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Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company

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Re: Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company

#141

Post by chrischen »

scarface74 wrote: post #122
bjelkeman-again wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t start one company. I would take a leaf out of Y Combinator’s book, and start funding lots a small startups, as well as advising them. I’d would attempt at investing in such a way that I create an ecosystem of companies that can learn from each other and support each other. I’d focus on climate resilience. Lots of current practices will be disrupted by changes we are already seeing. Easy? Probably not, but…

I wouldn’t start one company. I would take a leaf out of Y Combinator’s book, and start funding lots a small startups, as well as advising them There are only two YC companies that have gone public and both of those are still losing money -- PagerDuty and Dropbox and as far as I know, none have reached profitability.

Profitability=tax

Re: Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company

#142

Post by xchaotic »

high_derivative wrote: post #124
izzydata wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has no real advantages to buying a console because you still have to buy the games individually as they explained. It is no different than financing a gaming console except you could eventually pay it off unlike Stadia.

n=1 but I if were considering the two options, I would simply not want one that has me owning more electronic waste (console). I am not sensitive to the price either way, but I am sensitive to owning more electronics.

There’d be almost the same amount of electronics just sitting in Google’s servers. People don’t game 24/7 but if Google want to provision for peak loads like Christmas they can’t really get away with having less?

Re: Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company

#143

Post by earenndil »

aresant wrote: post #70
noego wrote: post #11

Finance 101: Being cash-rich is a major advantage in environments where fundraising is a major hurdle, and where the funds can be put to productive use very quickly. For example, for a startup to raise funds for a major marketing campaign, it has to go through a lengthy and attention-demanding process of pitching to VCs and negotiating terms. Hence why having a big war-chest ready to fire, can be a competitive advant…

“Google/Apple invest their cash hoard very conservatively, in things like short-term treasuries, because of which their returns are very low” This is actually wrong. Apple alone wholly owns one of the world’s largest investment funds - Braeburn Capital - that actively manages over $270b of Apples assets leveraging very sophisticated investment strategies. The extent to which managing its cash is now a value-add part…

Non-AMP url: https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-is-a-hedge-fund-that-make...

Re: Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company

#144

Post by xchaotic »

rpmisms wrote: post #99
MegaButts wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think Stadia is viable considering the lag? It's obviously worthless for competitive or even serious gamers. I am skeptical it will be enticing for casual gamers.

I'm going to sign up. I have a Pixel phone, I have an aging gaming laptop, and I want to continue play some new games. I'm not serious enough to be concerned by lag, and if it's awful, I'm out $129. Big deal.

Why not a PS4 hardly more expensive at this point?

Re: Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company

#145

Post by scarface74 »

chrischen wrote: post #141
scarface74 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t start one company. I would take a leaf out of Y Combinator’s book, and start funding lots a small startups, as well as advising them There are only two YC companies that have gone public and both of those are still losing money -- PagerDuty and Dropbox and as far as I know, none have reached profitability.

Profitability=tax

Are you really saying that these companies are losing money so they don't have to pay taxes?

Re: Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company

#146

Post by aduitsis »

This will come out as pure whining and probably off-topic, but how on Earth can they can have so much money (in cash no less) and at the same time can't sell some of their flagship products worldwide?

We're halfway through 2019, I'm sitting in a small eurozone country and still can't give them my money and order a Google Pixel properly from their site. Using this example because I consider a phone to be a relatively expensive device that probably generates a good profit over its lifetime. Other non-hardware products which produce smaller profits, such as activating a magazine subscription on the Google News application probably don't even register on their radar.

Apple, with all its failings, is always there and never misses the opportunity to ring the cash register. Sometimes they move slowly, but always make it eventually. Won't even go to non-hardware players like Netflix.

Come to think of it, maybe having so much cash is a mixed blessing for Alphabet, because it could be the actual cause if the above mentioned behaviour.

Re: Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company

#147

Post by siruncledrew »

ehsankia wrote: post #92
skybrian wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument relies on a fallacy of binary thinking: either you have ideas or you don't. It's perfectly fine to say that you have lots of investment ideas, but they don't add up to needing $100 billion to implement them. Especially when you are earning more cash every quarter.

Exactly, just because you have a lot of cash doesn't mean you should force investment into things that may not make sense. It's like if you had a huge buffet and force fed yourself until you threw up. If anything, Google probably gets flak for having too many ideas and being all over the place. People keep saying they need more focus, yet when they do that, they get accused of not having any more ideas...

Investors and board members would be way more wary of how the company is run if Google decided to do drastic things outside the scope of their core business (like Google Amusement Parks) for superfluous reasons, which would further make them lose money is the stock sinks.

At Google’s size they can invest a lot in R&D and product iterations, but because they are so big the innovation seems way less drastic relative to their size. Put it this way, if I put a new motor, deck, and paint on a small boat, it would seem like I did a lot, whereas if a giant cruise ship did the same thing, it wouldn’t really carry the same impact to outside viewers.

Re: Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company

#148

Post by formercoder »

aduitsis wrote: post #146

This will come out as pure whining and probably off-topic, but how on Earth can they can have so much money (in cash no less) and at the same time can't sell some of their flagship products worldwide? We're halfway through 2019, I'm sitting in a small eurozone country and still can't give them my money and order a Google Pixel properly from their site. Using this example because I consider a phone to be a relatively…

Presumably because making that product available in your region is not an NPV positive investment.

Re: Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company

#149

Post by chrischen »

scarface74 wrote: post #145
chrischen wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profitability=tax

Are you really saying that these companies are losing money so they don't have to pay taxes?

Yes most companies do that on the books, including movie productions, Amazon, etc. It’s not because their business model still doesn’t work, it’s because the point of corporate income tax is to make sure the corporation doesn’t hoard money and instead reinjects it into business expenses such as payroll.

Re: Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company

#150

Post by colechristensen »

skybrian wrote: post #58
wpasc wrote: post #4

This reminds me of a talk I watched with Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt. I know Thiel is controversial, but he was well-meaningly digging at Google for running out of ideas and no longer innovating. The criticism was something like "You have so much cash on hand but no ideas to invest in. However, you can't pay a dividend because the second you do, you're admitting you've run out of ideas and are no longer innovating".…

This argument relies on a fallacy of binary thinking: either you have ideas or you don't. It's perfectly fine to say that you have lots of investment ideas, but they don't add up to needing $100 billion to implement them. Especially when you are earning more cash every quarter.

This is a semantic argument which misses the point.

Let's rephrase:

Alphabet has far more cash than it has ideas, which is definitely a good sign that it is far past being classified an innovative company and stockpiling it can be seen as denial.

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