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Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

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Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#71

Post by Afforess »

smallnamespace wrote: post #25
__derek__ wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We humans have a hard time reasoning about correlation and causation. Superstition comes so naturally.

That's because causation is really hard to reason about. Often times it's not that A causes B or B causes A, but C causes both, or A and B causes each other at the same time.

No. You're correct, causation is complicated, A-Z and all the greek letters too are part of a single cause. But the situation is worse than that.

The reason humans are superstitious is that we don't seek answers, we seek narratives. We seek to explain without disrupting what we already believe. We might see the real cause and effect and rewrite what we see to fit what we want.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#72

Post by hkmurakami »

lmm wrote: post #13
mahyarm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of that stuff although is cheaper for the corporation to provide than for the employee to pay for themselves in money and time. The corp has a tax advantage and a bulk purchase advantage. Not having a payment infra probably adds a little bit of efficiency too.

Yeah. Which is why I'm always amazed how many companies will nickel-and-dime on that stuff. Those benefits more than pay for themselves, a smart company would commit to them especially when times are bad.

Compared to the salary you're paying your staff, it really does come out to mere pennies.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#73

Post by dispose13432 »

vkou wrote: post #56
Periodic wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to clarify the wording. I'm specifically trying to call out the structure of Google's management and the general way they approach problems. For example, even within the profitable Google portion of the business, they often have many competing projects. There will be competing search features, competing chat applications, competing cloud services. Google will make big speculative bets or internally competitiv…

Yet, free markets beat out top-down managed economies because they have competing teams seeking to provide the same services. Tech is, to an extent, a winner-takes-all market. If you build out two competing products internally, in the long run, it will cost you less then building one product, and having an outside competitor fight you for market share, by building that second product. Case in point: I'm sure that Fac…

They don't seem to play free market. They seem to play "new guy takes all".

For example, Google Voice was put in maintenance mode and Hangouts took off. Then Allo, then ... ?

They very rarely actively push two products with the same purpose.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#74

Post by 1_2__3 »

Periodic wrote: post #11

So many companies try to emulate how Google works. There are multiple books, hundreds or thousands of articles. People speculate on the perks, the review structure, the hierarchy, the autonomy. However, when other companies try to imitate Google they always fail because they're missing a crucial piece: Billions of dollars in ad revenue Google doesn't work the way it does to be successful. It works that way because it…

ITT: A lot of people who have never worked for Google and don't realize how correct you are.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#75

Post by pgeorgi »

takeda wrote: post #65
BeingIncubated wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just stop using Google if that is a concern. Personally I use DDG.

I use DDG, as well, but I think you're missing the point. It's virtually impossible to avoid Google. You visit some sites, and they use scripts or fonts hosted by them, or use their services such as captcha, maps, etc. If you use Android, virtually all apps rely on Google Play Services, and interestingly you it will autoupdate even when you explicitly tell it not to. Using google maps to navigate (now even Waze is th…

Regarding fonts, see https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_...

While some data is stored, no cookies are sent, plus there's heavy caching involved: "The result is that website visitors send very few requests to Google: We only see 1 CSS request per font family, per day, per browser."

All in all, those services (IIRC the JS library CDN is similar) don't seem to be designed to be a tracking data source except for some popularity stats about the data hosted there.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#76

Post by skizm »

I always wondered if Google just fired all their engineers except a few top guys, and focused on their core money making products like search / ads / etc. and tried to stay as lean as possible (lean being a relative term), how much profit they could make.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#77

Post by Mango_Diesel »

espadrine wrote: post #37

Contrast Google's old way of managing bets with Tesla. When Google started working on self-driving cars, they went about it academically. They did not plan a sequence of stepping stones that they could sell. They meant to have a product in an indeterminate future which should be immediately perfect and better than a human, essentially not needing a wheel. Tesla went about it with an engineering perspective. First, ca…

It will be interesting to see what end-game is for Google. Is it to provide the hardware specs to car manufacturers for cameras/components and use a Google operating/control system?

In the most recent quarter, Tesla posted a $22 million profit, which was their first profit since first quarter 2013. There have been many times in Tesla's history where things were tight and risky. Things are looking good now, so it is exciting and Tesla seems to be going in a great direction.

It all comes back to Google having tons of money and thus being able to do things Googley.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#78

Post by deegles »

mahyarm wrote: post #7
focusgroup0 wrote: post #3

Xoogler here. About a week after joining, and having partaken of the food, massages, meditation rooms, fitness centers, shuttle bus, sports facility, arcade, juice bar, tech stops, shwag etc. - I remember thinking to myself "whatever we do here must be ridiculously lucrative". There weren't signs of obvious waste (at least in my org.), and coming from other corporate gigs where you had to pay for coffee it really ope…

A lot of that stuff although is cheaper for the corporation to provide than for the employee to pay for themselves in money and time. The corp has a tax advantage and a bulk purchase advantage. Not having a payment infra probably adds a little bit of efficiency too.

It's even cheaper for the company to not provide them. Case in point: Amazon's paltry benefits.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#79

Post by bad_user »

inopinatus wrote: post #44
furyofantares wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google doesn't do what it does to be successful. It does it because it is successful. Those things aren't mutually exclusive and almost certainly are both true

The most pointed quote in the article is “No one wants to face the reality that this is an advertising company with a bunch of hobbies.” But without search, without Gmail, without Chrome, without Android, without the moonshots and all the "hobbies" Google's brand would wither, and its access to data at massive scale would be crippled, and its access to eyeballs would be curtailed, and the talent would walk. Others ha…

All of Google's products are complementary products that create lock-in.

For instance both Chrome and Android have been created with the purpose of controlling the underlying platform that people use, in order for them to not be at the mercy of the other platform owners, like Apple or Microsoft. And it worked.

This is very obvious to anybody with an interest in how microeconomics works. For example this is why open source can exist in a world where people need to struggle to put food on the table. It's basic knowledge: complementary goods and services are meant to increase demand for your cash cows.

But alas good journalism is dead.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#80

Post by drewmate »

VeejayRampay wrote: post #46

That Porat person is a serious contender for buzzkill of the year. Google makes tons of money with ads and spends it on geeky experiments to try to push a futuristic envelope (and create an environments where they can sell more ads, like a self-driving car) we'll all benefit from eventually and she gets to be the person that locks the toys away because "financial discipline".

To be fair, though, Google is a company that exists in a country where shareholders have the legal right to say how a company is run. Google (for better or worse) does not belong to the world, it belongs to its shareholders who _paid_ for the right to own a piece of the company. Even with Google's unique ownership structure mentioned in the article, Larry and Sergey are not immune from pressure from shareholders who might want to crack down a bit on corporate costs. There will always have to be a balance, and it doesn't look like Google is completely killing off its innovative culture, just trying to find a happy medium where it can do its thing and shareholders will still be happy.
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