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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

#221

Post by ZenoArrow »

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 actually a real estate company and not a hamburger company because they make more money from rent than from food"

I find this interesting. Are McDonalds making most of their revenue from real estate rents from their franchisees and/or those involved in their supply chain, or is the bulk of this land outside their hamburger business?

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

#222

Post by tyingq »

magicalist wrote: post #162
Phlarp wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Like specific query results where everything above the fold on desktop is an ad. Do you have an non-anecdotal evidence to present? A few advertisement laden queries and a "funny feeling" is rarely a sound investment strategy.

It depends on how you defined "above the fold", but I have seen this on occasion. It's hard to replicate, though. For instance "credit card" is a search terms often overflowing with ads, but it's only giving a few to me right now. Where GP is wrong is that this is something "they did not do 5 years ago". There were a ton of articles complaining about it in 2008/2009. Unless it is happening on many times more search t…

>>The fact that the increase was YoY makes it even more dubious.

YoY click growth percentage has been higher than traffic growth for years and years for Google. I suspect there are a number of reasons for it.

The 100% ads above the fold did get a lot of complaints in 2014, specifically because Google announced it would penalize sites that did that. Quite a few examples of Google doing this were subsequently pointed out, due to the irony.

You are correct in that I don't have an itemized, timestamped list of the things they've done over the years to either push organics down the fold, or expose ads further down the fold.

There are many things they've done that are pretty subtle as well.

- The wikipedia information in the sidebar when you do informational searches used to have links to wikipedia...leading you away from google. They now keep you within Google, and include links to ads: http://i.imgur.com/j3w9LbP.png

- Various widgets push organics down pretty far: http://i.imgur.com/VwYH7mY.png

- There are queries that became 100% above the folds ads within the last 1 or 2 years. Travel is especially aggressive: http://i.imgur.com/89iYCmc.png

- Other widgets that aren't ads per se, but serve to keep you on Google's site as you drill down to pages that will have ads: http://i.imgur.com/v1urMBm.png

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

#223

Post by marshray »

millstone wrote: post #188
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 P/E was quite low even at the height of the iPhone growth. The expectation for what Apple will sell tomorrow is nothing, because they'll be out of business, and it's been that way for a long time. Meanwhile, since Google was founded, Apple went from the Mac company to the iPod company to the iPhone company. Apple has a proven ability to reinvent itself, with more agility and success than Google or really any…

By all accounts, Jobs came back and reinvented Apple authoritarian-style.

I don't think it's proven that Apple can reinvent itself from within. Which is not to say that they'll never have another hit product.

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

#224

Post by danjoc »

mrb wrote: post #108
newman314 wrote: post #69

People were losing their minds over the fact that iPhone shipments slightly declined. If you look at the year over year growth (excluding the massive bump for iPhone 6), it would show that AAPL is still ahead of the growth curve. See https://imgur.com/vO0kPEy * Apple's quarterly revenue: $75.9bil * Apple's quarterly profit: $18.4bil * Google's quarterly revenue: $21.3bil * Google's quarterly profit: $6.8bil In sheer…

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…

> 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.

Just looking at the "Apple vs. Alphabet Market Capitalization Over Time" chart, this story appears to be as much about Apple falling as it is about Alphabet rising. And in that case I see what Apple is selling today.

iPods are obviously on the way out. iPads have been losing to cheaper tablets for a while now. Macs have been neglected to the point you can't even get one with a Skylake CPU. And now, the last week's news that iPhone sales are in decline. It seems Apple's fall is all about what they are (not) selling today.

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

#225

Post by btian »

itcmcgrath wrote: post #201
hammock wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Apps has 50 million users, iCloud has 125 million Edit: to clarify, my source[1] said 5 million orgs with 50 million individual users. Not counting Gmail obviously [1] http://blog.bettercloud.com/google-apps-stats/

Having worked on the Drive team, I can assure you Google Apps (which includes GMail, the Docs editors, and Drive) has much more than 50 million. A quick search on public figures for these services will give better numbers. Edit: Those are Apps for Work numbers, excluding consumers - obviously you can't compare just a subset with a total.

@toomuchtodo

What do you mean?

Drive sync works fine like Dropbox, at least on Windows and Mac.

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

#226

Post by tyingq »

Phlarp wrote: post #146
tyingq wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Care to present any evidence They certainly do things today that they did not do 5 years ago. Like specific query results where everything above the fold on desktop is an ad. I personally do not think that's good for consumers. I suspect, though, that you disagree. On your other point, they are getting better every year as measured by a YoY comparison...not just plain growth. Double-digit percentage YoY improvemen…

>Like specific query results where everything above the fold on desktop is an ad. Do you have an non-anecdotal evidence to present? A few advertisement laden queries and a "funny feeling" is rarely a sound investment strategy.

I didn't say anything about investment advice. My concern was from a consumer point of view.

You also put "funny feeling" in quotes, as if I'd said that.

In short, the repeated pattern of click growth outpacing traffic growth has me concerned that they are achieving that, in part, with strategies that are bad for the end user. Google says they care about such things. https://www.google.com/about/company/philosophy/

Non-anecdotal evidence is hard to collect, since Google doesn't release statistics like "organic click growth" or "real estate devoted to organic vs ads".

I can certainly post screenshots of queries that are 100% ads above the fold, but lacking the kind of information only Google has, they are, by definition, anecdotal.

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

#227

Post by smileysteve »

sdrothrock wrote: post #163
jad wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We could probably think of alternatives for most of these things, but there are a lot of people who just use what came with their phone/browser. Additionally, think of all of the Google-backed services out there provided by other companies. How many companies use gmail heavily that would lose all kinds of records? Normal people would lose their e-mail too, and businessmen would lose a lot of their calendars. The actu…

Critically

20 years ago, nobody could have pictured living without AOL, they had search, the directory, email, Aim - and connectivity.

15 years ago, few people could have seen a world without Yahoo.

3 months ago Dorsey said Twitter is an essential part of the internet.

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

#228

Post by [deleted] »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #219
itcmcgrath wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked on the Drive team, I can assure you Google Apps (which includes GMail, the Docs editors, and Drive) has much more than 50 million. A quick search on public figures for these services will give better numbers. Edit: Those are Apps for Work numbers, excluding consumers - obviously you can't compare just a subset with a total.

Why does Drive lack where Dropbox has succeeded (efficient, reliable syncing)? (Honest question, since you mentioned you're on the Drive team)

[deleted]

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

#229

Post by Kequc »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #218
shimon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google's flagship product is an advertising platform, not a search box.

Even that one feeds ads it thinks are relevant to you

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

#230

Post by tarblog »

marshray wrote: post #187
samstave wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple's brand trades a lot on having extremely well finished products with very polished experiences I don't fully agree with this. Did you have the first version of the iPhone? No copy and paste? WTF. Antenna signal dropping because "you're holding it wrong!"? WTF. The only thing you can hold to the apple brand without any criticism is the industrial design of the packaging and look of their products has been cons…

You're making the mistake of thinking other people evaluate products the same way you do. How many people do you really think tested the copy and paste functionality on the original iPhone before making their purchasing decision? I think almost no one.

I think you're on the right track.

The way I remember it: the product was still overwhelmingly better than everything else. Missing copy&paste was an "oh well" compared to owning an iPhone in 2007.

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