Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#231

Post by rsync » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 9:42 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #118

Periodic wrote: post #11

So many companies try to emulate how Google works. There are multiple books, hundreds or thousands of articles. People speculate on the perks, the review structure, the hierarchy, the autonomy. However, when other companies try to imitate Google they always fail because they're missing a crucial piece: Billions of dollars in ad revenue Google doesn't work the way it does to be successful. It works that way because it…

This is exactly correct. If you have a printing press that is dumping a couple of billon dollars into the basement every quarter in spite of what you're spending, you have the luxury of trying all sorts of novel things from a business perspective. That said, the margins on the search advertising business are shrinking, and have been for years now. You can cover for that by eliminating profligate spending and then eve…

""the magic is gone.""

Not only is the magic gone, but the boring, day to day fabric of functionality is gone.

Have you tried to really search for anything with google in the past five years ?

I don't mean meandering, aimless, consumer-centric searches like "new fitness watch" where any result tangentally related is useful ... I mean a specific, meaningful, concise search with multiple keywords, all of which are key words ... and the resulting pages do not contain one or more of those words.

I know all about allinsite: and quotation marks and so on ... those are, as far as I can tell, randomly interpreted by google. Who knows if they even work, ever.

A front page item on HN a few days ago asked what people would pay $1000 per month for ... I would pay that to have search with full control over search results with logical operators that actually worked.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#232

Post by nojvek » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 9:42 PM UTC

ScottBurson wrote: post #199

drcross wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. The sooner Tesla pass by the "we're safer than human drivers" mark the better because hearing stories about how a single guy who died, while absolutely tragic, is getting tedious when put in context of the the vast number of regular deaths on the road. My heart only bleeds so much for a guy I never met, who took a chance that he knew the risks of, when considering the grander goal at play here.

The problem is, a human driver wouldn't have had any trouble avoiding that accident -- the truck was visible for some distance. It's not just about the overall fatality rate per mile. Self-driving cars also need to not have any accidents that humans would have easily avoided. Until they demonstrate that, they're not going to be widely accepted.

Teslas don't come equipped with a LIDAR, that cruise, uber, udacity and google have been adding as a very important sensor.

Lidar sees a 3D cloud around the car with almost a cm accuracy. Better sensors could have most definitely prevented the accident.

However, to add to tesla's point. I have a car with adaptive cruise control. Not having to constantly check distance with car head has probably saved me once or twice from a crash.

Good auto-pilot's are definitely going to reduce human deaths on roads. Not only just deaths, but the amount of traffic all of us have to endure because someone just didn't keep the right distance from the car infront and bumped into them.

I'm all for open smart driving technology.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#233

Post by bduerst » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 9:43 PM UTC

bzbarsky wrote: post #223

bduerst wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that because you're using Edge, which doesn't support ActiveX? You can't use acrobat with the browser you're trying to download it with. https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/display-pdf-in-browser...

What does that have to do with Chrome being default-installed along with the Adobe Flash plugin?

Because Edge doesn't support the Adobe Reader plugin, and to avoid a support nightmare Adobe seems to recommend downloading a browser it does work with.

I visit that same link using Firefox on Linux and don't get a Chrome install checkbox on the page, but maybe someone else is?

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#234

Post by euyyn » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 9:43 PM UTC

ScottBurson wrote: post #199

drcross wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. The sooner Tesla pass by the "we're safer than human drivers" mark the better because hearing stories about how a single guy who died, while absolutely tragic, is getting tedious when put in context of the the vast number of regular deaths on the road. My heart only bleeds so much for a guy I never met, who took a chance that he knew the risks of, when considering the grander goal at play here.

The problem is, a human driver wouldn't have had any trouble avoiding that accident -- the truck was visible for some distance. It's not just about the overall fatality rate per mile. Self-driving cars also need to not have any accidents that humans would have easily avoided. Until they demonstrate that, they're not going to be widely accepted.

And my point wasn't "boohoo look at Tesla". It was that, contrary to what OP claimed, Google made the explicit decision to shoot for fully autonomous after having tried what Tesla did (and with LIDAR-equipped cars!).

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#235

Post by zardeh » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 9:45 PM UTC

ForHackernews wrote: post #161

user5994461 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Google has the good fortune to be operating in a field where being 90% right 90% of the time is more than good enough" I don't think it's an accurate view. It was good enough when they started. Now they are doing a lot better than that. The results are moved dynamically per user over hundreds of criteria. It really is not a dumb search/ad engine that anyone could replicate easy. They have evolved to be damn effici…

> It really is not a dumb search/ad engine that anyone could replicate easy. I'm not saying it's simple or could be replicated easily. I'm saying that the marginal improvements they've made don't really matter that much to users. I mostly use DuckDuckGo these days, and its native search results are markedly inferior to Google's, but it basically doesn't matter because I still almost always get what I want on the firs…

But it does matter to a lot of people, which I think is the thing.

There will absolutely be people who are willing to sacrifice some ease-of-use in the name of additional privacy, but it seems that those people are in the minority, and that means that Google (or whomever) needs to provide 99/99 when everyone else is only 90/90, if they want to continue being market leaders.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#236

Post by mljoe » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 9:46 PM UTC

gph wrote: post #104

quotemstr wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a fitness center You'd be amazed how much exercise helps with concentration and reduces stress.

Yea I get that, but you can extend that logic to just about every domain of life. Should they be allowed to buy all their employees the best mattresses available because a good night's sleep helps productivity? Should they pay for a nanny because help with child care makes you more productive? With that logic you could fund your employees entire lifestyle if you made the case that it helps them be more productive.

Is it "customary" for a company to pay for mattresses? Maybe if the company runs an oil rig, but a tech company?

This even goes for things like salaries. If a company pays salaries that are way above the market rate, this could be seen as [corporate] tax fraud. But there often isn't a bright line in law, which is frustrating to us engineers who think deterministically.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#237

Post by bitmapbrother » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 9:48 PM UTC

mahyarm wrote: post #7

focusgroup0 wrote: post #3

Xoogler here. About a week after joining, and having partaken of the food, massages, meditation rooms, fitness centers, shuttle bus, sports facility, arcade, juice bar, tech stops, shwag etc. - I remember thinking to myself "whatever we do here must be ridiculously lucrative". There weren't signs of obvious waste (at least in my org.), and coming from other corporate gigs where you had to pay for coffee it really ope…

A lot of that stuff although is cheaper for the corporation to provide than for the employee to pay for themselves in money and time. The corp has a tax advantage and a bulk purchase advantage. Not having a payment infra probably adds a little bit of efficiency too.

>A lot of that stuff although is cheaper for the corporation to provide than for the employee to pay for themselves in money and time

If that was really the case then why do so many companies offer no perks to their employees?

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#238

Post by milcron » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 9:49 PM UTC

kohanz wrote: post #211

rqebmm wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve also has the prestige of being a high-profile gaming company, which brings with it choice pick of engineers. A "normal" enterprise app consulting shop doesn't have the luxury of every computer geek clamoring to work there. If you have first-pick of incoming talent, it makes sense that you can get away with giving those employees an extremely high degree of autonomy.

Is that really true though? I remember when me and my engineering peers were in our teens, some of us dreamed of working for a gaming company, but now that we're older no one does. Most actually have a very negative perception of employment conditions in that industry.

I for one would prefer to avoid the gaming industry, but would not turn down the opportunity to work at Valve.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#239

Post by xenadu02 » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 9:49 PM UTC

ronald_raygun wrote: post #107

bad_user wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of Google's products are complementary products that create lock-in. For instance both Chrome and Android have been created with the purpose of controlling the underlying platform that people use, in order for them to not be at the mercy of the other platform owners, like Apple or Microsoft. And it worked. This is very obvious to anybody with an interest in how microeconomics works. For example this is why open s…

A good blog post on what youre talking about https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

He's got a great prescient paragraph at the bottom:

> Sun is the loose cannon of the computer industry. Unable to see past their raging fear and loathing of Microsoft, they adopt strategies based on anger rather than self-interest. Sun’s two strategies are (a) make software a commodity by promoting and developing free software (Star Office, Linux, Apache, Gnome, etc), and (b) make hardware a commodity by promoting Java, with its bytecode architecture and WORA. OK, Sun, pop quiz: when the music stops, where are you going to sit down? Without proprietary advantages in hardware or software, you’re going to have to take the commodity price, which barely covers the cost of cheap factories in Guadalajara, not your cushy offices in Silicon Valley.

Indeed Sun got eaten alive by commodity hardware while not having any viable strategy to make money on software.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#240

Post by weaksauce » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 9:49 PM UTC

ravitation wrote: post #204

blackguardx wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an electrical engineer and know people who were on the first iPhone team. I think it was about as close to 0 to 1 as you get in a big company like that. I worked for a major RF test and measurement company when the first iPhone came out and everyone was blown away that a company could design and tool up production for a cell phone without tipping anyone off in the industry.

Compare Apple, a consumer electronics company, building a phone to Google, an ad tech company, building a self driving car. One seems to leverage the core competencies of an organization better than the other... One seems closer to starting from 0...

I mean, google is not quite going from 0 to 1 there. it's a machine learning problem and google has some of the brightest machine learning people out there already working on search.