61–70 of 108 posts
As far as I can tell, this is the first time Google has reported YouTube Ad and Google Cloud revenues as separate line items.
It's a red herring designed to distract from the fact they missed ad revenue estimates by $800M. Lol at getting downvoted. They missed on revenue and down -5% after hours. This is a fact, not an opinion.
It is interesting to see the low revenue, slow revenue growth (~20% YoY), and quickly growing expenses from "Other Bets". If the Alphabet model made sense, I'd expect to see a company starting to clearly take off after 5 years. The data shows the opposite.
People constantly criticizing companies not taking long-term bets. When some company does take long-term bets, then some internet expert come along and find some arbitrary timeline to succeed without any justification and start criticizing without offering anything any substantial. I wish we can have more thoughtful discussion, instead of Twitter style self aggrandizing comments.
Back when I was at Google, X (which many Other Bets came from) had a goal of all their projects having meaningful impact in 10 years. They've been working on Wing and Waymo for close to 10 years now. Those projects are not yet meaningfully impacting many people.
As an armchair CEO, I have doubts about the compensation (more salary / less equity vs startups) and funding (fewer choices funding sources for the companies, weird incentives for the investors vs VC funds) model for "Other Bets". Based off of that and the lack of results, I think they should force the Other Bets to stand on their own vs handing them more cash to burn.
I miss those days when people had nothing but nice things to say about Google, which was supposed to destroy the evil, not join them.
I'm curious, what are they doing different now from then? Back then they had an ad business, and now they have an ad business. Back then they created useful services like Maps, Translate or Gmail, now they provide useful services like Photos, Docs and Drive. What are they doing now that is "joining the evil" which they weren't doing before? Is your point about the fact that people's perception has changed? People the…
back then, they had lots of cool products, and they also served ads. now they have ads and lots of products the siphon data from users to feed the ads business.
I say this as someone worked there for a decade and saw lots of "NSA - not search or ads" t-shirts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious, what are they doing different now from then? Back then they had an ad business, and now they have an ad business. Back then they created useful services like Maps, Translate or Gmail, now they provide useful services like Photos, Docs and Drive. What are they doing now that is "joining the evil" which they weren't doing before? Is your point about the fact that people's perception has changed? People the…
I think it's that, now, everything is to feed the ad business while back in the day, it wasn't. back then, they had lots of cool products, and they also served ads. now they have ads and lots of products the siphon data from users to feed the ads business. I say this as someone worked there for a decade and saw lots of "NSA - not search or ads" t-shirts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's that, now, everything is to feed the ad business while back in the day, it wasn't. back then, they had lots of cool products, and they also served ads. now they have ads and lots of products the siphon data from users to feed the ads business. I say this as someone worked there for a decade and saw lots of "NSA - not search or ads" t-shirts.
Even less data is being used for ads than when you worked there - Gmail is no longer used, Photos doesn't use them, Android doesn't except insomuch as the Google search bar exists on the home screen, Maps barely has ads...
Quarter after quarter G seaxeh results turn into ads. At some point there won't be any organic free results and all search results will be paid placements. Which is now 80% true
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's that, now, everything is to feed the ad business while back in the day, it wasn't. back then, they had lots of cool products, and they also served ads. now they have ads and lots of products the siphon data from users to feed the ads business. I say this as someone worked there for a decade and saw lots of "NSA - not search or ads" t-shirts.
Even less data is being used for ads than when you worked there - Gmail is no longer used, Photos doesn't use them, Android doesn't except insomuch as the Google search bar exists on the home screen, Maps barely has ads...
Any evidence of that? Enterprise GSuite is not supposedly used, but consumer Gmail not feeding into ads would be surprising to me. Android feeds location and contacts data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People constantly criticizing companies not taking long-term bets. When some company does take long-term bets, then some internet expert come along and find some arbitrary timeline to succeed without any justification and start criticizing without offering anything any substantial. I wish we can have more thoughtful discussion, instead of Twitter style self aggrandizing comments.
Google takes large long-term bets that are closely related to their core business / competency. Some of those seem to be clearly working (see Cloud, Deepmind). As a shareholder, I want to see more of those. Back when I was at Google, X (which many Other Bets came from) had a goal of all their projects having meaningful impact in 10 years. They've been working on Wing and Waymo for close to 10 years now. Those project…