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

#241

Post by photogrammetry » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 9:52 PM UTC

MicroBerto wrote: post #110

espadrine wrote: post #37

Contrast Google's old way of managing bets with Tesla. When Google started working on self-driving cars, they went about it academically. They did not plan a sequence of stepping stones that they could sell. They meant to have a product in an indeterminate future which should be immediately perfect and better than a human, essentially not needing a wheel. Tesla went about it with an engineering perspective. First, ca…

> but they make money along the way Only killing a few people in the process, but hey who am I to judge?

Are you implying that Tesla killed the (1 person, not people) who decided to let his car slam into a tractor-trailer on cruise control?

It's not a problem to you that, say, Apple has "financed the suicides of dozens of Foxconn workers," or that GM killed 140 people by suppressing information on a defective ignition switch, or that Lockheed Martin and Halliburton buoy their stock by selling weapons to kill hundreds of thousands of people?

Evidently, you must find totally acceptable the gun-running, terrorist-sponsoring activities of HSBC in the last few years. I bet Google's permabanning of people from their own Google Apps accounts (because they were reselling a couple Pixel phones) is ethically fine with you, as well.

Never mind the tens of thousands of preventable automobile deaths yearly because car manufacturers refuse to implement even the most rudimentary of Autopilot functions.

Yeah, totally reasonable to pick on the electric car / solar battery company with $3b in revenue since one dope decided to drive into a truck and behead himself. There's nobody else deserving of criticism whatsoever.

Let's not even get started with how cocky their CEO has been with his fancy sustainable business plans!

p.s. I won't even attempt an ad hominem at the guy selling homeopathics and 'nutritional supplements' in this thread.

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

#242

Post by ChuckMcM » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 9:54 PM UTC

dalbasal wrote: post #209

ChuckMcM wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How/why are search margins shrinking? Is it getting more expensive to deliver search? Online ad spending is going up, not down.

What Punch said, basically its a maturing of the Internet Advertising market, the early enthusiasm for lots of metrics on engagement being dampened by a gradual understanding of click fraud. This is reflected in Google's financials as a falling 'cost per click' (what Google gets for an ad click).

The other factor is that Google search has been slowly losing its quality edge on its competitors and so services like Microsoft's Bing start developing more significant inroads, the combination of more market share and higher CPCs on Microsoft's service lead it to be profitable last year[1]. And the reason is in part because Microsoft can preferentially send search traffic to their properties, but it is also tied to the fact that consumers don't then switch their search provider later.

To counter-act that Google has been paying more and more money to third parties to send search traffic their way (this expense is called 'traffic acquisition costs') and Google was horrified when Oracle's lawyer disclosed that they were paying Apple a billion dollars a year for their search traffic[2]. They paid millions to Mozilla to send their search traffic to Google [3] and had a material dip in traffic revenue when Mozilla cancelled that deal[4]. What the author of the article in [4] did not realize is that all of Yahoo!'s search traffic is in fact served by the Bing index and servers. Yahoo! hasn't had a native search service since they agreed to send it all to Microsoft. So Bing+Yahoo! market share is really just Bing market share. That money paid, their TAC, comes right out of the profit margin for their ads

At the end of the day this is neither good nor bad, search is being commoditized. And as it commoditizes that puts pressure on margins since discrimination based on cost always puts pressure on margins. Eventually Bing and Google will be equally expensive from an advertiser point of view and the one with the best operational efficiency will make the most profit. Neither of them will be able to use "excess profits" to fund moonshots.

That is why it is so critically important for Google to find additional viable businesses to augment its search advertising revenue.

The current road leads to a very un-fun place to work, long hours (maximize work done for salary paid), few benefits (reducing costs), and little room for new development. They won't end there, it's like saying if you drive west in the US and never turn eventually you'll drown in the Pacific ocean, it's true but there is always a turn before that point. But if Google of 2003 was one end of the spectrum, Google is inexorably moving toward the other end. Ruth is there to make sure what's left is still a viable business that deserves a high stock price.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/22/bing-is-profitable/

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-22/google-pa...

[3] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2398046,00.asp

[4] http://www.geekwire.com/2015/yahoos-deal-mozilla-draws-searc...

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

#243

Post by blackguardx » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 9:55 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...

Google hired the team that won the Darpa Grand Challenge.

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

#244

Post by bitmapbrother » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 9:57 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #16

michaelvoz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be a joy at parties. How is any of the data private when you willingly use their tools, sites, servers, etc? You open up google.com and type things in, what privacy do you expect? Or am I missing something you are referring to?

The problem is that Google's target market is largely people who are unaware of what the risks are, unaware of the extent of what Google does with their data. It's up to us in the tech community to protect people from companies that use dark pattern behavior like Google. yuhong: Responding to your question as an edit to my own comment since two -4 comments is probably enough for one day. Silently implementing opt-out…

>It's up to us in the tech community to protect people from companies that use dark pattern behavior like Google.

Are you a self appointed privacy vigilante or were you elected by the people to protect them? Do you also protect people from Credit Card companies, ISP's, Cable Companies, e-Commerce sites and Cell Phone companies or are you just infatuated with Google?

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

#245

Post by mathattack » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 9:57 PM UTC

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…

Yes. Many management books and theories confuse correlation with causality.

Another common example, "Companies with happier employees are more successful." But perhaps causality is the other way, "Employees become happy when their companies succeed."

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

#246

Post by OrwellianChild » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 9:59 PM UTC

notheguyouthink wrote: post #12

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it's amazing how profitable vacuuming up users' private data without their informed consent and monetizing it can be.

> informed consent Sidenote, and completely off topic: Is there a non-high-horse way to word this? I understand the meaning, but the same phrase can be used to be completely dismissive as well. It's a potential moral high ground, where if you don't agree you must be uninformed. I'm not saying OP meant it that way, it just brought up the honest question from me.

Is "passive data collection" close to what you want to say? Or "opt-out data collection"?

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

#247

Post by ocdtrekkie » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 10:01 PM UTC

bduerst wrote: post #233

bzbarsky wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Adobe Flash is directly built into Microsoft Edge, they collaborate on this. Chrome doesn't support ActiveX or NPAPI plugins either, and the Flash plugin also doesn't work with Chrome, because similarly to Edge, the Flash plugin is built directly into Chrome.

Also, Adobe Reader is a standalone program, you don't install it to embed in the browser. (Both Edge and Chrome can display PDF files natively.)

This has nothing to do with "recommended" apps. Chrome is pushed with Adobe Reader because Google pays them to do so. Similarly, McAfee pays to have their software installed with the Adobe Flash plugin installer.

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

#248

Post by bitmapbrother » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #164

“No one wants to face the reality that this is an advertising company with a bunch of hobbies.” Remember Nokia. They produced mobile phones with excellent quality, extreme ruggedness, good battery life, and good voice quality. Their manufacturing was highly automated and their costs were low. They focused on their core business. Recently, their CEO said "We did everything right, and we lost anyway". On the other hand…

Can you cite where Android is a loss leader to drive traffic? Their Play store makes more than enough to fund Android development.

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

#249

Post by OrwellianChild » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 10:03 PM UTC

deegles wrote: post #78

mahyarm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's even cheaper for the company to not provide them. Case in point: Amazon's paltry benefits.

Until you factor in employee turnover costs... Amazon spends an enormous number of man-hours and resources recruiting to backfill and has thousands of open job listings un-filled. It would be difficult to argue that they are saving money at the end of the day by crimping benefits and salary at the expense of employee loyalty.

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

#250

Post by mbesto » Thu, Dec 08, 2016, 10:05 PM UTC

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…

I'm oft reminded:

Revenue solves everything