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Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

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Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#201

Post by itcmcgrath »

hammock wrote: post #184
JesseObrien wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as "screech to a halt." is concerned, it's maybe a little on the exaggerated side, but I'd believe it. I've worked for 5 different companies of varying sizes from 5 to 1000 employees. All of them have used Google Apps to run their business. Email, Calendars, Docs, Basically the Apps suite in it's entirety is the core of communicating and information storage. There's arguments for backups, etc but in reality if…

Google Apps has 50 million users, iCloud has 125 million Edit: to clarify, my source[1] said 5 million orgs with 50 million individual users. Not counting Gmail obviously [1] http://blog.bettercloud.com/google-apps-stats/

Having worked on the Drive team, I can assure you Google Apps (which includes GMail, the Docs editors, and Drive) has much more than 50 million. A quick search on public figures for these services will give better numbers. Edit: Those are Apps for Work numbers, excluding consumers - obviously you can't compare just a subset with a total.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#202

Post by endtime »

hammock wrote: post #184
JesseObrien wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as "screech to a halt." is concerned, it's maybe a little on the exaggerated side, but I'd believe it. I've worked for 5 different companies of varying sizes from 5 to 1000 employees. All of them have used Google Apps to run their business. Email, Calendars, Docs, Basically the Apps suite in it's entirety is the core of communicating and information storage. There's arguments for backups, etc but in reality if…

Google Apps has 50 million users, iCloud has 125 million Edit: to clarify, my source[1] said 5 million orgs with 50 million individual users. Not counting Gmail obviously [1] http://blog.bettercloud.com/google-apps-stats/

How many of those people are iCloud users just because their iPhone's default settings sync their iMessages to it or whatever?

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#203

Post by [deleted] »

percentcer wrote: post #145

It's interesting to that it took this long, just considering the utility of each company. If Apple disappeared tomorrow I'd be moderately inconvenienced, I'd have to pick up an Android handset instead of my iPhone and maybe set up some new podcast feeds. If Google disappeared the world would screech to a halt.

[deleted]

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#204

Post by [deleted] »

percentcer wrote: post #145

It's interesting to that it took this long, just considering the utility of each company. If Apple disappeared tomorrow I'd be moderately inconvenienced, I'd have to pick up an Android handset instead of my iPhone and maybe set up some new podcast feeds. If Google disappeared the world would screech to a halt.

[deleted]

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#205

Post by [deleted] »

percentcer wrote: post #145

It's interesting to that it took this long, just considering the utility of each company. If Apple disappeared tomorrow I'd be moderately inconvenienced, I'd have to pick up an Android handset instead of my iPhone and maybe set up some new podcast feeds. If Google disappeared the world would screech to a halt.

[deleted]

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#206

Post by rayiner »

percentcer wrote: post #145

It's interesting to that it took this long, just considering the utility of each company. If Apple disappeared tomorrow I'd be moderately inconvenienced, I'd have to pick up an Android handset instead of my iPhone and maybe set up some new podcast feeds. If Google disappeared the world would screech to a halt.

Eh. People would use Bing. But if Microsoft disappeared the business world would grind to a halt, and with it the rest of the economy.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#207

Post by Thirdegree »

tedmiston wrote: post #170
sdrothrock wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could probably think of alternatives for most of these things, but there are a lot of people who just use what came with their phone/browser. Additionally, think of all of the Google-backed services out there provided by other companies. How many companies use gmail heavily that would lose all kinds of records? Normal people would lose their e-mail too, and businessmen would lose a lot of their calendars. The actu…

And Google Takeout continues to ensure that won't happen.

Only for people that proactively use it. Speaking of which, I should probably backup again.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#208

Post by endtime »

drewda wrote: post #131
shimon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's flagship product is a box that you can type words into, and get relevant texts/references/facts in response. It seems like a textbook example of AI.

Google's flagship product, in the sense of revenue, is the text ad ;-)

The text ad which is targeted using AI?

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#209

Post by latj »

sdrothrock wrote: post #163
jad wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's that? To search the web, I'd go to DuckDuckGo or Bing or whatever. Other companies also provide web mail, maps, office document solutions, etc. Google's definitely better at those things, but using a worse version of those products would not cause the world to "screech to a halt." Probably the most disruptive thing if Apple vanished would actually be every tech company suddenly needing to figure out how to use…

We could probably think of alternatives for most of these things, but there are a lot of people who just use what came with their phone/browser. Additionally, think of all of the Google-backed services out there provided by other companies. How many companies use gmail heavily that would lose all kinds of records? Normal people would lose their e-mail too, and businessmen would lose a lot of their calendars. The actu…

The world wouldnt screech to a halt though. We're talking about what would happen if Google disappeared and its not a hypothetical situation. It happened in China for a five year period starting in 2010. People who used Google services were very upset. Replacements sprung up and quickly improved. They never caught up to Google but they were good enough, along with propaganda and the threat of prison, to keep people from making more of a commotion.

The biggest loss to humanity (in my opinion) would be all the translation data they hold privately. But Google really just people and money. If Google the entity disappeared tomorrow all those people who still know how to do the work will just start working on it elsewhere and catch up quickly.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#210

Post by jonknee »

jfuhrman wrote: post #109
jonknee wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It's obvious that is where they are going.

How much of Google's profit(or even revenue) is not from tracking user data and advertising? Search, Gmail, Android, Chromebooks, Nexus, Pixel, Youtube, Maps etc. everything is about selling advertisements after scanning user provided data. The rest are either loss leaders or moats, or ones with unclear monetization scenarios like Fiber. One exception is GCE and GAE, but I don't know how much profit/revenue they're m…

They use AI to sell advertising and services (be it search relevancy, contextual awareness, filter out spam, etc)...

The reason why it's not incorrect to call Google an AI company is that Wall Street thinks they'll be able to shake out ever more cash from their machines in the future because of their position in ML and AI. It's their competitive edge and one that becomes more and more valuable as software continues to eat the world.

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