Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not "perfect", it's just "mastered"
What's the difference?
Probably "mastered" mean constant quality.
Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016
101–110 of 194 posts
Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moonshots are called that way because they bear both immense risk of failure as well as a potential to bring in billions. So individual moonshots are almost always failures; the ones that are successful pay the other ones. Google is doing the right thing to remain alive in the future without enforcing lock down on their users (like other companies not producing moonshots do).
They're only good investments if they tap that well someday. If you sit around moonshotting all day and never shipping they're worth $0. So far, no moonshot by a big corp has paid off. Maybe it's too early, or more likely Google is hoarding tech and filing patents like a rational engineer running a business using machine learning would do, and while that's good for Google it's bad for Society to have so much cool tec…
No moonshot by a big corp has paid off?
I used to work at Google. I remember the term "moonshot" being thrown around, it started with Larry and Sergey. If there's a definition for what this means, in the Google context, it's in their heads and nowhere else. But the way I interpreted it was "really really ambitious project".
One thing I do remember is that several projects that were described at the time as moonshots did pay off. The one that comes to my mind immediately was Street View. The idea of driving a car with a spherical camera down every road in the world seemed completely insane at the time it was first proposed, the idea it might make money even moreso. But Street View worked, and whenever we switched on SV in a new country usage of Maps in that country permanently increased. It really increased the value of the product, and in turn I guess it also raised ad revenues (or it'd be odd if increased usage didn't correlate with increased ad revenue at all).
There were others I remember. Rewriting the web search indexing system more or less from scratch was a big one. You don't hear much about that, but it was a big risky effort to rewrite the core of your product from scratch.
I think people tend to take past successes of radically ambitious projects for granted. Android was a moonshot at the time. We don't think anything of it now, but it wasn't clear at all it'd be so successful.
Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016
#103I don't see anything wrong with this approach, especially since the company can actually sustainably afford to keep placing these bets. And perhaps "bet" is the wrong word being used here. Usually with a bet in gambling terms, you either win big or you lose it all. When Alphabet tries a "moonshot", they come away learning a lot about whatever problem it is that they were trying to tackle. They build expertise in-hous…
In addition, it's not like these bets have been pronounced dead. They're all still in play. It will be years before we know whether any were successful or not. This is like someone betting $1000 on a game, and then calling it a $1000 loss up until the game is actually played (at which point it becomes indeed a true $1000 loss, or possibly a gain). It doesn't make any sense.
You could argue that Google Glass is dead.
Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016
#104Quoting Edison here:
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016
#105I don't think it's right to equate R&D spending with "losses". Google makes a profit, not a loss, so technically it does not have losses. It has expenses, and among those, investments in future technology. If all Google could do with their cash flow was pay a dividend, that would be very sad, and it would call for a much lower P/E ratio. This article completely misstates the facts. Perhaps the way they break out thei…
yes, absolutely. they do have 75B$ in cash and another 60B$ in short-term investments. So they have 135B$ to spend. judged by that number Google is too conservative.
That's incorrect. They have $75 billion in total 'cash.' $15 billion is listed as cash and $60 billion is listed as short-term investments (as of Q1 2016).
Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Moonshots are called that way because they bear both immense risk of failure as well as a potential to bring in billions. So individual moonshots are almost always failures; the ones that are successful pay the other ones. Google is doing the right thing to remain alive in the future without enforcing lock down on their users (like other companies not producing moonshots do).
They're only good investments if they tap that well someday. If you sit around moonshotting all day and never shipping they're worth $0. So far, no moonshot by a big corp has paid off. Maybe it's too early, or more likely Google is hoarding tech and filing patents like a rational engineer running a business using machine learning would do, and while that's good for Google it's bad for Society to have so much cool tec…
> So far, no moonshot by a big corp has paid off.
What about that mobile phone apple launched in 2007?
Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're only good investments if they tap that well someday. If you sit around moonshotting all day and never shipping they're worth $0. So far, no moonshot by a big corp has paid off. Maybe it's too early, or more likely Google is hoarding tech and filing patents like a rational engineer running a business using machine learning would do, and while that's good for Google it's bad for Society to have so much cool tec…
Self-driving cars look poised to pay off in a big way in the next 5-10 years.
Maybe in the Southern US. Here in Canada they're a lot longer from solving the snow and ice problem.
Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're only good investments if they tap that well someday. If you sit around moonshotting all day and never shipping they're worth $0. So far, no moonshot by a big corp has paid off. Maybe it's too early, or more likely Google is hoarding tech and filing patents like a rational engineer running a business using machine learning would do, and while that's good for Google it's bad for Society to have so much cool tec…
Self-driving cars look poised to pay off in a big way in the next 5-10 years.
Except Google is exclusively focused on full Level 4 autonomy which is likely to be a number of decades out.
Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
They mastered search. They mastered mapping.
Search has stagnated. Google has gotten scarily good at anticipating what I want to know, but conspicuously bad at answering hard questions. There's tons of room for improvement. Similarly, Google Maps has added features that make it a better map, and it's a great place to find what time a store closes and what their phone number is. But it's been essentially the same service, with iterative improvements, for years.…
I agree, I think search is ripe for disruption, Google is the old guard in this respect, I think they reached a crossroads where improvements in their search experience did not translate to increased revenue, and they stuck with this 'good enough' solution which made a predictable amount of money. I still show many users the 'filter by date' drop down and it's the first time they have seen it, it still does not offer me any way to restrict my searches to categories, though it certainly seems to have 'knowledge' based data in reach when it shows me adverts. There is surely much more that can be done, most competitors seem to want to match reach rather than innovate on the UI, I'm sure there are lots of startups out there, so if anyone wants to point me in the right direction feel free :)
Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016
#110I don't think it's right to equate R&D spending with "losses". Google makes a profit, not a loss, so technically it does not have losses. It has expenses, and among those, investments in future technology. If all Google could do with their cash flow was pay a dividend, that would be very sad, and it would call for a much lower P/E ratio. This article completely misstates the facts. Perhaps the way they break out thei…
There's a long history of using terms like loss to describe such segmented financial results. It's also typical to talk about them on an operating basis.
A vaguely topical example would be Xbox. Microsoft (and the press) reported losses on it for years, years were it would be reasonable to say they were investing in building up the division.