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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

#191

Post by e15ctr0n »

muninn_ wrote: post #153
jasode wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Many companies are able to get the perks, culture, and autonomy right without being a multi-billion dollar company. You're right but I understood what Periodic intended to explain. Unfortunately, he phrased it as "billions in ad revenue" instead of a less common metric of "profit-per-employee" . If the company generates enough profit-per-employee , it can afford to pay for lavish perks. Consider 2 different companie…

So I understand what you're saying here, and it makes sense. At the same time, I see career section after career section offering the same kind of perks with much smaller companies. Maybe it's not 3 meals of gourmet food, but free catered lunches, great 401k matching, unlimited vacation, great health and dental benefits. I'm not saying the perks are matched tit-for-tat, but I still stand by my statement that you don'…

> I see career section after career section offering the same kind of perks with much smaller companies. [...] you don't have to be a multi-billion dollar company to afford those perks.

Many of these smaller companies are VC-funded startups that have zero revenue and are burning VC money to provide these perks.

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

#192

Post by htrp »

georgespencer wrote: post #112

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 wi…

Any incentive system you develop will be gamed.

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

#193

Post by blackguardx »

ravitation wrote: post #61
espadrine wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. That said, Apple's phone was successful against established manufacturers, and Android won without having to build a phone at all.

iPod to iPhone was certainly not 0 to 1.

I'm an electrical engineer and know people who were on the first iPhone team. I think it was about as close to 0 to 1 as you get in a big company like that.

I worked for a major RF test and measurement company when the first iPhone came out and everyone was blown away that a company could design and tool up production for a cell phone without tipping anyone off in the industry.

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

#194

Post by htrp »

GCA10 wrote: post #57

Big companies seem to step in the same puddle, every time they try to set up one of these "breakthrough incubator" projects. They pick fascinating projects. They hire lots of smart people and give them great autonomy. But they inadvertently set up incentives that lead to the repeated creation of LINS (lavishly impractical non-solutions). And then the plug gets pulled. I think the key problem is that the research team…

Secret investment (or VC it out). Reputational risk is a real thing.

I do wonder how much coverage glass would have gotten had it not had the Google halo around it.

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

#195

Post by dmix »

sbov wrote: post #169
user5994461 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'm making the point that they executed well because of what they are, and were from the start. Google didn't suddenly transformed to being Google overnight the day they reached the first $1B.

How many successful companies do the exact opposite of Google? Have you done any research to determine which company succeeded: in spite of, because of, or no effect, from these models? What about the - surely - hundreds or thousands of companies that failed with Google (or not Google's) model? Trying to imitate success seems to turn into a cargo cult. For whatever reason people seem to shutoff their brains when talk…

Most of the attributes in question (office environment, perks, etc) are just semantics around the product/market. The semantics matter a lot especially when your team is critically dependent on a high-turnover potential staff and require talented smart people to stick with your company, or they need an environment that helps them be creative and think out hard problems.

It's similar to questions of programming language, infrastructure options, etc. They are important supportive aspects to the core business but mostly the core of the business could still operate even if those supportive aspect were mediocre/non-optimal - just not as effectively. On a longer time scale that stuff starts to matter in a highly-competitive market.

Most startups and small businesses don't really have those issues, or at least they aren't critical at that stage of the company when the core business hasn't been figured out. So emulating them at a high cost is a bad idea.

The context of everything is important. Sadly most advice dolled out in business books is extracted and formalized without considering the context of where it worked and why.

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

#196

Post by civilian »

BoysenberryPi wrote: post #183
shuntress wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't use steam to find gems. Steam is just where you go to buy them.

Someone said this on another forum and I disagree with them as I disagree with you. I've found plenty of games through Steam that I wouldn't have known about otherwise.

I also find games through Steam, but I do wish I found games through a different avenue. I've also had to promise myself that I'd strongly vet any early-access games I was buying. I've just been burned too many times.

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

#197

Post by mikebay »

They violate everyone's privacy, selling your information to anyone, spying you and hiding search results...

Haha, go home Google. Your business is censorship and fake news. Pay your taxes to countries!

Did I forgot to mention also that they are regulars in Bilderberg meetings. Lol!

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

#198

Post by euyyn »

nunez wrote: post #154
euyyn wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google, as a company, doesn't really seem to have any idea of what most individual engineers are doing week to week. This isn't true. Even I, as a software engineer, can look up with ease what the majority of other people work on.

I hope you're not talking about peoples OKRs or internal profiles on Grow or whatever it's called now because you know that stuffs not accurate

Wasn't thinking of those, no.

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

#199

Post by ScottBurson »

drcross wrote: post #181
euyyn wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This isn't what happened. The first iteration of Google self-driving cars, the modified Lexus', had wheels alright. What Google found and told the industry was "almost autonomous seems to be more dangerous than not autonomous at all", explained by the driver getting b…

Ugh. The sooner Tesla pass by the "we're safer than human drivers" mark the better because hearing stories about how a single guy who died, while absolutely tragic, is getting tedious when put in context of the the vast number of regular deaths on the road. My heart only bleeds so much for a guy I never met, who took a chance that he knew the risks of, when considering the grander goal at play here.

The problem is, a human driver wouldn't have had any trouble avoiding that accident -- the truck was visible for some distance.

It's not just about the overall fatality rate per mile. Self-driving cars also need to not have any accidents that humans would have easily avoided. Until they demonstrate that, they're not going to be widely accepted.

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

#200

Post by bduerst »

cobookman wrote: post #187
Animats wrote: post #164

“No one wants to face the reality that this is an advertising company with a bunch of hobbies.” Remember Nokia. They produced mobile phones with excellent quality, extreme ruggedness, good battery life, and good voice quality. Their manufacturing was highly automated and their costs were low. They focused on their core business. Recently, their CEO said "We did everything right, and we lost anyway". On the other hand…

what about cloud & gsuite? Hardly a failure.

Or Play store. I think Alphabet's other revenues is up to 11% now, it's just not growing as fast as ad rev is.
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