The fact that you linked to an amp version of the page, instead of the real link, is deeply disturbing to me.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...
Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment
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Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment
#12Google’s attempt to be a modern day Bell Labs was the one thing that set them apart. Make a lot of money in advertising and spend some of it to invent the future. Without the second part, the entire company changes. We need another company to take the mantle: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation...
Looks like the product/engineering/creative focused time of Google is giving way to the metric/marketing/MBA/McKinsey people for a fully pedal to the metal push into their Ballmer phase. When will technology/product/engineering/creative companies learn that the value creation is more important than the value extraction? With value creation there is always the ability to value extract. With value extraction the focus,…
I wish there was some paper that would quantify the dangers of this take over down into hard numbers, so that they could be used in the never ending internal civil wars of value creation vs value-usage.
In a ironic way though, this life-cycle reflects what we humans go through though. We have a fragile phase, where we must find our place, develop new things, risk it all, then we settle in, apply the learned things to our conquered niche and set to full cruise mode, to produce turtles eggs, to repeat the cycle.
So if a society wants to propell the exploration onwards, there are two ways. Eternal youth, as in never growing fully up, always replace aging elements with new rebelious and clueless young elements. The other, is acclerate the aging &reproduction period. For example allow for Managers, who can proof that there company is stagnant- has a stranglehold on a market, to split a sub-department from the main company (including IP) and thus accelerate the new turtle baby phase.
Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment
#13[dead]
Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment
#14As usual, I like Matt Levine's take. [1] Page and Brin ran Alphabet as a highly funded system of moonshot programs with near-infinite runway to make profits, which is unusual or unique. Basically it only worked that way because Page and Brin were idealistic visionary gazillionaires who were bored of thinking about the somewhat dirty business of selling targetted ads. With a more standard corporate governance under a…
That seems way more idealistic somehow. More likely, with a more standard corporate governance Google will begin to rot from within. Apple certainly made more profits under Cook than Jobs, but innovation has slowed to a crawl and he has failed to diversify Apple away from having one product (instead he just added a bunch of accessory products and services). The last thing Google needs is to double down on ads, it takes 2 minutes to block them.
Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment
#15The fact that you linked to an amp version of the page, instead of the real link, is deeply disturbing to me. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...
And I was very appreciative of the AMP version being posted. It made for a much better mobile viewing experience than the typical non-AMP experience from Bloomberg.
Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment
#16Google’s attempt to be a modern day Bell Labs was the one thing that set them apart. Make a lot of money in advertising and spend some of it to invent the future. Without the second part, the entire company changes. We need another company to take the mantle: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation...
Looks like the product/engineering/creative focused time of Google is giving way to the metric/marketing/MBA/McKinsey people for a fully pedal to the metal push into their Ballmer phase. When will technology/product/engineering/creative companies learn that the value creation is more important than the value extraction? With value creation there is always the ability to value extract. With value extraction the focus,…
Value creation is still around but they move from building it to buying it.
Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment
#17>Placing the head of Google, which contributes more than 99% of Alphabet’s sales, at the helm of it could call into question the entire purpose of Alphabet I think this gives a false impression of the value of the non Google bits of Alphabet Currently the market cap of Alphabet is $924bn and "Waymo is worth about $105 billion" ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-27/waymo-val... ) which would make that 1…
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Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment
#18>Placing the head of Google, which contributes more than 99% of Alphabet’s sales, at the helm of it could call into question the entire purpose of Alphabet I think this gives a false impression of the value of the non Google bits of Alphabet Currently the market cap of Alphabet is $924bn and "Waymo is worth about $105 billion" ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-27/waymo-val... ) which would make that 1…
The market cap of Waymo is $0 because it has no market cap.
[edit: note that the parent comment originally spoke to the `market cap' of Waymo before an edit, giving context to this reply]
An analyst independently made up a number, likely to justify an outsized Google target number. There have been rumors that Google will seek outside investments in Waymo that might legitimize some valuation, but they haven't.
And for now Waymo's revenue is estimated to be $5M. While Google's revenue is about $160,000M.
So I don't think they're giving a false impression of anything. Google has been pouring enormous sums of Adword cash into Waymo and it's still a stuttering business ten years later.
Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment
#19If they had assigned a new CEO for Google it could of not looked this way. However this looks bad especially when you hear "We the People" talk about how some of these tech giants need to be broken up. This is not going to help them. I wonder who the next Bell will be.[0]
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment
#20Any investor in Alphabet for the long term would hope this isn't the case. It also doesn't make sense at a time when some of their moonshots are looking as though they could pay off. (Eg. Waymo) That said, it makes sense from the Page/Brin perspective, perhaps. It's a lot more difficult to 10x a company that's already worth $Y billion. Perhaps better to start the ventures separately in a way that is more exciting to…
The problem is funding: let's say funding a self-driving project takes $5B-$10B and 15 years, until it starts to become a real, scalable business.
And that's probably optimistic.
Who will fund that ?
I wonder if Google was too ambitious. Maybe if they focused all the effort on making trucks that could only ride the highway safely, in limited conditions, they would have had a working business by now.