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Advancing our amazing bet

googlefiberblog.blogspot.com

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Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#121

Post by dredmorbius »

meshko wrote: post #26
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…

Thanks, nice job. I must say I am more saddened by the way Google chose to word it than by the fact that they are killing it.

Google have been spewing gratuitously specious numbers for some years now. A piece in VentureBeat from 2012:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/20/google-skews-google-plus-s...

"This post on Google+ statistics is a billion* times better than any other post"

But what concerns me most is that Google is touting these meaningless statistics in the hopes that journalists will misunderstand them and report that Google+ is seeing rapid growth. The bottom line is, those 60 percents, 80 percents and 90 million registered users are just there to mask the fact that Google doesn’t want to tell us how many people are actually using Google+.

(Disclaimer: I helped lift the lid on actual G+ usage numbers.)

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#122

Post by asafira »

chii wrote: post #40
s8-0913458 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thinking about your last statement:

If the price were an average of beliefs, we would have people that believe it's worth more and people that think it's worth less. Those that think it is worth more would, logically, buy Google stock, and then the price would increase until we reached the price where people are somewhat on agreement that it isn't worth more. So, either there is a lack of funds to make the purchases, or the given price reflects the highest price someone is willing to pay for it, right?

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#123

Post by Akkuma »

xenadu02 wrote: post #90
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…

> If Google enters a market to provide a better service, Comcast et al. can easily pretty much flip a switch in that market to start providing a better service to hold onto their disgruntled customers, depriving Google of much of the market it needed to make Fiber profitable. This is why the pure libertarian ideas about a completely free market just don't work for some services. It is a complete waste of human and ma…

>This is why the pure libertarian ideas about a completely free market just don't work for some services. It is a complete waste of human and material capital to run more than two last-mile networks (the second for redundancy and you could argue that is also a waste). When you've got more than 4-5 you simply can't ever make a return on investment.

If the current environment is preventing any and all business from flourishing, in this specific case Google Fiber, this is arguably even more wasteful. There is nothing getting done instead of something getting done. The political & regulatory maneuvering probably costs nearly as much for Google Fiber would as building out more redundant infrastructure. Plus, their business model may have required a large amount of users to really make the business worthwhile, so they wind up in this situation where they can't expand fast enough.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#124

Post by [deleted] »

xenadu02 wrote: post #90
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…

> If Google enters a market to provide a better service, Comcast et al. can easily pretty much flip a switch in that market to start providing a better service to hold onto their disgruntled customers, depriving Google of much of the market it needed to make Fiber profitable. This is why the pure libertarian ideas about a completely free market just don't work for some services. It is a complete waste of human and ma…

[deleted]

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#125

Post by orangecat »

dredmorbius wrote: post #108
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…

Pretty much exactly the interpretation a Googler posted earlier: https://plus.google.com/+PeterKasting/posts/TJwzGb5dt1W "We have refined our plan! "We're going to push technology, remain a leader, enhance our focus, and in general optimize our synergistic long-term 'outside the box' thinking for high-impact de-risking of our core vertical integrations for enhanced customer satisfaction. "Oh, and practically speaking…

The shit's not even selling on the inside.

Googlers are quite good at translating executive messages. I wish I could see the internal memes for this.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#126

Post by bsder »

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…

> I'm sure Comcast and Time Warner and friends are all breathing a sigh of relief.

Not really. I read this as "Google no longer regards wireline providers as an existential threat as everybody is on mobile."

Google fiber was never about profit; it was about preventing Comcast et al. from cutting Google off from users

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#127

Post by a-no-n »

a-no-n wrote: post #52

So when will Google Fibre fix the embarrassing Starbucks WiFi at: 247 reviews$$$$ 3605 El Camino Real Santa Clara, CA 95051 It's slower than communicating with smoke-signals in a hurricane, or boxing up each bit and sending via the post. Alphabet/Google needs to work on finishing an actual business that they start and scaling faster. Search, email, maps are mobile are pretty good, but the million other areas lack bus…

IOW... They're going to make all Starbucks' WiFI slooower, just like they did with the city of Mountain View.

Thanks for almost nothing, Google.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#128

Post by dredmorbius »

Posting as rampant speculation: The thought occurs to me that Google may be finding that achieving its aim of improved broadband service through regulatory mechanism might be cheaper than building their own. Armed with the data from the response of entrenched broadband monopolists, making the case to the FCC of a market and/or regulatory failure seems plausible. That could actually cast this as a win.

Background: With Google's strong ties to the Obama administration, the exceptionally high likelihood of a Clinton administration (also with strong Google ties), another item today of the resignation of the (now former) head of the US Copyright Office under the Library of Congress (seen as a loss by old-guard copyright interests, especially Hollywood, the RIAA/MPAA, and possibly book publishers -- which would also include Apple and Amazon among thsoe affected), a current and sustained (for at least 4, and quite probably 8 years) favourable regulatory inclination to Google's goals of widespread, high-speed service might be expected. This would serve Google's general interests (serving more ads, surveilling more data, running high-speed and omnipresent services such as Google Now), and as noted, put several of Google's major competitors back on their heels (though I'm not sure how big books are for Amazon any more).

Another theory is that Google have worked out a fiber-to-wireless concept which removes much of the need for last-mile connectivity.

Again: no source other than my own fevered brain.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#129

Post by ashark »

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?

Kansas City here. We recently moved to a new neighborhood where Google Fiber is still two streets away from us (our house was very recently finished and there are lots of vacant lots on our street still). We'd had Google Fiber before.

We signed up for Time Warner and the rep expressed surprise that we wanted them just for Internet, since Google Fiber is a thing, until we explained the situation. That should give you some idea of how it affected them.

Prices have dropped for other providers, and speeds have gone up, though they're still worse than Google Fiber. It's been great. I'm really bummed that this may mean they won't ever hook our street up, or at least that it'll be delayed until someone else takes over their infrastructure and starts expanding again.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#130

Post by wildmusings »

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…

A big part of Google's value is in having convinced everyone that they're a super innovative company pumping out new successful products all the time. This keeps talent coming in, keeps talent away from competitors, and acts as a shield against regulation and bad perception by the public. The secret is that they're just a search and ads company that doesn't know what to do with all the money and is having a hard time making any new products stick.
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