
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Long weekend here in the USA; not sure how many will read this, so will keep this one short.
Last week I wrote a post about my belief that any vision of Perplexity becoming the next Google is entirely misleading. Since then Google once again made a huge public blunder with its AI-assisted search. Examples are all over the web now - from glue in pizza to misleading statements about ideal temperature for cooking a chicken.
Examples are all over the web now - from glue in pizza to misleading statements about ideal temperature for cooking a chicken.
So is Google done? Should I take my words back?
The short answer is “No”. What Google is going through is a clear lack of product leadership. Anyone who has ever ran a great engineering team knows the feeling. A great engineer coupled with a great product leader is magic. Remove product leadership and I don’t care if you quadruple engineering, the team just won’t build anything good. They will be focused on the process - ultimately shipping something that is not for consumption. This is what Google is going through.
But there is actually a solution to such engineering problems: customers. Within limits, it is possible to avoid the need for strong product leadership by just putting the product in front of customers. From my experience, this won’t give engineers PMF-level feedback, but it will get them to dial down issues in architecture and AI. And basically this is what’s happening now with Google - on unprecedented scale.
Soon we will learn that Google does not need to innovate in the search, because they can just put the product in front of 10 million people, and watch feedback on twitter accumulate. Sensible strategy? Not really. Is it absolutely destroying my trust in Google’s talent pedigree? Yes - probably would not hire anyone directly from Google again. But will they recover? In search, yes!
Meanwhile, something else is happening. Devin AI is all about kissing up to Redmond’s executives like never before, and people are starting to make a bet that there is a strategy behind the scenes to execute a quick flip of Cognition to Microsoft.
If so, it would be a first in Satya Narayana’s awesome streak (LinkedIn, Github, OpenAI…). Anything is possible, of course. The last 4 years have shown is that we live in the upside-down times.
But what would actually make much more sense: Satya acquiring Perplexity.
Perplexity → MSFT
People nowadays have a very short memory, so it is easy to forget what exactly makes Google, Google. People tend to forget that in the late 90s the were many search engines. That it wasn’t clear that Google would win on just search itself. Yes, it had that thing called “PageRank”, but by early 2000s, that was neither the differentiator nor the core of its technical IP. Arguably, by the early 2000s the bigger things were: massive self-hosted server locations and brand. But, of course, the biggest differentiator of all: Adwords.
Will Perplexity discover its own version of Adwords? Dunno. This is not 2000. Ads are much more lucrative in social media than in direct search. And it is not even clear how receptive people will be to ads in AI-powered search. Also unclear how any paid model would be executed in the face of all the easy wrappers on top of ChatGPT.
Meanwhile, MSFT has all the ways to monetize search and actually has a pretty good mass-scale brand to go with it. Not saying this is a clear thing. Valuation expectations might make the whole thing impossible. Yet, this is actually what would make things very interesting, and would probably get me to become a loyal Perplexity/Bing user.
Have a good weekend! And, as always, let me know what you think..