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

Post by guycook » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 10:09 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #231

ChuckMcM wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eve…

""the magic is gone."" Not only is the magic gone, but the boring, day to day fabric of functionality is gone. Have you tried to really search for anything with google in the past five years ? I don't mean meandering, aimless, consumer-centric searches like "new fitness watch" where any result tangentally related is useful ... I mean a specific, meaningful, concise search with multiple keywords, all of which are key…

Post by niels_olson » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 10:12 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #231

ChuckMcM wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eve…

""the magic is gone."" Not only is the magic gone, but the boring, day to day fabric of functionality is gone. Have you tried to really search for anything with google in the past five years ? I don't mean meandering, aimless, consumer-centric searches like "new fitness watch" where any result tangentally related is useful ... I mean a specific, meaningful, concise search with multiple keywords, all of which are key…

Post by sdenton4 » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 10:16 PM UTC

RandomOpinion wrote: post #124

ChuckMcM wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eve…

> 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. One has only to look at Microsoft to see an example of what might happen. Things were very carefree there as well b…

Post by fred256 » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 10:19 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #139

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…

It reminds me of some place I heard about that had very generous patent bonuses, to the point where people would make more money filing for patents all day than their salary--so they would do the bare minimum to get their "official" job done and not get fired, and spend the rest of their time writing patents all day. Not sure if it was Google, but it's another example of incentive systems being gamed.

Post by adnzzzzZ » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 10:23 PM UTC

thearn4 wrote: post #97

matwood wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of Valve's no manager management style: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-04-27/why-there... When you have a lot of money, a lot of things work because you have a lot of money. You often see the same thing with people trying to emulate pro-athletes training methods. A genetically gifted pro-athlete can often succeed in spite of their training, and not necessarily because of their training.

The endless spigot of cash from Steam is something that does enable Valve to take some very experimental leaps (VR, Steam machines, SteamOS, etc.) In my opinion, Valve also has the same shortcomings as google: practically zero customer support, and an un-curated app platform full of shovelware (finding gems on the Steam and the Google Play & Chrome Web Stores can be tricky). But there is still a ton to admire in both…