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Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

fortune.com

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Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#41

Post by Igglyboo »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #29
melling wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That probably should have said 'search advertising'. YouTube is a different type of advertising. Google needs to plan for a day when search advertising comes under attack from the next big thing. Maybe traditional search fades away, etc.

The interesting thing is that neither YouTube nor Google search have much user lock-in. YouTube has content producer lock-in, which is tremendously helpful. And it may be that there's just no room for improvement massive enough to pull people away, that video delivery is close enough to its peak to not leave any room for real competition. But if content was elsewhere, YouTube revenue would vanish very quickly indeed.…

Exactly this, I use youtube because everything I want to watch is only on youtube, I use facebook because everyone I want to keep in touch with is only on facebook, I use search because because it's a good product and not because something external is forcing me to use it. If a better search comes along I'm gone in a second.

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#42

Post by jeffreyrogers »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #29
melling wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That probably should have said 'search advertising'. YouTube is a different type of advertising. Google needs to plan for a day when search advertising comes under attack from the next big thing. Maybe traditional search fades away, etc.

The interesting thing is that neither YouTube nor Google search have much user lock-in. YouTube has content producer lock-in, which is tremendously helpful. And it may be that there's just no room for improvement massive enough to pull people away, that video delivery is close enough to its peak to not leave any room for real competition. But if content was elsewhere, YouTube revenue would vanish very quickly indeed.…

> Search, on the other hand, still has massive room for improvement.

This is true, but it's also a really hard problem and most likely any improvements will require enormous scale to implement (because they'll be based on statistical analysis of prior search queries), which only Google and a handful of others have. So no network effects, but huge economies of scale.

Plus, having used some other search engines (DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Bing, etc.), I feel that Google still has a comfortable lead than the competition.

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#43

Post by Igglyboo »

yzzxy wrote: post #33
jpatokal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The time horizon for moonshots is way too long for the average VC. Google started working on autonomous cars c. 2010, and I'd be fairly astonished if they're available for sale to the general public by 2020.

I bet Google's car tech will start yielding returns for the company far before consumers drive robotic cars. I doubt they will make cars themselves.

I could see them partnering with Tesla or some other forward thinking automaker in the near future. It would be a very large investment to also build their own cars which probably wouldn't pay off as well as a partnership.

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#44

Post by jeffreyrogers »

chuckcode wrote: post #8

It would be great to see google diversify their business model as well as their technology so they weren't getting most of their profit from advertising.

Sometimes doing one thing well is good enough. Like Gillette or Coca-Cola.

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#45

Post by Igglyboo »

jacobkranz wrote: post #40
rattray wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be giving up too soon here. None of the fruits of Google X's labors have hit mainstream production yet. You'll be able to judge them once they have.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Google Glass come out of X?

Is Glass considered mainstream yet? I thought it was still for developers mainly.

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#46

Post by Igglyboo »

duaneb wrote: post #30
bjelkeman-again wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously I would consider Musk an Co have achieved several of their goals. Each one being the step on the way to a bigger goal.

Maybe, but so has Page—a self-driving car, a box where you can basically ask a question, the first major piece of wearable electronics after the watch—this aren't trivial. And yet, it doesn't impress me much more than Musk's existing achievements have—they're both in edison territory at the moment—brilliant businessmen—not Gutenberg, world-changing level yet.

Agreed, Google does a ton of things extremely well but the world would be more or less the same with subpar search or subpar youtube from some other company. If they can realize the self driving car or get everyone wearing glass then they've changed the world.

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#47

Post by Igglyboo »

Ygg2 wrote: post #17
corysama wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The joke was probably intended as a jab at unreasonable managers, but joke-Page did catch an important engineering flaw: After you use the wall-socket-powered time machine to travel through time, there is likely to not be a wall socket at your destination...

Depends on what principles the machine works. Realistically, it transfers information several milliseconds from future into present. Socket present. Unrealistically, it can only travel couple of years into the future/past. Socket present. Unbelievably realistically, it can travel hundreds or decades of years into the future/past. ???

Extremely realistically, it transfers information from the present to the future in realtime.

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#49

Post by amaks »

millstone wrote: post #34
amaks wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does -- there are products for enterprises, hardware, Google Play ecosystem, Internet access (fiber, loon), operating systems, investments into health research and robotics, self-driving cars, house energy and safety products (Nest). Not enough?

Enterprise (with Google Docs), and maybe Chromecast, are the two arguably profitable non-advertising products. The other product areas are surely in the red. Google is trying to diversify, but they haven't been successful at turning a profit on non-advertising products, at least not yet.

How can you possibly know (unless you're a member of Google leadership team)?

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#50

Post by saryant »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #44
chuckcode wrote: post #8

It would be great to see google diversify their business model as well as their technology so they weren't getting most of their profit from advertising.

Sometimes doing one thing well is good enough. Like Gillette or Coca-Cola.

Gillette is part of Proctor and Gamble. Coca-Cola makes hundreds (thousands?) of products.
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