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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

#181

Post by mark_l_watson »

simula67 wrote: post #163
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…

Cloud profits are not much ( for AWS around $687M per quarter [1]) compared to ad ( around $7B per quarter [2]). Google has many businesses that has the potential to generate a lot of money like a) licensing technology to car manufacturers for self-driving cars b) Manufacturing and selling hardware ( like Chromebooks, OnHub, Chromecasts etc ) c) Google Apps, GCE, Google Drive etc d) Google checkout/wallet payment pro…

+1 that is a good list

Although I use Google Search a lot less than I used to, I find myself a fairly happy customer of Play Music + TV + Movies, and I am using GCE as the platform for a new book I am writing on cognitive computing.

Google checkout may end up being huge. Google has sufficient funds to do more Google branded products. Their premium Chromebook is sort of too expensive to be a mainstream product, but I could see a Google branded cheaper Chromebook selling very well.

Google branded Chromebooks and Android phones bundled using their Fi wireless data services also seems like a good source of profit.

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

#182

Post by ethbro »

trhway wrote: post #172
themartorana wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The struggle is moving the relative needle. I doubt they have trouble making money, but is it going to move that $20.3B number? Because in order to actually move it, it needs minimum revenues of $100,000,000. I'm sure they make money in other pursuits (I'm sure GCE is doing some, and I hear their government contracts are sizable) but $100m just to tick up the revenue decimal point...

Amazon AWS revenue was 2.4B in Q4 and 2B in Q3. GCE would be obvious next (and the easiest as a lot of components is already in-place) big money printing thing for Google if done right. Yet it seems that they struggle even there. One of the main issue i see here is pretty typical for Google in my view, ie. that Google isn't really trying to serve customers - i mean in search Google is monopolist and thus advertisers…

I'd agree with the difference. Maybe it's the articles I've read recently, but Amazon seems to have more agile / startup philosophies (trying, failing, continuing support, and iterating) embedded higher up.

I've seen too many instances of pretty simple Google usability / feature bug reports closed as "will not fix / working as intended" to chalk it up to specific teams. "We built the Pontiac Aztek perfectly, and you should love us for it" type project design seems embedded in their DNA.

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

#183

Post by michaelt »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #153
jfoster wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 despit…

  There is no hope of that happening. You're never going
  to convince people to remove safety features,
Not only is this legal, it currently happens with hire cars. Enterprise rent-a-car, for example, brought 66,000 Impala cars with the standard side-curtain airbags removed, saving them $175 per vehicle [1]

With that said, I don't think the savings from removing safety features would be big enough to have much impact on Google's finances. I'd have thought the real savings would be from avoiding the costs of being in accidents. Or capturing some of the value of people being productive when they would otherwise be driving, although that value might be hard to capture.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/enterprise-rent-a-car-removed-a...

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

#184

Post by eru »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #152
jfoster wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can see a country like Singapore banning human-driven cars in a few years.

There are set to get self-driving taxis before the end of the year there. And you already need to bid on a pricy permit to operate your own car. (Certificate of Entitlement. A ten year one goes for more than 50k SGD.)

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

#185

Post by eru »

simula67 wrote: post #155
patmcc wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

I do.

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

#186

Post by 50CNT »

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.

Thought the whole self driving car thing was a bid to scalp the transportation business. Some of the largest companies around are half logistics, say Amazon & Walmart.

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

#187

Post by hibikir »

adventured wrote: post #61
tommoor wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They seem to be doing a pretty good job of diversifying? The profits haven't caught up yet, granted, but this is a company with many of the smartest people in the world working on future game-changing tech and sinking a ton of money into research. Still bullish here :)

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…

Business in self driving cars? How about the elderly that get to choose between depending on somebody, or driving unsafely? How about carting around too young to drive? Making current taxis obsolete? Self driving big rigs?

It wouldn't necessarily eat the entire car industry, but it's close.

That said, yes, they have to target problems that require a lot of capital, because, in practice, a company that will turn a profit no matter what you do is not one that is ever in a rush, or where hungry entrepreneurs go. They have to aim for niches where regular venture capital would never dare to go. This leads to lots of risky bets, looking for one that really moves the needle.

Remember Xerox PARC? That is what a monster like Alphabet ends up doing. It was not great for Xerox, but we all sure benefitted from their 'failures'

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

#188

Post by madgar »

trg2 wrote: post #114
mediocrejoker wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the companies paying $10 per click? Otherwise I'm not sure you're making the appropriate comparison.

"mesothelioma attorneys" is $50+ per click. Expected value of a class-action asbestos lawsuit = Millions? 10s of millions?

Not even class-action, just individual lawsuits.

For mesothelioma, an in-person referral from a doctor to an attorney is worth well over $10,000. Of course the doctor doesn't get paid until after the successful suit - but even discounting the time value of money, it's easy to see how advertising at $50/click could work out.

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

#189

Post by LoSboccacc »

jfoster wrote: post #116
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.

Exactly. The main "real" concern would be iOS. Even that can be handled, though.

There are sites I just can't go on mobile because iOS web view doesn't support purify and they have a form of ad that steals the current page - as in, not a popup or popunder, the whole page gets redirected and original link is lost, you can't even going back because the redirect stack they drive your browser trough is too deep. It's usually the mobsweet network.

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

#190

Post by funkyy »

matwood wrote: post #134
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.

GCE is much simpler to use than EC2. Google came to the party late and they have seemed to take some time to not replicate AWSs annoyances.

The problem for me is that "much simpler" is not good enough. With DO for example when I go to their panel I never used it before it will take me tops 1 hour to find all the possible options, all perks and cons, everything. In just 1 hour.

I know, I know, AWS and Google Cloud is not DO and I agree. But would it hurt to introduce DO or Vultr style UX and make it easier for regular user to launch what he wants without all the expert language and need to jump in to documentation for hours?

Would button "Simple" and "Advanced" UI be really that hard to make?

I, as startup owner, dont really have time to focus on all the noise from large cloud providers, its easier to just launch 5 VPS with DO or Vultr and create my own infrastructure. And while I grow I doubt I will move my business to any of the cloud providers because I dont have time for it. Its easier to just build infrastructure on VPS's for $5 or just go for dedicated servers for backend.

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