G is for Google
221–230 of 607 posts
Re: G is for Google
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, they sell decently, but do no represent any profit for Google (which gives the OS for free). It's around 5-6 million units sold anually, but, as Google themselves said, Google don't make any money of off them. Samsung, Acer, etc, who produce the units do, but again, in total it represents a tiny slither of laptop profits due to the small margins. Most Chromebooks (70%) go to the education market as cheapo laptop…
If direct profit generation is the measure of failure for Google then they've failed at basically everything except for advertising.
Yes?
They suffer from the gulf state problem where they make so much money from one thing that nothing else will ever be important enough to really be successful.
Re: G is for Google
#223From the abc.xyz source code: Sergey and I are seriously in the business of starting new things. Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort http://www.hooli.xyz/" target="_blank" class="hidden-link">.
It seems to me that their domain name (https://abc.xyz/), and maybe even the corporate name, was chosen to imitate Hooli XYZ.
Re: G is for Google
#224Is 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…
Isn't 96% of Google profits from search ads only? They 've done a million ventures since then, still remain ad-funded.
Re: G is for Google
#225Google does not own https://www.alphabet.com/
Thought I'd link this to:
Re: G is for Google
#226Is Larry Page trolling PG? A day after PG publishes an essay that companies should own the .com version of their names, he renames Google to Alphabet with .xyz as the TLD.
From his blog: "Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company."
Re: G is for Google
#227Re: G is for Google
#228Re: G is for Google
#229Wow, they are doing letters? Really? Letters? Hey is Eric Schmidt still in the building somewhere? Ask him how well Planets worked out for Sun Microsystems. Interesting strategy, hard to second guess from the outside of course. Sun's motivation was to figure out whether the other parts of the company could stand on their own[1], it also makes it less fiscally complicated to discharge an entire group into the void. Th…
Sounds like a form of the ChargeBack system for IT. It makes bean counters happy, but spreads misery every place else.
Re: G is for Google
#230Wow, they are doing letters? Really? Letters? Hey is Eric Schmidt still in the building somewhere? Ask him how well Planets worked out for Sun Microsystems. Interesting strategy, hard to second guess from the outside of course. Sun's motivation was to figure out whether the other parts of the company could stand on their own[1], it also makes it less fiscally complicated to discharge an entire group into the void. Th…
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Don't misunderstand me, it isn't dislike, its amazement. Some things really do well under multiple companies, think BASF or Siemans where the core that holds them is something common to all the sub-companies. But historically tech companies do not prosper in that model, and generally for a similar reason, there isn't anything in common between the companies except maybe there are smart and talented people working there.
The original Sun vision was that Sun Hardware would sell SPARC architecture machines running any OS, SunSoft would sell Solaris for any type of hardware, Sun Labs would license their innovative research rights to anyone who wanted to productize them. Except ...
Nobody really wanted to run their OS software on Sun hardware because SunSoft had an inside track on what was coming out. Sunsoft couldn't really make Solaris on x86 just as powerful as it was on SPARC because it would undercut Sun's HW arm, and Sun Labs? They could never really license a technology to a Sun competitor without the other two companies vetoing it. The whole reason FirstPerson was created (the shell company that was developing Oak which became Java) was to keep the politics and other constraints off what could be done with the software. And when the group told Sun it was going to ship first on "Chicago" (aka Windows 95), Scott McNealy blew a gasket.
Pretty much everyone I've talked to about that decision in depth thought it was a net negative for Sun and that had we had a chance to do it again, they would do something different. And since Eric was right in the middle of that, I would have expected him to advise Larry and Sergei that it wasn't the best choice. And maybe he did, and maybe they have a scheme that will avoid the problems Sun had. I'm surprised though that they chose that route.