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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

#151

Post by ngold »

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…

"There is a bit of a walking-away-from-Omelas element to this—you get to think about driverless cars and human immortality because in some dingy basement ad metrics are being tortured—and it was a lot easier to forget the, uh, all the internet stuff in 2015 than it is in 2019."

One of the best and most tragic short fiction stories ever written. It is scary how accurate the metaphor is.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#152

Post by hash872 »

andbberger wrote: post #142
tootie wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Famously, neither of his companies are even remotely profitable, and he has one of the most prominent reputations in the world to help him raise endless investor funds- either from private investors or retail ones. Both of his companies have been burning cash for close to two decades now! To my understanding SpaceX- which just raised another funding round despite never being profitable for a minute- doesn't even have a realistic path to profitability other than a handwavey 'we'll somehow establish a global wireless Internet from satellites' sort of plan

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#153

Post by smacktoward »

scarface74 wrote: post #65
mantap wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Since Tim has taken charge, they’ve become much more diversified. The watch and the AirPod business is larger and will probably be longer lasting than the iPod business, the iPad is much more than a big iPhone, and they are in services. Compare this chart to Google’s https://sixcolors.com/images/content/2019/financials-2019-7-... The iPhone was a once in a lifetime thing. Even in 2007 there were 1 billion phones a ye…

I made another chart back in 2016 to show how over a decade the iPhone became such a truly once-in-a-lifetime product: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/apple-...

(As an illustration for this post: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/10/why-apple-doesnt-care-abo...)

By 2009 Apple's iPhone business was larger than its personal computer business. By 2011 it was larger than all of Apple's other businesses put together. By 2015 it was several times larger than all of Apple's other businesses put together.

Which is why, even though I'm not the world's biggest Apple fan, it always amuses me to hear people complain that Tim Cook hasn't pulled another iPhone out of his hat. The iPhone was the kind of hit that only comes along every two or three decades. I'm struggling to think of anyone who's produced two hits on that scale.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#154

Post by leetcrew »

abalone wrote: post #34
mantap wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

some of the stuff they do really is stupid. I literally can't buy an apple computer with a mainstream desktop processor. they sell laptops and two different desktop computers that use laptop parts. or I can pay $6k for the pro tower with xeon parts. why do they have to make it so hard for me to get a machine that compiles code targeting their own desktop OS?

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#156

Post by smacktoward »

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.

Basic research is still very expensive. The "two guys in a garage" model is about reaping the fruits of basic research, e.g. taking something invented in a lab somewhere and turning it into an actual product. Take away the labs, though, and you're taking away the seeds that the people in the garages plant, water and serve up on plates.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#157

Post by basch »

scarface74 wrote: post #145
basch wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

>Not when something is wrong, just when I don’t want to spend too much time trying to figure something out.

That is how support should work in general. Support has become so much "thats outside the scope of your contract" or "blame other vendor" instead of a shortcut to training. If my provider has already seen a problem I've run into, its in their best interest to get me moving again, so I can use more of their product and extend their tentacles further into my business.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#158

Post by scarface74 »

smacktoward wrote: post #153
scarface74 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since Tim has taken charge, they’ve become much more diversified. The watch and the AirPod business is larger and will probably be longer lasting than the iPod business, the iPad is much more than a big iPhone, and they are in services. Compare this chart to Google’s https://sixcolors.com/images/content/2019/financials-2019-7-... The iPhone was a once in a lifetime thing. Even in 2007 there were 1 billion phones a ye…

I made another chart back in 2016 to show how over a decade the iPhone became such a truly once-in-a-lifetime product: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/apple-... (As an illustration for this post: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/10/why-apple-doesnt-care-abo... ) By 2009 Apple's iPhone business was larger than its personal computer business. By 2011 it was larger than all of Apple's other business…

Also look at Apple’s product and revenue mix since 2007. They have consistently been able to change it as technology changed.

If you look at Google’s revenue and profit mix, it looks the same as it did in 2007 - advertising.

Microsoft and Apple have been able to pivot. Even while the Mac is only 10% of Apple’s revenue, even it has grown slowly throughout the years.

Another note from your article - Apple sold $23 Billion dollars worth of Macs in 2016.

Between 2010 - 2016. Google has only made $31 billion in revenue on Android (https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...).

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#159

Post by TheCoelacanth »

drawkbox wrote: post #82
scarface74 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon retail is still a low margin, low profit business and is not a good example. AWS on the other hand is printing money. Google hasn’t had a non advertising based hit besides maybe Android since it’s inception and even that has only made $23 billion a year in profit from its inception until the Oracle trial where the number was revealed.

The low margin e-commerce led to massive innovations and improvements including their services architecture that became their biggest product and the first to market in the cloud. AWS was created out of the continual re-investment by Bezos back into Amazon. Amazon also has many acquisitions from it and associated to all their businesses: IMDB, Twitch, Zappos, Whole Foods, etc. Google with search, maps and mobile won…

> Yep, only $23 billion, horrible. /s

For something supposedly worth almost $1 trillion, it's not great. If you bought Google and then kept the profits, it would take 28 years before you broke even. That's longer than the company has even existed.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#160

Post by summerlight »

Larry and Sergey still holds more than 51% of voting stocks. IMO, this is the only thing that matters unless they delegate all the decisions to Sundar. Although I expect "other bets" to be forced to evolve into more realistic businesses but no radical structural changes.

And another thing to consider is that a significant portion of Alphabet's value already comes from potential growth of "other bets" (e.g. Waymo). The major driver of digital ads' growth has been cannibalization of traditional media ads budget. This is no way sustainable over the next decade so the growth will be eventually saturated. Unless Google can find another strong driver (Maybe Cloud?), it's pretty natural to keep investing "other bets".

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