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Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

wsj.com

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Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#191

Post by ramzyo »

RomanBob wrote: post #190
ngold wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Are you referring to walking away from omelas? I don't see why people think that story is in anyway interesting or tragic. It's non-sensical, when reality isn't so. It's only deep if you have never read an account of a war or read history or basically know anything about how anything works outside of your suburb.

It would be more helpful to focus your comment on seeking to understand why the OP connects with the story than to put them down and imply that they've never read an account of war, history, or how things work outside of their own suburb.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#192

Post by puranjay »

skinnymuch wrote: post #121
puranjay wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't YouTube a separate entity under Alphabet, and not a part of Google? That alone would be a $100B company

It would be. But it doesn’t make money. Someone has to pay for it still.

With the number of ads I see, I doubt they don't make money

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#193

Post by abalone »

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…

This is a predictable response that is trivially wrong. Originally the iPhone required iTunes to set it up. Is it an “accessory”?

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#194

Post by abalone »

01100011 wrote: post #185
enitihas wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. People think that stuff like iPhone can just be created, if there is enough will and innovation. The iPhone is the most successful consumer electronics product of all time, and might also be the most profitable product on an yearly average basis. Failure to recreate that is not bad. Expecting any company to keep churning out things like the iPhone would be too harsh.

I dunno, but it seems like the iPhone was a product of many technological advances coming together at once, and Apple's key addition was to execute it in a way that made it appealing to the masses. So, I don't expect Apple to make a teleporter, or home fusion energy, or something that doesn't exist. I expect them to take something that is possible, like VR/AR, like videoconferencing, like IPTV.. even just computers a…

> I expect them to take something that is possible... and to execute them in a way that makes them the best designed product in the industry.

I mean they just did that with smart watches and earbuds, under Cook. They are totally dominating those categories with uncontroversially the best designed products. Not good enough for you?

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#195

Post by ksec »

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…

>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).

Apple has definitely slowed down quite a bit under Cook. But that is comparing from Apple's best to Current Apple. iOS 13 and macOS quality has definitely slipped. Along with the extremely long denial and no reaction pattern of Mac, Mac Pro and MacBook Pro Keyboard problems. But they are still Innovating like hell on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPod. Getting a decent iPhone out every year, which also happens to be the best selling Smartphone around the world is no small task. Services is also growing, although I am still not too fond of the idea of Apple TV, Arcade and News.

Those so call "bunch of accessory and services" would have been a Fortune 2000 company on its own, and likely to be Fortune 500 soon if not already.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#196

Post by bscphil »

abalone wrote: post #193
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…

This is a predictable response that is trivially wrong. Originally the iPhone required iTunes to set it up. Is it an “accessory”?

iTunes was released for Windows in 2003, so it was available for free on all major platforms. The iPhone was released in 2007. If iTunes had only been available on Macs, it would have been perfectly reasonable to consider the iPhone a "Mac accessory", but it wasn't, so it isn't.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#197

Post by bscphil »

crazygringo wrote: post #164
skinnymuch wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope no source. I’ve tried looking as well. I assume since it costs so much in infrastructure that Google lends for free to YouTube, and that they have never been able to announce nice numbers for YouTube, ever, that it likely doesn’t make a profit or break even. Especially after accounting for all the freebies Google provides YouTube.

I guess I just have a time believing it's in the red, considering the sheer quantity of advertising they show and the fact that video hosting itself isn't all that expensive (relative to the cost of showing an ad), and even cheaper given how cost-efficient Google's datacenters are. But also, given YouTube's astronomical growth over the past 15 years, I can also see it operating similar to Amazon -- not technically ma…

> video hosting itself isn't all that expensive

I would not be shocked to hear that video encoding is actually the biggest cost of running Youtube, much more than the hosting cost itself, at least when you factor in their close connection to Google's networking infrastructure that probably brings bandwidth cost way down.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#198

Post by mantap »

sneak wrote: post #172
enitihas wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. People think that stuff like iPhone can just be created, if there is enough will and innovation. The iPhone is the most successful consumer electronics product of all time, and might also be the most profitable product on an yearly average basis. Failure to recreate that is not bad. Expecting any company to keep churning out things like the iPhone would be too harsh.

Apple is Apple because every ten years or so they take an existing product category and make it worlds better than anyone has ever before. They’ve done this with workstations (iMac), laptops (iBook then PowerBook then unibody/retina), they’ve done this with phones, and they’ve done this with in-ear headphones. They almost did it with wireless speakers (the HomePod is an absolute engineering marvel, entirely unparalle…

HomePod flopped because few people want to spend hundreds of dollars on Siri when they could spend tens of dollars on Google home which is a better voice assistant. Having good audio quality doesn't explain the price tag when you can pair Google home with a dumb speaker if you find the audio quality is insufficient.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#199

Post by wbl »

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…

I bought a mac because I wanted a Unix workstation. That's increasingly unsupported and poorly working.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#200

Post by wbl »

enitihas wrote: post #58
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…

Correct. People think that stuff like iPhone can just be created, if there is enough will and innovation. The iPhone is the most successful consumer electronics product of all time, and might also be the most profitable product on an yearly average basis. Failure to recreate that is not bad. Expecting any company to keep churning out things like the iPhone would be too harsh.

How are you measuring success? I would say the digital quartz watch was far more disruptive and certainly moved more units. It's definitely consumer electronics.
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