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Advancing our amazing bet

googlefiberblog.blogspot.com

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Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#31

Post by Guest98123 »

scarmig wrote: post #28
Inconel wrote: post #14

I won't be surprised if this news is met with the usual sentiment that Google abandons everything that isn't immediately hugely successful, and while I often share that criticism of Google, I can't really fault them too much in this case. Getting a nationwide ISP up and running from scratch just seems like an almost impossible task. This is disappointing to me nonetheless. Can someone with knowledge of the industry e…

My totally non-professional opinion is this: the problems of there not being good ISPs in the USA isn't a technical or infrastructure problem, where Google excels. They are instead political and organizational problems. Existing ISPs give as little as they can legally get away with while extracting as much money as possible from customers, by hook or by crook. If Google enters a market to provide a better service, Co…

Google Fiber was never in my city, but can those with Google Fiber in their area weigh in on the above? When Fiber came to town, what happened with the existing ISPs in the area? If you called to cancel and explained moving to Fiber, did they give you an offer you couldn't refuse to stay with their services, and if so, did you take it?

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#32

Post by TaylorAlexander »

GavinMcG wrote: post #21
fowlerpower wrote: post #13

This is terrible corporate speak. It should be titled "We are killing Google Fiber for any new cities". Why do companies do this? Why sugar coat all of this and why make me think your actually going to expand only to let me down. It's terrible double speak and it does not help your cause, it just makes me dislike your company for two reasons now. One for canceling a service I was excited about and two for being, in m…

It turns out saying "we failed and are canceling a product, again" hurts the stock price more.

Which, said another way, is lying for profit.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#33

Post by s8-0913458 »

GavinMcG wrote: post #21
fowlerpower wrote: post #13

This is terrible corporate speak. It should be titled "We are killing Google Fiber for any new cities". Why do companies do this? Why sugar coat all of this and why make me think your actually going to expand only to let me down. It's terrible double speak and it does not help your cause, it just makes me dislike your company for two reasons now. One for canceling a service I was excited about and two for being, in m…

It turns out saying "we failed and are canceling a product, again" hurts the stock price more.

No, that's not how the stock market works.

If a company's project/product were failing and/or losing money, then investors would have priced the loss into the stock price long ago.

If a company announces that it is ending a money-losing effort, then investors will value the company more highly.

In theory, therefore, this announcement should raise the stock price. In practice, who knows.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#34

Post by scarmig »

Guest98123 wrote: post #31
scarmig wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My totally non-professional opinion is this: the problems of there not being good ISPs in the USA isn't a technical or infrastructure problem, where Google excels. They are instead political and organizational problems. Existing ISPs give as little as they can legally get away with while extracting as much money as possible from customers, by hook or by crook. If Google enters a market to provide a better service, Co…

Google Fiber was never in my city, but can those with Google Fiber in their area weigh in on the above? When Fiber came to town, what happened with the existing ISPs in the area? If you called to cancel and explained moving to Fiber, did they give you an offer you couldn't refuse to stay with their services, and if so, did you take it?

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2016/08/22/comcast-hopes-you-d...

That doesn't prove anything, but their prices certainly are eerily competitive with Google's in any market that Google entered, while they're... terrible everywhere else.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#35

Post by gwern »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #5

This announcement needs a little bit of translation from the marketing language it's written in: > And thanks to the hard work of everyone on the Access team, our business is solid: our subscriber base and revenue are growing quickly, and we expect that growth to continue. "We're not yet profitable." > We have refined our plan going forward to achieve these objectives. It entails us making changes to focus our busine…

As usual, the news leaked out well in advance as rumors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12364270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12362830

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#39

Post by nostrademons »

Inconel wrote: post #14

I won't be surprised if this news is met with the usual sentiment that Google abandons everything that isn't immediately hugely successful, and while I often share that criticism of Google, I can't really fault them too much in this case. Getting a nationwide ISP up and running from scratch just seems like an almost impossible task. This is disappointing to me nonetheless. Can someone with knowledge of the industry e…

I worked briefly on the Fiber team when it was very young (basically from 2 weeks before to 2 weeks after launch - I was on loan from Search specifically so that they could hit their launch goals). The bottleneck when I was there were local government regulations, and in fact Kansas City was chosen because it had a unified city/county/utility regulatory authority that was very favorable to Google. To lay fiber to the home, you either need right-of-ways on the utility poles (which are owned by Google's competitors) or you need permission to dig up streets (which requires a mess of permitting from the city government). In either case, the cable & phone companies were in very tight with local regulators, and so you had hostile gatekeepers whose approval you absolutely needed.

The technology was awesome (1G Internet and HDTV!), the software all worked great, and the economics of hiring contractors to lay the fiber itself actually worked out. The big problem was regulatory capture.

With Uber & AirBnB's success in hindsight, I'd say that the way to crack the ISP business is to provide your customers with the tools to break the law en masse. For example, you could imagine an ISP startup that basically says "Here's a box, a wire, and a map of other customers' locations. Plug into their jack, and if you can convince others to plug into yours, we'll give you a discount on your monthly bill based on how many you sign up." But Google in general is not willing to break laws - they'll go right up to the boundary of what the law allows, but if a regulatory agency says "No, you can't do that", they won't do it rather than fight the agency.

Indeed, Fiber is being phased out in favor of Google's acquisition of WebPass, which does basically exactly that but with wireless instead of fiber. WebPass only requires the building owner's consent, and leaves the city out of it.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#40

Post by chii »

s8-0913458 wrote: post #33
GavinMcG wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It turns out saying "we failed and are canceling a product, again" hurts the stock price more.

No, that's not how the stock market works. If a company's project/product were failing and/or losing money, then investors would have priced the loss into the stock price long ago. If a company announces that it is ending a money-losing effort, then investors will value the company more highly. In theory, therefore, this announcement should raise the stock price. In practice, who knows.

> investors would have priced the loss into the stock price long ago

That's a misconception. The investors had done expectations. They were either met or unmet. But unless there is insider info, a project going bad won't get priced before the news is known.

Stuck prices isn't some magical thing that knows all. It's simply an average of what everyone believes. Beliefs are sometimes wrong.

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