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.
imo Stadia needs to switch to a Netflix style subscription-model to be financially viable (from a consumer standpoint)
I don't think it is out of the realm of possibility and I see them taking the same path as Netflix currently. They are launching with big games that people know, but they need to get people hooked with new exclusive games, and a bunch of cheap stuff so they can have the "Play 10k games for $X/month" marketing tagline.
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.
I realize that, but the companies I’m referring to - the VC backend companies and the YC backed public companies aren’t cash flow positive.
Personal conspiracy theory: these tech companies are sitting on their piles of cash waiting for the next recession so they can go on a shopping spree for all the cheap startups unable to raise any further rounds and unprofitable IPO'd unicorns crashing on the stock market
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
I would call income tax a good problem to have, one which these companies don't have
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 played 30 hours of assassins creed on stadia during the beta and I didn't notice any lag, so yes.
Go play some CS:GO or Overwatch and get back to me.
Personal conspiracy theory: these tech companies are sitting on their piles of cash waiting for the next recession so they can go on a shopping spree for all the cheap startups unable to raise any further rounds and unprofitable IPO'd unicorns crashing on the stock market
This is USD? I know it seems like a doomsday scenerio, but if the US goes through a moderate hyperinflation, do these companies die?
If the economy was hyper-inflating large institutions and corporations would be the first to trade their cash for other securities and assets like real estate.
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".…
When you invest large sums into a new long term project it gets in as capex in your quarterly results, significantly altering your balance sheets and missing analyst expectations. There are tons of ambitious projects companies can invest in including medical research (ex. cancer medicines), communication networks (ex. ubiquitous wifi), transportation networks (ex. flying cars, underground tunnels), space (ex. astroid mining, zero-g manufacturing), robotics etc. Most of them will need a tremendous amount of capital and very long term vision. Typically stock market would support projects with low to medium capex and high payouts in near to medium term. Everything else would tank your stock. There is no dearth of interesting challenges and ambitious ideas but the way we have setup public companies, quarterly results and analyst expectations of continous growth simply doesn't allow big capital expenditures.
How about just spending a few tens of thousands making Gmail fast again?
What makes you think that'd only cost tens of thousands?
Well, for starters it used to be fast (so we know it can be done and they have the source code to reference), so I imagine a couple of months of dev time (tens of thousands?) would be enough to make significant improvements.