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Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

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Re: Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

#151

Post by declan »

olalonde wrote: post #97
adventured wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are doing a poor job of diversifying. Those side businesses are producing a small amount of revenue. It would be one thing if the profits hadn't caught up, the real problem is there isn't much in the way of sales to begin with. I see no example business of theirs that will get them even moderately diversified off of online advertising in the next five years. And I'm not speaking of technology Alphabet is messing…

> what business are they looking to capture in self-driving cars for example? I see no example of an actual business there so far. God, I wouldn't want to be on the record saying that. People used to say things like this about web search too.

Yup. There's a lot of mischief in "so far."

Some products take a while to build, especially when dealing with less-than-friendly .gov regulators.

Re: Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

#152

Post by semi-extrinsic »

jfoster wrote: post #112
prostoalex wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the financials of car rental companies, markets are not too eager to pay premium for a business that has high upfront capital cost (buying/manufacturing the vehicles) as well as high operating costs (car washes, maintenance, repairs). You could argue that Alphabet's margins will be so good as to obliterate those concerns, but then why haven't other operators in the space (GM owns some car rental busine…

The margins on Uber-like trips in self-driving cars might be better than the margins on day rental of conventional vehicles. Self-driving changes quite a bit about cars. If accident rates can be low enough, they don't need as much conventional safety measures; air bags, metal armour that crumples, etc. Less weight there means lower fuel costs. The way they drive should mean lower maintenance & fuel costs compared wit…

Your hypothetical "low accident protection" scenario is laughably unrealistic.

One major point against it is that even though self-driving cars may be here soon, none of us will live to see the day when manual driving is banned. Especially not in the freedom-happy US.

A second major counterpoint is that even in this fascist dictatorship where manual driving is banned, external factors (large wildlife, sudden slippery ice, human error in vehicle maintenance, etc.) will still cause serious accidents.

The third major counterpoint is: say you reduce accident rates by two or three orders of magnitude (which would be huge). Still, a tiny tiny fraction of people would end up in accidents. What society would be OK with saying "Oh, screw it, let those people die so manufacturers can build cheaper cars"?

Re: Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

#153

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jfoster wrote: post #112
prostoalex wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the financials of car rental companies, markets are not too eager to pay premium for a business that has high upfront capital cost (buying/manufacturing the vehicles) as well as high operating costs (car washes, maintenance, repairs). You could argue that Alphabet's margins will be so good as to obliterate those concerns, but then why haven't other operators in the space (GM owns some car rental busine…

The margins on Uber-like trips in self-driving cars might be better than the margins on day rental of conventional vehicles. Self-driving changes quite a bit about cars. If accident rates can be low enough, they don't need as much conventional safety measures; air bags, metal armour that crumples, etc. Less weight there means lower fuel costs. The way they drive should mean lower maintenance & fuel costs compared wit…

> If accident rates can be low enough, they don't need as much conventional safety measures; air bags, metal armour that crumples, etc.

There is no hope of that happening. You're never going to convince people to remove safety features, and even if you could, a car that has 5% as many collisions but logs 50 times as many miles would justify more safety features because there will be more collisions per vehicle despite there being fewer collisions per mile.

> The way they drive should mean lower maintenance & fuel costs compared with human drivers.

All of that sort of thing will be dwarfed by not having to pay a human driver. But in a competitive market it will also be eroded by competition. A cab ride that used to be $20 will soon be $2 because now $2 can turn a profit.

On the other hand, if it now costs $2 instead of $20 then people will start using hired cars instead of owning cars and then you might make a lot of it back on volume. (By essentially destroying the rest of the auto industry.)

Re: Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

#154

Post by dingaling »

home_boi wrote: post #123
adventured wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are doing a poor job of diversifying. Those side businesses are producing a small amount of revenue. It would be one thing if the profits hadn't caught up, the real problem is there isn't much in the way of sales to begin with. I see no example business of theirs that will get them even moderately diversified off of online advertising in the next five years. And I'm not speaking of technology Alphabet is messing…

Are there ad blockers for mobile? I feel like Google has already solved the ad blocker problem with Android.

> Are there ad blockers for mobile?

In terms of mobile apps, yes. There are rootless-firewalls that register themselves as an all-routes VPN and then blackhole 'unwanted' traffic.

Mobile browsers such as Firefox already have the same ad blockers plugins as desktop.

Re: Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

#155

Post by simula67 »

patmcc wrote: post #64
bpodgursky wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If adblocking becomes a serious problem for Google, they can (and will) block the relevant extensions in Chrome. Also, mobile chrome (increasingly dominant worldwide) doesn't, and won't, have adblocking. Yes, I'm ignoring numerically insignificant installs like rooted hosts redirects, firefox mobile, opera, etc. Those aren't going to impact revenue.

That's an excellent way to get people to switch away from Chrome. I love Chrome, use it all the time, but if I can't have any adblocking? No thanks.

Do you use Firefox over Chrome mobile ?

Re: Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

#156

Post by tluyben2 »

rsync wrote: post #133
funkyy wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet they managed to make another complicated cloud service. Would be nice if someone would cater for Startup owners that do not have time to study documentation and overlook multiple processes just to run a simple bot etc.

If only ... If only there were cloud products and services that were dead simple and just did one little useful thing just the way you wanted it. If only ...

That is nice in theory but nobody really wants that. In practice I do not want to run my app on 40 different services potentially owned by different companies. If you mean that inside one company is fine than I believe ec2, s3 etc seperately already provide what you say: if you would make them simpler it would get annoying as you would have to set up yet more services (within the same portal, which is a bit better) to get stuff done. I think the theory is nice to start off but I do not think there is a real market for 'dead simple with one little useful thing'. Then again: try it, who knows.

Re: Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

#157

Post by mgnacl »

home_boi wrote: post #123
adventured wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are doing a poor job of diversifying. Those side businesses are producing a small amount of revenue. It would be one thing if the profits hadn't caught up, the real problem is there isn't much in the way of sales to begin with. I see no example business of theirs that will get them even moderately diversified off of online advertising in the next five years. And I'm not speaking of technology Alphabet is messing…

Are there ad blockers for mobile? I feel like Google has already solved the ad blocker problem with Android.

Firefox + ublock origin works fine for me.

Re: Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

#158

Post by prostoalex »

jfoster wrote: post #112
prostoalex wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the financials of car rental companies, markets are not too eager to pay premium for a business that has high upfront capital cost (buying/manufacturing the vehicles) as well as high operating costs (car washes, maintenance, repairs). You could argue that Alphabet's margins will be so good as to obliterate those concerns, but then why haven't other operators in the space (GM owns some car rental busine…

The margins on Uber-like trips in self-driving cars might be better than the margins on day rental of conventional vehicles. Self-driving changes quite a bit about cars. If accident rates can be low enough, they don't need as much conventional safety measures; air bags, metal armour that crumples, etc. Less weight there means lower fuel costs. The way they drive should mean lower maintenance & fuel costs compared wit…

Uber's entire spiel is avoiding the capital hit associated with purchasing a pricey asset that depreciates quickly by keeping it on driver's personal balance sheet, not theirs.

I agree autonomous driving changes some cost dynamics, but on the other hand people not only have higher expectations on rented vehicles as far as cleanliness and safety go (that "check engine" light is no longer optional, dirt from previous passenger's shoes needs to be vacuumed, random leftover trash and water bottles need to be taken out), but are also likely to abuse rented vehicles for random dirty jobs like hauling potted plants from the nursery, as well as plain old bar hopping while drunk with associated sanitary accidents.

Re: Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

#159

Post by kgwgk »

ASinclair wrote: post #9
jerryhuang100 wrote: post #5

GOOG/GOOGL's 'other bets' revenue is more than doubled yoy, though they spent 27% more yoy ($657MM just for Q1!!) for their 'other bets' operation.

Fiber infrastructure is expensive.

That is capital spending. They have lost more than $600mn (on $166mn of revenue), without including the $280mn in capex and the $145mn in stock-based compensation.

Re: Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

#160

Post by thomasz »

patmcc wrote: post #64
bpodgursky wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If adblocking becomes a serious problem for Google, they can (and will) block the relevant extensions in Chrome. Also, mobile chrome (increasingly dominant worldwide) doesn't, and won't, have adblocking. Yes, I'm ignoring numerically insignificant installs like rooted hosts redirects, firefox mobile, opera, etc. Those aren't going to impact revenue.

That's an excellent way to get people to switch away from Chrome. I love Chrome, use it all the time, but if I can't have any adblocking? No thanks.

They could just use an js adblock blocker like wired&co. Sure, there are ways around that, but thats way too much trouble for the average user
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