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Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

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Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#141

Post by scarface74 »

petra wrote: post #110
abalone wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> innovation has slowed to a crawl This is so typical of Apple criticism. They did do well with the iPhone and Mac that now any new innovations seem boring in comparison. It’s wrong. The Apple Watch came out under Cook. That is more than an “accessory.” It’s a new platform, new OS variant, etc. It’s dominating smart watches. The AirPods are pretty innovative in terms of the fine grained details that have made them su…

// Their innovations are more around key details and hardware/software integration that makes the whole system work like magic. That philosophy was Steve Jobs' key insight back than. Today many companies excel at magical ux design. And sure, their control over iOS and their rich clients allow them to do stuff others cannot. And definetly, it's incremental innovation. But that's very little innovation, considering the…

How much have Google’s “innovations” led to profit?

People seem to forget that one of the first things Jobs did was get rid of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group and focused research on profitable products.

Google’s lack of focus explains why it has had five failed messaging apps.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#142

Post by andbberger »

tootie wrote: post #50
melling wrote: post #6

Google’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...

It's sorta what Elon Musk is doing except he's intending his moon shots to be viable businesses.

Except not really at all. Musk and co have a mandate to be profitable and don't have a vast advertising fortune to fund fundamental research with.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#143

Post by andbberger »

hooande wrote: post #102
melling wrote: post #6

Google’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...

It's possible that the idea of a Bell Labs is outdated, because individuals now have more access to information and cheap resources than they did in the 50s and 60s. Instead of needing a big company to bring the best minds together and give them money, random people in garages can have good ideas and build proof of concepts relatively easily. Maybe.

Information may be freer than ever but capital is more concentrated than ever. You can't do much without capital.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#144

Post by dang »

irrational wrote: post #11

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...

I changed the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21730007 and detached this subthread and marked it off topic.

Seriously off topic. There have been two huge threads about AMP in the last week and something like 9 of them in the last year: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#145

Post by scarface74 »

basch wrote: post #84
scarface74 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A “visionary” without any operations expertise is useless. Cook has as much to do with the rise of Apple as Jobs. Jobs wouldn’t have had the supply chain experience to manufacturer 100 million iPods at his height or all the products that it ships now.

and Pichai would still be there. I fully 100% agree, Cook is who scaled Apple. Whoever else decided to allow iTunes onto Windows should be shown a lot of respect as well. That was a very uncharacteristic and forward thinking move. Putting a visionary in the drivers seat of google doesnt mean that operations should be thrown to the wayside. And part of that pretense is paring down and refining what "google" is. GCP ob…

That’s true about GCP. I don’t care how good GCP is technically, I wouldn’t bet my career on it as either a person spending time developing on top of it or as a potential decision maker.

While I haven’t worked with Azure specifically besides what is now called “Azure Devops”, MS’s enterprise support is legendary.

I work for a company now that has AWS business support. I use the live chat all of the time as an “easy button”. Not when something is wrong, just when I don’t want to spend too much time trying to figure something out. They are excellent and batting close to 100.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#147

Post by scarface74 »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #69
abalone wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> innovation has slowed to a crawl This is so typical of Apple criticism. They did do well with the iPhone and Mac that now any new innovations seem boring in comparison. It’s wrong. The Apple Watch came out under Cook. That is more than an “accessory.” It’s a new platform, new OS variant, etc. It’s dominating smart watches. The AirPods are pretty innovative in terms of the fine grained details that have made them su…

> The Apple Watch came out under Cook. That is more than an “accessory.” It’s a new platform, new OS variant, etc. It’s dominating smart watches. The Apple Watch is literally designed to be an accessory to the iPhone - you can't use most of its features without an iPhone. I wanted one for my Android phone but tough shit for me. If you like it as a product that's fine, but it is absolutely an accessory to an iPhone be…

You can’t set it up without an iPhone. But, once you set it up - especially the cellular one, you can leave your phone at home. You can do anything on your watch that you can on your phone that would make sense on a screen that small. You can make phone calls, text, receive notifications, get directions, stream music and podcasts, etc.

As of the latest OS you can download apps directly to it.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#148

Post by scarface74 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #95
OnlineGladiator wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Apple Watch came out under Cook. That is more than an “accessory.” It’s a new platform, new OS variant, etc. It’s dominating smart watches. The Apple Watch is literally designed to be an accessory to the iPhone - you can't use most of its features without an iPhone. I wanted one for my Android phone but tough shit for me. If you like it as a product that's fine, but it is absolutely an accessory to an iPhone be…

iPhones were originally an accessory to iTunes. What you complain about is all software. Software is changeable.

The iPad even required iTunes to set up for the first year and half.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#149

Post by kgwgk »

sowbug wrote: post #53
dylan604 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And for now Waymo's revenue is estimated to be $5M. While Google's revenue is about $160,000M. Why the decision to write $160,000M vs $160B? Was it so the same as the previous $5M number? Even still, it seems unnatural to me.

As topkai22 said, it's to make the author's comparison easy to understand. But this is a chance to mention that ~50 years ago the UK abandoned its old "billion" terminology, which used to be equivalent to a trillion elsewhere (10^12), and adopted the global definition of "billion" as 10^9. I think they called 10^9 a milliard, but I've never seen it in use. For a long time after the change, you'd see English written f…

> and adopted the global definition of "billion"

What's your definition of global?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_...

Edit: I guess you meant global as far as the English language is concerned only, ignoring the equivalent words in other languages. But even that would be wrong, as apparently Australia adopted the American usage after the UK.

In any case, it's interesting that the US diverged from the European use following the French (who since then went back to the original meaning of billion).

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#150

Post by riffraff »

mantap wrote: post #14
dzdt wrote: post #5

As 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 tak…

> he has failed to diversify Apple away from having one produc

isn't Apple+ the largest diversification Apple has had in a long time?

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