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G is for Google

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Re: G is for Google

#351

Post by joshstaiger »

zrail wrote: post #333
derf_ wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a lot of comparisons to Berkshire. Not every large conglomerate is Berkshire. Berkshire is composed of pre-existing businesses that were themselves successful before being purchased. They are not experimental ventures that need to be subsidized. It is exactly the opposite: money is plowed into the strongest businesses. They each generate excess cash, and it is easier to reinvest that cash in some places tha…

Berkshire is pretty explicit about using the firehose of cash that their insurance businesses throw off, as well as the huge amounts of premium float they have, as capital for their other more profitable businesses.

Sure, but Berkshire is also explicit about the fact that they only acquire pre-existing "remarkable" businesses.

They may benefit from the firehose, but were already self-sufficient without it.

That’s in stark contrast to the Google/Alphabet model, where there’s no way driverless cars could exist independent of the adwords firehose.

It’s waaaay more speculative. On the order of VC investing. Rather than Berkshire’s value investing.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Re: G is for Google

#354

Post by Spooky23 »

vonmoltke wrote: post #290
Spooky23 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fiber is the hint about what this really means. Capital intense businesses like ISPs or car companies are expensive to operate and the financials would drag down Google. In this model, the big shareholders get to dilute risks in these ventures, while retaining the ability to exponentially increase their personal wealth.

This reorganization makes no difference on the financials. The release explicitly stated the company is trading at the conglomerate level.

It will when Google is manufacturing cars, or is joint venturing with a car company to manufacture them.

The Google guys are smart. You don't do something like this without a long term strategic aim.

Re: G is for Google

#355

Post by hyperpallium »

_delirium wrote: post #335
hyperpallium wrote: post #117

At last, reversing Jobs' advice to combine everything, returning to the original idea of trying lots of things. Maybe 20% time will see a resurgence, too? Bonus: small, separate entities makes it easier to tackle new opportunities (which start small) that wouldn't move the needle for Google - as per Christensen. > We did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time. Many of those crazy things now have over a billion…

Won't this make it more awkward to do something like 20% time? It sounds like the experimental stuff will be split out from the core "Google" business, and employees will work for either one or the other.

20% time would be for nascent, university-like pre-startup projects. The conglomerate structure would give them somewhere to go, without needing to fit into search. But I admit, that's quite a leap. An internal-YC would fill the gap, but there's no evidence they're doing that. So I think you've torpedoed my idea.

Re: G is for Google

#356

Post by gohrt »

ljk wrote: post #334
mtgx wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess Alphabet is meant to be the PG of tech products?

what i thought too http://i.huffpost.com/gen/585370/original.jpg

That is an absolutely horrible visual presentation of information.

Re: G is for Google

#357

Post by Ologn »

bcantrill wrote: post #235
ChuckMcM wrote: post #133

Wow, 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…

Ha -- the Sun planets experience was the first thing that occurred to me as well. In my experience, the planets model was a total, unequivocal failure at Sun -- and the answer to the question of whether those companies could stand on their own was actually "no" for all of them (SME, SMCC and SunSoft all needed one another; the value came from what they delivered together). And Sun customers should blame the planet mo…

> And Sun customers should blame the planet model for one of the worst decisions in the history of a company that had plenty of contenders for the distinction: unbundling the compilers from the operating system and separately monetizing them.

Hear, hear.

The only thing Sun did that is the running for being even dumber is blowing Solaris x86. They released a pretty (for the time) awesome Solaris x86 product back in 1993, but never really got behind it. I had a Solaris 2.5.1 x86 workstation at work in 1997, and even then, my then-boss Scott Swanson was saying how Sun had blown it in terms of taking over the x86 server market.

I mean, even into the year 2006, Red Hat was telling me if their kernel crashed on a RHEL box, I had to set things up so the core file would go out over the network, instead of somewhere on a local disk. Sun had solved problems like that long, long before.

Re: G is for Google

#358

Post by a-dub »

Four months ago, Larry asked his assistant to order him a new X1 Carbon 3rd Edition. 1237 web form fields filled later, 27 phone calls, 122 submit buttons, 17 excuses, 4 customs delays and 1 CPU fan that would never kick into low gear later, he still had no laptop and he'd had enough.

"No... No.... NO!!@ NO MORE. NO MORE PAPERWORK. NO MORE WEBFORMS. NO MORE MOMA. NO MORE REPORTS. NO MORE STANFORD BRATS. NO MORE METRICS. NO MORE DATA. NO MORE MOTHERFUCKING EIGENBULLSHIT. NO MORE OF THIS FUCKING NULLSPACE. I DON'T WANT A NEW LAPTOP, I WANT A NEW FUCKING COMPANY.... A SIMPLE ONE... ABC. ABC.XYZ."

Re: G is for Google

#359

Post by slantedview »

To the extent that shareholders are driving pressure to separate the experimental bets with the more stable parts of the business, I'm not sure that I understand the point of replacing Google's stock/ticker with a new one. Any insight here?
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