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

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

#381

Post by usrusr »

mathattack wrote: post #245
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."

Enter the stock market and suddenly the cargo culting that results from causality mixups can successfully increase market capitalization for a while as long as enough people literally buy into the shared misconception.

It must be hard to think straight in a domain where one of the most visible success metrics can be so misleading.

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

#382

Post by dx034 »

pgeorgi wrote: post #66
Naritai wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I one spoke with a woman from the Netherlands who was surprised that these perks are not taxable. According to her, in the Netherlands perks like shuttles to work or company-provide food are taxable.

They are in Germany. What happens with perks is that there's a (reasonable) fixed value assigned to them which is accounted for in income taxes.

And as long as they're below a certain amount, the benefits will be taxed at a fixed tax rate, not the employees individual rate. It's much easier for accounting purposes.

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

#383

Post by dx034 »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #248
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.

Plus in-app ads and the fact that ad-blocking basically doesn't exist on mobile. I'd guess that Android is what actually ensured the success of Google. Controlling the ecosystem is incredibly important, even if you don't directly make money from it.

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

#384

Post by dx034 »

throwaway40483 wrote: post #83

This is the killer quote: “No one wants to face the reality that this is an advertising company with a bunch of hobbies.” It's so brutal but (IMHO) sums up Alphabet in one sentence.

However, many of these "hobbies" actively support ad traffic. Chrome and Android ensured Google's high market share for search & maps while delivering additional ad revenue channels.

By the number of projects most are side projects that make a loss, but the really big ones have a big contribution to Google's success (via ads).

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

#385

Post by dx034 »

compiler-guy wrote: post #30
zigzigzag wrote: post #26

The robotics effort sounds like an absolute disaster. How shareholders haven't been demanding answers there is beyond me. Acquiring 11 companies to, apparently, satisfy Rubin's obsession with robots (it's named Android for a reason) and then trying to shut them all down or flog them off ... but nobody wants them? Yikes. How did they get so starry-eyed about Rubin that keeping him (also failed) was apparently worth su…

Shareholders can demand answers, but it won't get them anywhere. For better or for worse, Larry, Sergey and Eric own Google and can do whatever they want.

Shareholders can sell and thus lower the stock price (and the owners' wealth). The fact they don't do it means that many people seem to believe in management's ability to earn future profits.

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

#386

Post by dx034 »

tajen wrote: post #291
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.

I concur. But then I tried to classify Google projects in 3 categories and find for "obviously useless things that only exist so engineers can have fun", and I didn't find so many obvious things: - Obviously productive ones: Gmail, Google Analytics, Android, Android TV, Maps, Youtube, OpenSocial, Chrome, because they all participate to "universally trackable users", - Skeptical projects: Fiber, Flights, Google Schola…

Even the skeptical ones are probably productive:

- Flights will likely make money, it operates on a comission basis. It's just not big compared to other projects

- TensorFlow is part of the machine learning programme that is used heavily to make more money in other areas. Sharing knowledge helps to get talent in that area

- Chrome OS is like Android for laptops. It ensures that you use Chrome and Google. The adaption rate is not huge, but I could imagine that it still pays off

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

#387

Post by adwn »

baccheion wrote: post #326
GCA10 wrote: post #57

Big companies seem to step in the same puddle, every time they try to set up one of these "breakthrough incubator" projects. They pick fascinating projects. They hire lots of smart people and give them great autonomy. But they inadvertently set up incentives that lead to the repeated creation of LINS (lavishly impractical non-solutions). And then the plug gets pulled. I think the key problem is that the research team…

Brilliant internals? Maybe (never checked). Worthless product that solves nothing? Definitely. Developing great systems or internals, then trying to find a use for them is one thing. Google Glass was a crap product without a purpose (from the beginning). That aside, Google doesn't know what to do with clever, ingenious, or well-Engineered systems/tools/libraries/components/etc. They'll wrap them in sh-t, then use the…

> Driverless cars? Is the driving of a car the real problem, or even a problem?

Really?! You don't see the advantages of a self-driving car? What about taking a nap, reading, or watching a movie while you drive to work? What about having a couple of drinks and getting home safely? What about being dropped off in the middle of the city right at the front door, and your car looks for a parking spot, maybe 10 blocks away? What about the potential for vastly reduced risk of accidents? What about cars that communicate with each other to improve merging, thereby avoiding congestion? You really don't see the value in this?

A self-driving car that handles traffic situations at least as well as a human is the holy grail of personal transport. You couldn't have picked a worse example.

> Driverless cars [...] the technology has long been created.

No, that is completely wrong. If it weren't, driverless cars would already fill the streets.

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

#388

Post by patrickk »

rsync wrote: post #231
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…

""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…

> A front page item on HN a few days ago asked what people would pay $1000 per month for

Somewhat meta, but I cannot find this item on https://hn.algolia.com or using a Google search ("site: news.ycombinator.com $1000 for") can you post a link if you have it?

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

#389

Post by ForHackernews »

zardeh wrote: post #235
ForHackernews wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"But it does matter to a lot of people"

Does it?

Imagine some alternate reality where Bing were the dominant search engine (or look at real world cases like Russia, where Yandex dominates), do you think that Google's marginally superior results would be enough to make users switch?

I propose that Google reached a market-leading position early on by being pretty good when other search engines were pretty bad. Since then, they've become the "default" option, and people will keep using what they're accustomed to.

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

#390

Post by user5994461 »

eropple wrote: post #272
user5994461 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're just ad distributing products. Ever tried to install an adblocker on Android? There isn't anything you can do without rooting your phone. Seriously, it should be called Addroid. Ever tried to install adblock/ublock on Chrome? only to find out that it doesn't exist in the chrome store or was removed again.

> Ever tried to install an adblocker on Android? Yes. Works across browsers and against in-app ads, too. https://block-this.com > Ever tried to install adblock/ublock on Chrome? Yes. > only to find out that it doesn't exist in the chrome store or was removed again. Under no circumstances. AdBlock Plus has never, as far as I know, been removed, nor has uBlock Origin.

Well. First commit 6 months ago, that thing is a novelty.

Next we'll see how it goes when you'll try to explain to your sister and your mother how to use that android VPN to block ads.

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