161–170 of 230 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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".…
Investors want companies to invest where it makes competitive sense, in the amount that makes competitive sense, and return a dividend (or do buybacks) for all the cash beyond that.
Investors only invest for the dividend/buyback ultimately -- if it didn't exist, every stock would be valued $0.
I think it's perfectly clear to anyone that all of the tech Big 5 are plenty profitable enough to innovate plenty and also provide dividends/buybacks.
The criticism is perhaps valid for a company 1/100th the size of Google, or maybe even 1/10th... but certainly not current Google-size.
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".…
https://www.thebalance.com/why-dividend-stocks-outperform-no...
Also, is buying back stock really any different than a dividend? I would say that it is, but only in the sense that most of that buy back money gets transferred to employees in stock grants.
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 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.
In StarCraft, you always want to be at 0 minerals and 0 gas because that means you are maximizing your investment into buildings and units. People make fun of you if you don't have the skill to optimize for this.
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".…
Most academic research found that, overall, that dividend paying companies actually have more total return than non-paying companies. https://www.thebalance.com/why-dividend-stocks-outperform-no... Also, is buying back stock really any different than a dividend? I would say that it is, but only in the sense that most of that buy back money gets transferred to employees in stock grants.
Power-law distribution in stock-based compensation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This just struck me as the same reason UBI is a great policy for governments. Just distribute the cash people, you’re too big to allocate it well!
That's just an argument for lowering taxes.
It's both.
You don't tax people and then provide everyone with a free dog, you just let people keep their money and they'll use it to get a dog if they want one.
If you want to help the poor, you don't give them bureaucratic programs that require them to buy specific amounts and types of food, housing and education, you just give them the money and they can figure out what they need better than you. In that case some of the money came from different people than it went to, but it's still the same principle.
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".…
And when I say buy it also means invest internally in new technology.
And this has nothing to do with company's size.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once you get to Google or Apple scale, you’re essentially a government and run into the same problems with central planning that governments do. It’s absolutely the right move to return the money to shareholders and let them reallocate it to more economically promising endeavors. That doesn’t make a statement about innovation stagnation on the whole, it just reflects the reality of diminishing returns to scale.
Why not buy some companies and get some proper entrepreneurs back into the mix of management? I can't remember any recent major Google acquisitions. No mega company really has to have internal innovation. And I doubt the pretend internal startups ala skunkswork with an unlimited budget and extensive runways are a real replacement for innovation popping out of the marketplace among the bodies of a hundred other failed…
Because it's inefficient. Google could buy a thousand biotech startups that are all doing innovative work trying to cure cancer and things like that, but that work has nothing to do with search engines or data centers, so it makes no sense to put it under the same roof. The same management staff isn't going to be effective in managing both types of business, all it's going to do is split their focus.
But give the money to the shareholders and the ones who want to can use it to invest in biotech, others can invest in electric cars or new types of power generation or energy storage or space exploration or whatever else.
Using the profits from search engines to fund cancer research and space exploration is great. Running those businesses inside the search engine company is pointless.