Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016 • Hacker News Board

Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016

#191

Post by eru » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 7:45 AM UTC

melling wrote: post #138

eru wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter too much what Google/Alphabet shareholders think. The controlling majority is with the founders, and the company is not going to the markets anytime soon to ask for more capital.

"any time soon" What exactly does that mean? The next two years? If people start dumping your stock, I'm sure there will be repercussions.

What kind of repercussions? Please elaborate.

The only result of a lower stock price that I can see is that Google employees might demand cash instead of stock for compensation. (But Google still does make enough in cash.)

And by 'demand' I mean: get unhappy, be more likely to leave, and for new hires, be more likely to take up alternative offers instead.

Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016

#192

Post by landryraccoon » Sat, Jul 30, 2016, 3:51 PM UTC

jahnu wrote: post #67

zaroth wrote: post #33

I 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…

Playing devil's advocate here (a little) but imagine they took a few dozen million of that and, say, improved their development tool chains for Android (which are disappointingly flaky). Or another few dozen millions and extended the security updates for Nexus phones by a couple of years. That could grow their market share of both developer mind-share and consumers. Moonshots maybe should come once you've mastered al…

A lot of world class engineers would leave Google to go to their competition. The promise of maybe getting to work on self driving cars is a big recruiting carrot. Improve ad revenue by 0.01%? Will that motivate a top 1% engineer to sign or stick around?

Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016

#193

Post by iopq » Sun, Jul 31, 2016, 7:45 AM UTC

ZenoArrow wrote: post #98

iopq wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "perfect", it's just "mastered"

What's the difference?

A grandmaster chess player has mastered chess, but he can't play perfectly because he's still a human.

Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016

#194

Post by virgilp » Mon, Aug 01, 2016, 9:09 AM UTC

flylib wrote: post #189

whack wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: Has Google ever achieved financial success with a moonshot project? Google Glass seems to have come closest to becoming an actual product, but it eventually crashed and burned as well. The self-driving car was a great technological success, but I really wonder how Google plans to monetize it. Years ago, when Google was the only major company doing self-driving-cars, there was a lot of buzz and poten…

would be careful to say "near-parity", google is still ahead of everyone in level 4 autonomous cars at the moment, not only that the gap may be larger then the other car companies lead you to believe.

This.

I mean, Apple is investing into cars, changing the original goal from "car" to "self-driving car"... and we are seriously questioning whether google's effort was a good idea? WTF, people?