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Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

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Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#21
post #14
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that is good news. You can look at it either as they slowed how much money they pour into the moonshots incinerator, or they stopped investing in potential unicorn lines of business.

I think they have proved that it's a incinerator at this point.

Well, a lot of the money goes into Waymo which is just ramping into revenue service. With the filing they submitted last week, they want to serve all of Silicon Valley and all of Los Angeles County, which is more than an order of magnitude expansion in their market. Waymo might be a real investment and not just an emergency profit reducer.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#22
post #14
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that is good news. You can look at it either as they slowed how much money they pour into the moonshots incinerator, or they stopped investing in potential unicorn lines of business.

I think they have proved that it's a incinerator at this point.

Waymo _might_ be the sole survivor here... they are ABSOLUTELY trying their damndest with it. It's remarkable to not go a single day without seeing a driverless Waymo doing its thing. (I live in Central Phoenix, they're _everywhere_.)

The core concept is being proven pretty well, in markets with good weather and good roads at least... whether they can achieve some sort of critical mass that allows them to recoup any of the investment, even on a single capitalized vehicle... who knows. I've heard each Jag costs ~$250k fully loaded... that's a lot of ~$14-on-average trips before breakeven, and obviously the trips aren't free.

That all being said, riding in one feels like the actual future, and if they close in on this first-mover advantage and keep on keeping on, and strengthen their Uber integration, and open in more and more markets... there's a real chance they establish themselves and make this thing actually capture a significant portion of the trip economy.

That being said, it's not generalized, so opening markets is expensive because they're all individually trained for each mile of road in the market, I expect they'll be functionally useless in bad winters (but that's not a dealbreaker, per se), and those operating expenses remain high. Though I do expect we'll begin to see those lower, now that they're so deep into the proof of the concept. (They're finally starting highway driving here in PHX, which is really the last hill to climb.)

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#23
post #4

This caught my eye, total employees - 2022: 190,234 - 2023: 182,502 Total increase in revenue of 10 billion. Not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but being a software engineer I found employment count interesting. Though 5% change in head count seems hardly major.

I guess a significant number of employees are just working really hard on things that don't matter. When every single thing that needs working on is already being worked on, a lot of people are going to be doing busy work. There was a post by Stevie Yeggie where he talked about working at google. he looked really hard to find a new project to lead but absolutely everything was already being worked on, he found. eventually he just couldn't see himself leading or doing meaningful work there and quit.

the lesson here, i think is that there are limits to how much can be done, without moving into new industries and spreading horizontally.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know if it’s the actual reason, but they missed ad revenue expectations according to Yahoo. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stock-market-today-nasdaq-fal...

Hm there it says Revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs: $72.32 billion vs. $70.97 billion expected ($63.12 billion in Q4 2022) Adjusted earnings per share: $1.64 vs. $1.59 expected ($1.05 in Q4 2022) Cloud revenue: $9.19 billion vs. $8.95 billion expected ($7.32 billion in Q4 2022) Ad revenue: $65.5 billion vs. $65.8 billion expected ($59.04 billion in Q4 2022) I hope that 0.3 is not the reason for that slip h…

Google missing on ad revenue is like Apple missing on iPhone revenue. It's even worse for Google because it's a larger part of their business. Is the miss a blip or a signal of a slowing ad market or are LLMs eating into their business? Hard to know, but that's the concern.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#25
post #4

This caught my eye, total employees - 2022: 190,234 - 2023: 182,502 Total increase in revenue of 10 billion. Not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but being a software engineer I found employment count interesting. Though 5% change in head count seems hardly major.

To me it shows that Google doesn't know how to generate significant revenue with those eight thousand people. I am worried it indicates Google is running out of good bets and has limited future growth.

Of course, the counter argument is that technology allows Google to do more with less people. I am not convinced by this argument, because Google's competition has about the same ability to do more with less people. If you can improve individual productivity than why not scale that across more people.

To summarize, this indicates to me that Google is reducing their value on human capital.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#26
post #4

This caught my eye, total employees - 2022: 190,234 - 2023: 182,502 Total increase in revenue of 10 billion. Not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but being a software engineer I found employment count interesting. Though 5% change in head count seems hardly major.

I guess a significant number of employees are just working really hard on things that don't matter. When every single thing that needs working on is already being worked on, a lot of people are going to be doing busy work. There was a post by Stevie Yeggie where he talked about working at google. he looked really hard to find a new project to lead but absolutely everything was already being worked on, he found. event…

But isn't that just bad management / prioritization? Isn't the solution to just shuffle people to more useful projects instead of firing them? Especially at a company that hires general engineers who can work on any project, and also at a company that has a lot of internal tooling which makes ramping up new engineers slow and tedious.

They'll probably grow back to 190k within a few months, but those 8k new hires will probably take months if not a year to fully ramp up.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#27
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they have proved that it's a incinerator at this point.

Waymo _might_ be the sole survivor here... they are ABSOLUTELY trying their damndest with it. It's remarkable to not go a single day without seeing a driverless Waymo doing its thing. (I live in Central Phoenix, they're _everywhere_.) The core concept is being proven pretty well, in markets with good weather and good roads at least... whether they can achieve some sort of critical mass that allows them to recoup any…

I always imagined Google licensing the tech as opposed to spinning up a fully fledged national taxi service.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#28
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There could be other factors in play like the recent volatility in Netflix within the same sector, as well as the upcoming FOMC meeting tomorrow causing increased fear. Markets aren't always as accurate and efficient as some believe, and stock prices always become more volatile around earnings.

All those other factors would have been priced in at the end of the day. The only new information since then would have been the earnings release. If the absolute numbers are better than expected, then maybe it's the relative numbers (as compared to Microsoft who also released earnings) that are worse than expected?

Also keep in mind that the "expected" are not the actual expected, but rather "publicly expected numbers that are freely given out and therefore useless". Investment firms have private expected numbers that are far more accurate, the publicly given out ones are designed to manipulate retail investors.

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#29

Google Cloud made $864M in profit in a single quarter, more than ever before. Google Bets lost $86 3 M in the same period, much less than ever before.

Does that mean we'll stop seeing all the alarmist posts about how one should never build on GCP?

Re: Google Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2023 Results [pdf]

#30
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they have proved that it's a incinerator at this point.

Waymo _might_ be the sole survivor here... they are ABSOLUTELY trying their damndest with it. It's remarkable to not go a single day without seeing a driverless Waymo doing its thing. (I live in Central Phoenix, they're _everywhere_.) The core concept is being proven pretty well, in markets with good weather and good roads at least... whether they can achieve some sort of critical mass that allows them to recoup any…

> I've heard each Jag costs ~$250k fully loaded

They said it costs as much as a “moderately equipped S-Class” 3-4 years ago. At the time, that would be ~$140k. That includes the base car cost, sensor hardware, compute, redundant vehicle systems and their integration. So not quite $250k, but still steep. I think the Waymo-Geely robotaxis coming next year will be interesting cost-wise.

> That being said, it's not generalized, so opening markets is expensive because they're all individually trained for each mile of road in the market

This is a misconception. The Waymo Driver is, in fact, designed to be generalizable. There some steps like mapping and initial validation in each market, but the same software runs on Waymo vehicles in every city. It’s definitely not individually trained for each mile in each market.

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