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Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

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Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#171

Post by stcredzero »

jasode wrote: post #153
mwfunk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling someone an "X company" means that they make their money from X. There are aspects of AI in targeted advertising, but not enough to call them an AI company rather than an advertising company. It doesn't really matter where they're going- that's what they aspire to be, not what they are. If you judge companies based on their aspirations, you end up judging them based on their most positive and idealistic versio…

>Calling someone an "X company" means that they make their money from X. It doesn't necessarily mean that. It's more common to associate "X" with their business competency . If we always insist on X to be only defined by revenue, we then get the following type of soundbites that we pat ourselves on the back for: - McDonalds is actually a real estate company and not a hamburger company because they make more money fro…

    - McDonalds is a real estate company 
    - General Electric is really a bank 
    - Harvard University is really a hedge fund 
    - Lebron James is actually an advertising spokesperson 
    
    Are the twisted examples above really how we categorize companies/celebrities?
Maybe that's not so twisted. Maybe they are how we should really categorize the above, and the common perception is just marketing/how they made their mark initially.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#172

Post by stcredzero »

magicalist wrote: post #125
mwfunk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling someone an "X company" means that they make their money from X. There are aspects of AI in targeted advertising, but not enough to call them an AI company rather than an advertising company. It doesn't really matter where they're going- that's what they aspire to be, not what they are. If you judge companies based on their aspirations, you end up judging them based on their most positive and idealistic versio…

> Calling someone an "X company" means that they make their money from X. There are aspects of AI in targeted advertising, but not enough to call them an AI company rather than an advertising company. eh, either way Google is described it's just trying to be a cute soundbite with next to no information. You can call them an advertising company, but they create the products that most of their ads are seen in, so reall…

Instead we could go crazy and use like two, even three sentences to describe what a company does, what its incentives are and where its constrained.

What would be your "crazy" characterization of Google?

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#173

Post by andywood »

mwfunk wrote: post #97
jonknee wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It's obvious that is where they are going.

Calling someone an "X company" means that they make their money from X. There are aspects of AI in targeted advertising, but not enough to call them an AI company rather than an advertising company. It doesn't really matter where they're going- that's what they aspire to be, not what they are. If you judge companies based on their aspirations, you end up judging them based on their most positive and idealistic versio…

The subject at hand is valuation. The future is more relevant to valuation than the present.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#174

Post by pessimizer »

shimon wrote: post #110
jonesb6 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely agree that comparing Google and apple is silly. But calling Google an "artificial intelligence" company is just feeding another buzzword into the fire.

Google's flagship product is a box that you can type words into, and get relevant texts/references/facts in response. It seems like a textbook example of AI.

Is grep AI?

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#176

Post by tedmiston »

lazaroclapp wrote: post #130
mrb wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which pretty much shows that the market value of a company is not based on what they sell today, but on the expectation of what they will sell tomorrow. Does Apple do research in biotech (Alphabet's Calico)? Are they developing drones delivering wireless internet to the world (Google's Skybender)? Do they have an investment arm (Google Ventures)? Did they start an ISP (Google Fiber)? People see Alphabet's increasing…

Apple's brand trades a lot on having extremely well finished products with very polished experiences. If they started experimenting left and right like Google does, they would lose that brand image, which is arguably their most valuable asset (even above and beyond the technology itself). If Google releases Glass and it flops, it hardly affects their image ('well, yes, it's cool technology, that's what Google does, b…

Except they already do.

https://beta.apple.com/

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#177

Post by hollerith »

percentcer wrote: post #145

It's interesting to that it took this long, just considering the utility of each company. If Apple disappeared tomorrow I'd be moderately inconvenienced, I'd have to pick up an Android handset instead of my iPhone and maybe set up some new podcast feeds. If Google disappeared the world would screech to a halt.

By the same reasoning, the most valuable companies should be the dominant suppliers of food, water, electricity and maybe gasoline and basic internet connectivity.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#178

Post by JesseObrien »

jad wrote: post #158
percentcer wrote: post #145

It's interesting to that it took this long, just considering the utility of each company. If Apple disappeared tomorrow I'd be moderately inconvenienced, I'd have to pick up an Android handset instead of my iPhone and maybe set up some new podcast feeds. If Google disappeared the world would screech to a halt.

How's that? To search the web, I'd go to DuckDuckGo or Bing or whatever. Other companies also provide web mail, maps, office document solutions, etc. Google's definitely better at those things, but using a worse version of those products would not cause the world to "screech to a halt." Probably the most disruptive thing if Apple vanished would actually be every tech company suddenly needing to figure out how to use…

As far as "screech to a halt." is concerned, it's maybe a little on the exaggerated side, but I'd believe it. I've worked for 5 different companies of varying sizes from 5 to 1000 employees. All of them have used Google Apps to run their business. Email, Calendars, Docs, Basically the Apps suite in it's entirety is the core of communicating and information storage.

There's arguments for backups, etc but in reality if the common business person working at these companies sits down and none of their Google products work, their day will halt.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#179

Post by PeCaN »

kbenzle wrote: post #40
nsxwolf wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can that really go on forever? I don't know anyone that deliberately clicks on ads. Ads usually act as a "don't buy" signal to me - I assume the product is of low quality or a scam because of the skeeziness of how they tried to reach me as a customer. Like higher education, the online ads business seems poised to collapse.

Are you Russian, this is a common sentiment there :)

I think this is a common sentiment everywhere.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#180

Post by tedmiston »

hyperbovine wrote: post #65
dangoor wrote: post #50

Interesting that Apple's net profits last quarter was greater than Alphabet's revenue.

How much Google product did you buy last quarter...

Or, How many websites did you browse that serve ads from Google last quarter...
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