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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

#201

Post by mantap »

scarface74 wrote: post #189
mantap wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many Android users buy Apple watches and airpods? They are primarily accessories to the iPhone, not standalone products. What limits Apple to the electronics market? It's been clear for a long time that they need to grow outside of electronics. Apple's value is in its design and brand. They could be so much more than an electronics company, under different leadership.

And how has that worked in the past? AOL/TimeWarner General Electric/Universal/Synchrony Bank AT&T/DirecTV Google/Motorola ....

Those are mergers and acquisitions. I said Apple needs to find new product categories outside of consumer electronics. They were going to make a car at one point but the project imploded.

It's really not healthy for a company to build a whole constellation of products and services around one product only. It creates unnecessary risk because if that product ever sours, everything will fall apart.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#202

Post by hobofan »

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…

Yes, the amount of ads on some of the videos has grown, but overall I think the amount of money they make per popular video has shrunk significantly.

The amount of people using ad-blockers had increased a lot and there have been a lot of demonetization events where the bar for acceptable (advertiser-friendly) content has been raised. This also caused a lot of creators to move their income streams to merch or Patreon, sometimes even fully disabling advertising on their videos.

Still just conjecture, just wanted to point out that there have been a lot of things that hurt Youtube's ability to monetize despite their good growth.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#203

Post by hobofan »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #77
repsilat wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I'm sure a lot of people think the opposite, and that only proves your point more.

As someone intimately familiar with the world of self-driving cars (and their investors, and their enthusiasts) - yes. There are many people who believe Waymo is going to be ridiculously valuable because they are certain (almost always based on being wildly misinformed) that it is going to magically blanket the planet in robotaxis in a handful of years. I would love to short Waymo. And now that Sergei is no longer th…

> And now that Sergei is no longer there to shield it from Ruth Porat

Both Larry and Sergei are still on the board, so I don't see what changed? If you are thinking along that route, wouldn't it be more important what Sundar Pichai's opinion on Waymo is?

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#204

Post by stephenr »

dang wrote: post #144
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...

So maybe that should inform the powers that be, that the canonical URL should be the one that's used by default?

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#206

Post by skinnymuch »

puranjay wrote: post #192
skinnymuch wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But no one figure out if they actually make a profit. And they themselves have never announced breaking even or profitability.

Along with that, if you take away the massive subsidies they get with Google’s infrastructure, and the money they split with music studios and makers. I don’t see profitability being the case.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#207

Post by skinnymuch »

bscphil wrote: post #197
crazygringo wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah that’s why I assume almost no other company could handle running YouTube without massive losses because they won’t have the infrastructure. The two major Chinese co’s and ~5-7 American companies could probably handle running it without costs going out of control.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#208

Post by petra »

scarface74 wrote: post #184
petra wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selling ads does speak nothing of diversification. In 2001 Google probably only sold search ads. Today they sell ads on so many digital places, some of those they own. As for the question of "long term" - Google X was founded only 9 years ago. That probably a reasonable time for a drug startup to show sucsess. And they recently started testing self-driving cars with no safety driver , with real passengers. So they're…

In the last 9 years, Apple has introduced two products that are probably larger generators of revenue than the iPod. Microsoft has released Azure. Saying that a Google sells ads in more places is about as “diversified” as saying Apple sells iPhones on more carriers.

In 2001 Google didn't own YouTube. Today it does.

YouTube profits from selling ads, that's true.

Yes YouTube makes all of their money from selling ads. But it's fate is highly independent from Google search. That's diversification.

Same idea goes for Other Google businesses.

As for Apple - it's less diversified than it seems: the fate of the watch, for example, is highly dependent on the fate of the iPhone.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#209

Post by OnlineGladiator »

hobofan wrote: post #203
OnlineGladiator wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone intimately familiar with the world of self-driving cars (and their investors, and their enthusiasts) - yes. There are many people who believe Waymo is going to be ridiculously valuable because they are certain (almost always based on being wildly misinformed) that it is going to magically blanket the planet in robotaxis in a handful of years. I would love to short Waymo. And now that Sergei is no longer th…

> And now that Sergei is no longer there to shield it from Ruth Porat Both Larry and Sergei are still on the board, so I don't see what changed? If you are thinking along that route, wouldn't it be more important what Sundar Pichai's opinion on Waymo is?

I think Larry and Sergei have been slowly removing themselves from Google/Alphabet over the past several years. You're right about Sundar having a large say in the matter, but he seems focused on search and AI (Waymo is not AI - I am too lazy to argue why right now). Ruth Porat, however, has always had it out for the projects at X - and Waymo is the big one that hemorrhages money (even by Alphabet standards) and makes pathetic revenue (even by non-Alphabet standards).

The screws are definitely going to tighten, moreso than they already have. The majority of the original talent that made up Waymo left years ago - that doesn't happen when you're on the brink of an actual breakthrough that can truly transform the world for the better. If Waymo can't pull a rabbit out of its hat, it's going to the Google graveyard. This isn't going to play out immediately, it will take a few years.

Re: Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

#210

Post by petra »

xyzzyz wrote: post #137
petra wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Softbank has dumped $10B in WeWork, a glorified office rental company. If you think there are no investors willing to put $10B in self driving cars, you might still be living in 2005.

Wow man, $10B into wework ? That's really fucked up.

And you're right, about self driving cars and that i'm still living in 2005 :)

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