361–370 of 445 posts
Am I the only one who didn't realize Alphabet == Google? When did that happen?
Some of the companies purchased by "Google" became subsidiaries of Alphabet as well.
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Google is a ad company who uses search to attract customers. I don't see the McDonald's reference as the same, drinks are part of their food product. Ads are not a integrated part of search (google did not start out having ads).
So, if set up a fashion magazine and then I fill it with ads, I'm in the fashion magazines business, or in the ads business? If someone asks, which of the 2 answers would be more helpful to them?
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So is McDonalds a drink company? It makes most of its money from drinks... The way a company makes its money is only weakly correlated to the service it offers to users. Think about it: if McDonalds stopped selling food, it would not have any customers. If Google stopped offering search, it would not have any users.
Google is a ad company who uses search to attract customers. I don't see the McDonald's reference as the same, drinks are part of their food product. Ads are not a integrated part of search (google did not start out having ads).
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This is an annoying meme. Are concession stands the flagship product of movie theaters? People use Google for search, email, maps, etc. And that's what the company was built for. If they had a better way to monetize than ads, they would certainly drop ads.
Technically, movie theaters are in the business of selling "movie experiences", which include the movie, the dark room, the chairs, and yes, the concession stands.
Although originally theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-do-we-eat-pop...
I was just referring to the fact that theaters make most of their money from concessions, but you wouldn't then call them a concession company. No one would go to a theater just for the concessions. They would (and do) go just for the movie though.
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It's interesting that the market is valuing Apple's ability to innovate in the absence of Steve Jobs at ~zero. Apple trades like a value stock right now; Wall Street assumes that they're a cash cow that is just going to be milked, and unlikely to have any future major hits. If you (correctly) disagree with this assessment, there may be money to be made here. If you agree with it, well, I understand why Apple wouldn't…
It's cliche at this point but... "The Market Can Remain Irrational Longer Than You Can Remain Solvent"
The market can do what it likes; my AAPL shares are paid for. I don't know how long they'll have to buy back shares before the fickle market changes its mind again but I can certainly wait.
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unlike Google, where practically 100% comes from one single product, which is ads. all "other bets" are actually losing money, per their data.
Nope: there's Google ads, Google non-ads, and "Other Bets". Q4 Google non-ad revenue was $2.1 billion, or almost 10%, and this share has been steadily increasing. https://abc.xyz/investor/news/earnings/2015/Q4_google_earnin...
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In both cases you describe, the company with the higher cap is the more "powerful" company though. In example one, they have a lot more control of their destiny since they have debt and not more shareholders. In number two they have more control because if an opportunity comes up that costs say 10 billion, Company B can act on that and Company A cannot.
> In number two they have more control because if an opportunity comes up that costs say 10 billion, Company B can act on that and Company A cannot. You missed the example completely. Both companies raised $10B, either through debt or equity, and both of them spent/invested the money immediately. Net result: both of them have equal amounts of cash in the bank. But one of them has a market cap $10B higher than the oth…
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Many things would have blown the socks off people of a previous time. That doesn't make them all AI, especially since many of the results we see today are not due to novel techniques a ten-years-ago AI researcher wouldn't have known about, but rather to ten years' worth of advancement in refining the techniques and in the availability of computing power to use those techniques with. A lot of it is just "yeah, if we c…
Even within the last six months I've seen very confident posts here to the effect of "an AI that is worth a damn at go is still at least 10 years off".
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Google's flagship product is an advertising platform, not a search box.
This is an annoying meme. Are concession stands the flagship product of movie theaters? People use Google for search, email, maps, etc. And that's what the company was built for. If they had a better way to monetize than ads, they would certainly drop ads.
The comparisons between Google and Apple aren't as apples-to-apples as everyone in the media seems to think. If we're talking about the future of these companies, and their earning power, they are situating themselves very differently. Apple is really a consumer electronics company, Google is an artificial intelligence company. And investors think more money will be in the future of AI instead of consumer hardware an…
Google has great AI people - arguably more than anywhere else - but the bulk of the company is not based on AI. I'm a former Google employee, and up until a few years ago, most of the company was very skeptical of machine learning. Many people still are. I left because my machine learning project was canceled - a manager had an older solution that didn't use machine learning, and he didn't want his pet project to be replaced (even though it had worse performance and was much harder to use), so we were canceled while about fifty lines of code away from launching. Other parts of the company may be different, but in our product area AI was a minus, not a plus.