Google's Decline Really Bugs Me

Google was the antithesis of Microsoft as the author writes and is now doomed to become the same. It's a monopoly that has come to dictate its terms for maximum profit and resilience against competition. By becoming "evil", it is opening opportunities for a new antithesis of itself. Perhaps Twitter will take that spot, perhaps some entirely different company from the Far East? That's the way it goes ...

Steve jobs didn't say to maximise profits. He said make great products, rather than simply adequate products.

Here are 3 pertinent facts related to your post:

1) When I worked there, long before Larry Page was CEO, 20% time barely existed and Google cared a heck of a lot about making money.

2) The share price going up makes employees, former employees, and all sorts of non-"wall street investors" very happy.

3) Your hacker news about section links to your Google+ page

twitter are showing signs of going the same way. what it takes is someone prepared to take a low-prifit long-haul trust based approach rather than 'monetise now!'. this is a hard choice to make at the moment when its so easy to make money from investors who think they can both make big profits and keep users signing up.

They are the new Microsoft but they're trying to avoid the same fate of companies like Yahoo and Microsoft; i.e viewed as stodgy old companies that aren't great places to work. The perception about Google needs to be "innovative" which is why there is lots of PR about their X Labs initiatives. But if you think about all of the high profile ones, they aren't really attractive businesses.

Driverless cars? It's technology that all the major car companies have been working on for years and is close to market. This means they aren't going to create a business of licensing that tech to them. Are they going to get into the high capex business of car manufacturing?

Google Fiber? Same story. Capex heavy business with lower margins than being an ad company. It also takes a lot of time to scale it up and roll it out to cities.

Most of these things are for PR rather than real businesses that will be successful and change Google's revenue mix from 90%+ advertising to anything else. Even in their core business, Cost Per Clicks continue to trend down. This is a deterioration in pricing power largely being driven by the shift to computing on mobile devices. Their latest quarterly results were good because they are essentially "making it up in volume", but there is a limit to how much ad inventory you can squeeze out of all your properties to keep driving aggregate clicks up without pissing off users or trashing your products.