Google loses two execs: one for Messaging and Workspace, another for Payments

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)

Google had a pair of high-ranking executives leave this week. The first was Bill Ready, Google's "President of Commerce, Payments & Next Billion Users," who left to become CEO of Pinterest. The second big departure is Javier Soltero, who was vice president and GM of Google Workspace, Google's paid business app, and was the leader of Google Messaging. Both executives made big changes to Google in their nearly three-year stints at the company. Now that they are leaving, it's unclear what the future of their respective products holds.

Ready was only at Google for two-and-a-half years, where his highest-profile move was presiding over the disastrous rollout of a significant Google Pay revamp. The new Google Pay app was spearheaded by Ready's payments team, led by another recently ousted executive, Caesar Sengupta. The Google Pay revamp brought an app originally developed for India to the US, where the requirement for phone number-based identity came with a huge list of downgrades: The Google Pay website had to be stripped of payment functionality, the app no longer supported multiple accounts, and you couldn't be logged in to multiple devices.

The rollout of the new app was also clumsy. Slowly, over a month or two, users were kicked out of the old Google Pay and had to transition to a new app. The new identity system wasn't backward compatible with the old Google Pay, though, which meant users still on the old app couldn't send money to users on the new app.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments