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

#341

Post by brandmeyer » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 4:13 AM UTC

T2_t2 wrote: post #294

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.

As well as a diversity / community aspect. For every chef, barista, waitress, cleaner etc they hire, there is a chance to alter the hiring clique from (hyperbole) rich, snotty nosed, Ivy leaguers to include people with different backgrounds. I know that may seem like a small thing, but providing jobs for the less educated off sets at least some of the problems these companies face with gentrification, gender and raci…

Unfortunately, I think this has backfired. Instead, it has created a caste society. The service jobs are dominated by minorities (especially latinos), while the engineering jobs are dominated by whites, chinese, and indians. The difference between rich and poor has never been more stark.

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

#342

Post by KKKKkkkk1 » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 4:13 AM UTC

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…

Tesla's business strategy is a moving target. I don't think anyone put the words autonomous driving and Tesla in the same sentence until 2014. And now they turned into a solar power company all of a sudden.

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

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Post by baccheion » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 4:13 AM UTC

brilliantcode wrote: post #70

I feel like Google is still stuck in 2005. Not much has changed from top of my head. All of their products are still based on their end-user being the product since everything is free and people expect it to be that way. I don't see anything changing because they are literally printing money from their monopoly on online advertising. They have no serious competition and no, Facebook is not really great for targeted a…

What's funny about Google's Cloud initiative is that even as recently as a few years ago, they didn't have enough servers to scale their own products and "were lacking the capacity to expand to meet the needs of X-product-being-pitched." Or maybe this is just another example of them being full of it.

If I remember correctly, they had to take a significant amount of server resources from other teams in order to launch Google Instant.

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

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Post by kwijibob » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 4:13 AM UTC

Google has some killer products that aren't just about adsense for the web:

Youtube - incredible future for revenue Google Docs/Spreadsheet/Slides - the future of productivity suites - easily monetisable when needed Android - dominating this space bodes very well

They are gently providing an entire computing stack that covers all a simple user might need: android/chrome OS/chrome browser/cloud

Yes they have a bunch of crazy hobbies. But they are dominating in a number of key spaces.

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

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Post by sjg007 » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 4:24 AM UTC

OrwellianChild wrote: post #249

deegles wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

uhm.. walmart sets the example here I think... For Amazon is there high turnover in software engineering?

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

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Post by KKKKkkkk1 » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 4:24 AM 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…

Nokia made a lot of money for its shareholders, and when its core business died, it shut down. I don't think that Nokia's story is a cautionary tale. On the other hand, if Nokia had spent all the money they earned from selling cellphones on failed moonshots, that would be a cautionary tale.

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

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Post by deadowl » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 4:25 AM UTC

thearn4 wrote: post #97

matwood wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of Valve's no manager management style: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-04-27/why-there... When you have a lot of money, a lot of things work because you have a lot of money. You often see the same thing with people trying to emulate pro-athletes training methods. A genetically gifted pro-athlete can often succeed in spite of their training, and not necessarily because of their training.

The endless spigot of cash from Steam is something that does enable Valve to take some very experimental leaps (VR, Steam machines, SteamOS, etc.) In my opinion, Valve also has the same shortcomings as google: practically zero customer support, and an un-curated app platform full of shovelware (finding gems on the Steam and the Google Play & Chrome Web Stores can be tricky). But there is still a ton to admire in both…

Are you kidding me about Google customer support? They're the only company that ever solved my problem with a Linux question, and later helped me when I purchased a movie on YouTube on an account I didn't intend to purchase on. They might not provide great customer support to some market segments, but when it comes to the end-consumer, they go above and beyond.

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

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Post by baccheion » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 4:29 AM UTC

skizm wrote: post #76

I always wondered if Google just fired all their engineers except a few top guys, and focused on their core money making products like search / ads / etc. and tried to stay as lean as possible (lean being a relative term), how much profit they could make.

Only the top 5% at Google are "that good" (and that number may be lower now). Everyone else is average-to-mediocre. As search and ads will essentially be in maintenance mode in your hypothetical world, what they should do is pull out the top 5% and set them to work on something "big" (if they'd prefer to be told what to do or have nothing worthwhile in mind). The next 5% can then be assigned to search or ads, mainly to maintain (which still requires incremental times-related improvement).

That's 3,000 people working on bigger things, and another 3,000 supporting what is.

If you want to do something even more aggressive (which doesn't like such a bad idea if the top 5% are actually working on more important things, rather than it just being claimed/heralded as the plan), then get rid of all products other than search + ads (therefore Android and Chrome), YouTube, and GMail (which would first have to freed from political gridlock and modernized).

I'll mention the obvious (the plan relies on properly identifying the top 10%), as it seems the idiots there fall for politicking, posturing, BS'ing, or whatever else leaves them drawn toward "meh"-quality people and toward screwing over everyone else.

They also like trusting their intuition, while twisting, mangling, and misinterpreting data in whatever way will push/support their biased self-serving point of view.

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

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Post by ghaff » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 4:35 AM UTC

muninn_ wrote: post #153

jasode wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Many companies are able to get the perks, culture, and autonomy right without being a multi-billion dollar company. You're right but I understood what Periodic intended to explain. Unfortunately, he phrased it as "billions in ad revenue" instead of a less common metric of "profit-per-employee" . If the company generates enough profit-per-employee , it can afford to pay for lavish perks. Consider 2 different companie…

So I understand what you're saying here, and it makes sense. At the same time, I see career section after career section offering the same kind of perks with much smaller companies. Maybe it's not 3 meals of gourmet food, but free catered lunches, great 401k matching, unlimited vacation, great health and dental benefits. I'm not saying the perks are matched tit-for-tat, but I still stand by my statement that you don'…

These are by no means the norm outside of Silicon Valley VC funded companies where they have become table stakes. Good health and dental in many cases but not the rest. And unlimited vacation, where offered is, even ignoring the more cynical interpretations mostly about eliminating liabilities especially under California law.

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

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Post by spydum » Fri, Dec 09, 2016, 4:49 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #242

dalbasal wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Mic…

Chuck, just want to say your detail and insightful comments are a tremendous asset to the community!

I do have to disagree though: MSFT has office and windows as major cash cows, maybe azure will also start turning some big profit in 2017 as well (tbd). So they can afford those r&d style projects without nearly as much risk as "Alphabet". I do agree with your assessment of goog though: the heat is turning up and I don't doubt belt tightening is their future.