One of the big dangers of being Google is using the profitable advertising arm to subsidize unprofitable side-ventures that don't materially affect the advertising arm of the business. This same problem lead to the decline of the Ottoman Empire - they used the profitable Balkans to pick up albatrosses like Egypt and the Levant, and then collapsed when they lost the Balkans and could no longer subsidize ruling those areas.
G is for Google
121–130 of 607 posts
Re: G is for Google
#122Just a stray observation, but now Microsoft and Google are both run by Indian born CEOs.
And Adobe and Pepsi.
Re: G is for Google
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd assume it was a move to make failure easier. Sclerosis is the natural fate of large corporations but variation and selection is an obvious way to help with that.
The danger of conglomerates that give so much freedom to their subsidiaries is that said subsidiaries start actually competing against each other and hurting the business overall.
> The danger of conglomerates that give so much freedom to their subsidiaries is that said subsidiaries start actually competing against each other and hurting the business overall.
Google seems to like competing against themselves, so I'm not sure that's something that they are particularly worried about.
Re: G is for Google
#124on the one hand, cool, on the other, it just seems like Google has gone up it's own arse.
I mean, alphabet? really?
Re: G is for Google
#125Wow, this is really strange. Has there been any precedent for things like this?
Many large companies in other sectors are structured like this. Google, through its diverse acquisitions has now, in that sense, become like a lot of the older conglomerates like GE, Berkshire Hathaway, Raytheon, DuPont, Honeywell, UTC, 3M, etc. To different extents, these are all organized like Alphabet will be. Take branding: core products may be sold under the company's name, other products may be sold in a nearly autonomous fashion. Similarly, quarterly earnings calls are centered on the performance of each of these sub-units.
Re: G is for Google
#126All of the announcement makes sense except the part where the Conglomerate is the one that is trading on the market.
Are the hived-off business separate in any sense if at earnings time everything sinks or swims together? the most logical move would be to trade the new GOOG
Re: G is for Google
#127This is a big move, which might also possibly help with EU anti-trust accusations by splitting up the big-ol' monolithic GOOG into functionally separate units.
Although what often happens is that now divisions compete against either in suboptimal ways. Search and Maps are separate? Great, until Search decides maps are really cool and starts building their own version, again. It takes a strong hand at the top to prevent division heads from viewing their peers as rivals.
I'm pretty sure Search and Maps will still be operating under the Google organization. They're just spinning off their more "wacky" projects that aren't directly related to Internet technology.
Re: G is for Google
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wave, Plus, Glasses at least. If we are to include less ambitious stuff, Google Video, Orkut, Chromebooks (never went far), Reader, Google Code, Dart, nothing much came out of Morotola, etc. And let's see were those "self driving cars" will go, market-wise...
Reader was the top web application in its market for almost a decade. I'd like to have that kind of failure.
Maybe the only Google "failure" to have people protest its closure: http://www.tbd.com/blogs/tbd-arts/2011/10/occupy-google-read...
Re: G is for Google
#129Is this purely a function of sharding liability across a conglomerate of businesses? It seems like concentrating Google's ad revenue in a smaller, more efficient business unit is a nod to Berkshire Hathaway's method of business. I can't recall this sort of thing happening in my lifetime, so it will be really interesting to see how this plays out. I also wonder how this would be treated if Google didn't have the crazy…
Re: edit 2: the stock holds all the stuff it held yesterday, right? The stock is now for alphabet.