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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

#81

Post by flinty »

cooper12 wrote: post #31

I'm no businessman, but does anyone else feel this will kill a lot of potential innovation? Not every project pays dividends immediately, and some are worth pursuing even at a long-term loss. (imagine if we all had fiber today and bandwidth was ridiculously abundant. Just how different would the internet be, just as when electricity became abundant?) Also I understand that Google is a business, but the need for a bus…

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. Short(shorter than usualy for Google) term financial motives kill any far fetched ideas from ever having a chance. Wall Street demands up and to the right movement every 3 months. Companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple try to have their own internal cadence of some goals in 3-5 years. Google had 10+ year projects but from the sounds of this article and what has been happening in the past year or so that leash is being shortened drastically. Sad day but I guess every company has to eventually grow up. Maybe another contender will emerge for long range innovation.

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

#82

Post by __derek__ »

Afforess wrote: post #71
smallnamespace wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You sound like someone who's read The Black Swan. If you haven't, though, you probably don't need to.

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

#84

Post by ForHackernews »

Afforess wrote: post #38

Google has a fundamental problem with solving challenging issues, especially those in the realm of physical "meat-space". Really hard problems, problems that might reveal that Google is not omnipotent, where Google might not succeed, Google pulls back from. In areas where Google is, Google dominates the landscape. In all others, Google does not deign to participate. If Google can't dominate a market, it is not intere…

> Really hard problems, problems that might reveal that Google is not omnipotent, where Google might not succeed, Google pulls back from.

I've heard this phrased as "Google has the good fortune to be operating in a field where being 90% right 90% of the time is more than good enough"

If the search result you want is number 3 instead of number 1, that's totally acceptable. If your ad-targeting is good but not perfect, you can still make enormous amounts of money.

There are other domains where 90%/90% is absolutely unacceptable: avionics, medical life support, rocket propulsion, etc.

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

#85

Post by MrZongle2 »

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".

Buzzkill? Sure.

But she also sounds like one of the few responsible adults in the place with a hand on the purse-strings, whose job is to ensure that there is an Alphabet and Google in 10 years, shiny toys be damned.

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

#86

Post by xxs »

Naritai wrote: post #23
gph wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which does seem like sort of a loophole. Don't companies have to add perks over a certain amount to the employees pay so that it gets taxed? Wouldn't feeding an employee every day qualify? It would be sort of weird if we turn back into having sort of 'company towns' where your employer provides a lot of what you need except they pay for it. It's not just Google this would be beneficial for, even if you run a factory…

I one spoke with a woman from the Netherlands who was surprised that these perks are not taxable. According to her, in the Netherlands perks like shuttles to work or company-provide food are taxable.

Taxable throughout the EU [probably the entire EU]. In most cases it amounts to full income + social tax - just like salary (except it doesn't count for retirement). There could be some exceptions like drinking water but overall it's considered hidden salary.

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

#87

Post by xxs »

pkaye wrote: post #34
Naritai wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I one spoke with a woman from the Netherlands who was surprised that these perks are not taxable. According to her, in the Netherlands perks like shuttles to work or company-provide food are taxable.

What if the company had a business meeting and lunch was provided?

If it involves clients, then you need the paperwork and may save on part of the VAT + part of the money could be considered expense. Usually it can be quite complex and it's not harmonized in the EU.

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

#88

Post by mattmcknight »

brilliantcode wrote: post #70

I feel like Google is still stuck in 2005. Not much has changed from top of my head. All of their products are still based on their end-user being the product since everything is free and people expect it to be that way. I don't see anything changing because they are literally printing money from their monopoly on online advertising. They have no serious competition and no, Facebook is not really great for targeted a…

"All of their products are still based on their end-user being the product since everything is free" Counterexamples: GSuite (fka Google Apps) Google Pixel Google Home Google Wifi Google Cloud Platform

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

#89

Post by bzbarsky »

michaelvoz wrote: post #8
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it's amazing how profitable vacuuming up users' private data without their informed consent and monetizing it can be.

You must be a joy at parties. How is any of the data private when you willingly use their tools, sites, servers, etc? You open up google.com and type things in, what privacy do you expect? Or am I missing something you are referring to?

And the people who ended up with Chrome installed and set as their default browser because they installed some other application (like Flash) were using Chrome willingly, right?

Yes, Google was doing that sort of thing for Chrome distribution for a while. They've stopped since, which is better than nothing, I guess. [Edit: apparently they haven't stopped, according to ocdtrekkie's comment! Or maybe they have started again.]

Point is, a lot of people are NOT using Google's products willingly. They may be using them because someone else set them up with the product and they don't know how to change, they may be using it because they're required to for work (Google docs, e.g.).

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

#90

Post by smacktoward »

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…

But those are different classes of bets, no? I mean, Tesla makes cars, and a self-driving car is still a car. Google's primary business has nothing to do with cars. Their "X" bets are in completely orthogonal fields from their primary business. They are (in theory, anyway) hedges against a complete collapse of that primary business, while Tesla's is more evolving their primary business to position it for the future.

Which is not to say that Tesla is Doing It Wrong -- I personally am a much bigger fan of focused, iterative improvement than of wasteful throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall "moon shots." It just feels unfair to compare the two.

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