The things is I never read about any major decisions Sundar Pichai has made. There's tons online about Tim Cook, Satya, Netflix's various SLs, Daniel Ek, Elon Musk (admittedly more about his tweets than business strat these days) etc. But I never read about Sunder Pichai's strategies or decisions. What is he actually doing?
What's the incentive to do anything at that level? He's going to walk away after 5-10 years with OOM a billion dollars regardless of how anything he does or doesn't do pans out for Google. Why not just play the quiet card and pin anything that happens to the fiefdom lords who now have free reign and no oversight?
If good things happen, he gets credit for delegating well. If bad things happen, it's their fault. But if he loudly tries something different and it fails, the failure is more likely to get pinned on him. And again, he's already going to walk away with a billion regardless, so "financial upside" as a motivator for success is largely an illusion.
He's a "just gotta keep my nose clean and get out with a middling reputation and a shitload of money" CEO.
My sense is that people who think like this don't make it this high up. Sundar has already had opportunities to sell out much earlier; Money stopped becoming a problem for him long ago.
Now that I think about it, I'm really curious as well. I didn't work in Cloud, but my perception is TK is really reshaping GCP as well as the Gsuite to whatever it is now.
Sundar's role seems to really be give his lieutenants free reign which I guess makes sense seeing as how he now oversees all of Alphabet.
