Alphabet just sounds evil, a bit like Umbrella Corp, E-Corp, etc. I am not a fan of the name.
G is for Google
511–520 of 607 posts
Re: G is for Google
#512[deleted]
Re: G is for Google
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hyves in NL had the 'circles' thing before Facebook even existed, let alone before Google went public with G+.
And the Russians dreamed of going to the moon but that's the rub with consumer products - the market has to accept them for it to be an accomplishment. Google thought they'd found the magic recipe and pitched it as something for everyone that was a huge breakthrough. Being first with features or flows doesn't matter at all. The only thing that matters is making it relevant to users' lives, which all parties failed at…
Hyves had big acceptance in NL at some point it was one of the largest websites here, Facebook ate their lunch.
Re: G is for Google
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how it does that.
Two main areas. It prepares you, in terms of financial visibility, experience, etc, if the most painful of anti-trust remedies (breakup) ever happens. AT&T, for example, would have likely proposed different terms for their breakup if they had better visibility into how Western Electric would have performed on its own. It provides more public financial visibility into some areas of concern, early. For example, it look…
The new structure won't affect the EU's investigations, as you had stated earlier. All the components the EU will whine about are still under the Google subsidiary (Search, Maps, YouTube, Android).
The only companies exiting from Googles purview are Calico, Nest, Fiber, Ventures, Capital,and X. None of which were likely candidates for antitrust prosecution.
Re: G is for Google
#515Wow, 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…
I don't think it's quite comparable though. This is chopping off companies with essentially no synergies with the core business, which are kept in a single monolithic entity. If anything the association is often negative, with the assumption that the only reason Google owns a business (e.g. Nest, Fiber) is to hoover up people's private information. Now, there would be insane ways of splitting the company. Say putting…
Agreed. And I hope that does happen. This is the best chance for Google to clear out the air around all the privacy and transparency issues it has been tackling. However I do wonder if that indeed is the plan.
For example, Google would not want to miss on the data from its Fiber or Auto or Nest projects say. It is too valuable to not include as part of a user's profile.
If anything, I feel it can lead to just making the situation even more muddy. What happens to all the Terms and conditions? Privacy policies? Would they, or even can they, stay merged?
Re: G is for Google
#516Sounds like Google is turning into Umbrella Corporation: http://umbrellacorporation.jp/aboutus.html Life sciences, life extension, military, information, telecommunications all under one umbrella company.
Clicking around the website, this is most likely not an actual company but a spoof of the evil conglomerate from the Resident Evil games/films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Resident_Evil_characte...
It is indeed. That was my point. It's difficult to discern megacorporations from their dystopian film counterparts now.
Re: G is for Google
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reorganization makes no difference on the financials. The release explicitly stated the company is trading at the conglomerate level.
Google could go public though, right? (The new Google)
No they need the cash it produces to finance the rest of the businesses.
Re: G is for Google
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't see why anyone would object to that kind of arrangement. The whole reason we do the boring stuff is because it pays for the exciting stuff. If exciting stuff could pay for itself, nobody would ever do anything dull.
If the dull stuff compensated for the lack of prestige with cash (for example), that might be true. But in reality, the low prestige tends to go with low pay, low promotion opportunities, and low recognition.
and that's why you need open allocation in a huge company. keeps everyone honest and allows economy of work to balance effort and pay.
if you don't balance people not wanting to do the low grunt work, you'll only get inexperienced or low rank employers to do it which is extremely hurtful in the medium run (say not in a year, but you'll definitely notice within a decade)
Re: G is for Google
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think there would be a difference on financials. Alphabet is worth exactly as the old Google, and is currently operating exact same businesses. Separating Fiber is important for other reasons, most notably, saving themselves from conflict of interest/anti-trust lawsuits.
Nope. If there's an antitrust issue (I'm not saying there is), it's still all the same company to the DOJ. Google is too visible to play that particular shell game and get away with it. If this was in preparation for spinning Fiber off, sure.
Which might make sense. Perhaps more broadly, they see the advertising entities as a whole that is complete, e.g. the value of these is strong, and not likely to be anything more than incremental (in the case of Youtube, that increment is still likely thousands of percents) nor to need any capital or debt for the foreseeable future.
Fiber, cars et al could be spun off, which would create share holder value without dividends, and allow these units to leverage debt rather than capital. Cars, Fiber, the WiFi balloons, could all be spun off at a point where they need capital and debt, and not drag down Alphabet.
Fiber with an IPO and access to debt as its own needs dictate might grow a lot faster than fiber waiting for capital from Google.
Maybe that is Google's plan: get them ready for IPO, then set them free and take an interest?
Re: G is for Google
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What about this post from a month ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9889942
> There is no strategy. The thought of Google having a central product management strategy -- and successfully executing it across many teams -- is hilarious to people who work there. It's chaos that outsiders try to read into.
This is a consequence of bad internal economics and incentives. Google PMs and engineers are incentivized to create new products and ship them by quarterly deadlines (perf/promo cycles) rather than align their teams towards a cohesive user experience. Thinking this way would occasionally cause teams to, gasp, not build a product they wanted to build. Everyone needs to ship something, ideally something new. After all, you don't get promoted for deciding not to build something. I've seen awful products/implementations go out the door and get killed or reimplemented soon thereafter. And people still list these as "achievements" on promotion packets (and they get promoted despite the product failing!).
The company is kind of trying to address this by changing promotion criteria, but it's culturally ingrained and won't change for some time.