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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

#111

Post by rokhayakebe »

throwaway729 wrote: post #69
inopinatus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Google's dominance in advertising couldn't occur without the product mix. This is absolutely accurate. Google is what it is because google.com is the best search engine in the world and because GMail is the best web-based mail client -- free or otherwise.

free or otherwise.

Correct, which is why many people have gmail for personal use and google apps gmail for professional.

I can't use Outlook or Yahoo Mail; that's not due to a lack of trying.

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

#112

Post by georgespencer »

There's an interesting fiscal corollary of having unbridled ambition matched by enormous firepower which brings the world's smartest engineers and hackers together: a Xoogler who was early in the business once told me about how engineers would hack/exploit the travel allowance policy.

Google allowed folks to book their own flight and accommodation, and had an algorithm which determined rewards for folks travelling with financial efficiency.

The measure of 'financial efficiency' was an invisible coefficient tied to average hotel and flight prices in an area. So if the average cost of a trip from Mountain View to Boston for three days was $1,500, and you managed to do it for less, then you got back a cut of the difference either as a cash bonus or in points to spend on upgrades for hotels and flights.

After a while someone realised that a group of engineers were consistently booking shitty travel around the same time, and then travelling first class the rest of the year.

They had worked out what the algorithm was doing, and started scraping hotel prices themselves. They booked (spurious) cheap earlybird flights and hotels during conference season in various cities, sometimes years in advance, and took huge numbers of internal points from doing so.

The person describing the situation to me said there was a lot of discussion as to whether they should be fired or rewarded.

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

#113

Post by pageld »

digi_owl wrote: post #19

Best i recall, the Glass problem was more Brin over-hyping than the tech itself. And i do not recall reading about the car getting into trouble while under computer control. Either someone ran into it or it ran into something while human operated.

The car actually did hit a bus while in autonomous mode. To me, it was an odd situation though. The lane the car was in was for parked cars as well as traffic and it was ending at a turn lane or something. http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-video-google-car...

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

#114

Post by enraged_camel »

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…

>>Google has a fundamental problem with solving challenging issues, especially those in the realm of physical "meat-space".

Actually, before you get to the other examples you gave, there is another aspect of that, which is the social aspect. Think about Google Glass. That project, and its failure, really opened my eyes to the reality of Google: that it is one giant bubble, and the people living in that bubble don't comprehend what it is like to not be in it.

When I first read about Google Glass, the very first thing I thought of was, "man, people are going to find this thing waaay too intrusive." I ended up being right. When stories started coming out about Google Glass wearers being asked to not wear them in public places, Google realized the project was a failure, so they canned it.

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

#115

Post by throwaway98237 »

bad_user wrote: post #79
inopinatus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

"All of Google's products..." and there are many "create lock-in." so very true

How have there been no anti-trust related issues here?!

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

#116

Post by sahaj »

bad_user wrote: post #79
inopinatus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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

I disagree. Chrome was created to be a standards based browser, Android to unify the different phone operating systems circa 2004. I picked Google products because they allowed me to get out if I needed to. Gmail provides IMAP, POP. Docs and Music let you take out your data as needed. Google intentionally creates a way to get your data out. All of these things require foresight and work to pull off.

Does the lock-in exist because no one else is offering the same service? Potentially. But the intention of the company when they created these services was to create the best service, not a lock-in service.

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

#117

Post by LiweiZ »

I think Google has been trying to somewhat imitate how life under nature selection works. Bring basic-but-extensiable-happy-route-scoped projects to life to test markets and wait and see which one would have the DNA for the next boom. From this perspective, I think they actually allocate their resources very carefully and intelligently. But the next emerging DNA perhaps needs more than just luck. Maybe more persistent and focused effort. I guess W. Brian Arthur's work has not small influence on its strategy. In fact, if I recall correctly, he is/was some kind of advisor to Google. Just my personal speculation.

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

#118

Post by ChuckMcM »

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…

This is exactly correct. If you have a printing press that is dumping a couple of billon dollars into the basement every quarter in spite of what you're spending, you have the luxury of trying all sorts of novel things from a business perspective.

That said, the margins on the search advertising business are shrinking, and have been for years now. You can cover for that by eliminating profligate spending and then eventually you can't. I think Ruth is the right person to handle that transition but its going to hurt in terms of people feeling that "the magic is gone."

When that happens, Google is going to have to start rewarding operational efficiency gains at least as strongly as they currently reward popular science project type gains. And then it will be very interesting to see how they change and if the era of "but Google offers its employees ..." will be over.

I hope the free sodas stay though.

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

#119

Post by AlgorithmicTime »

MicroBerto wrote: post #110
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 they make money along the way Only killing a few people in the process, but hey who am I to judge?

But fewer than the number who would be killed in Tesla cars if the cars lacked the self-driving features.

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

#120

Post by danielvinson »

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.

Shuttles are a weird area even in the U.S. - When I worked as a contractor at Google I was required to pay for shuttle use since Google couldn't write off benefits provided to non-employees.
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