Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World • Hacker News Board

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#431

Post by zpatel » Tue, Feb 02, 2016, 8:17 PM UTC

bhauer wrote: post #161

percentcer wrote: post #145

It's interesting to that it took this long, just considering the utility of each company. If Apple disappeared tomorrow I'd be moderately inconvenienced, I'd have to pick up an Android handset instead of my iPhone and maybe set up some new podcast feeds. If Google disappeared the world would screech to a halt.

> If Google disappeared the world would screech to a halt. I agree that Google vanishing in an instant would have a more tangible short-term effect than Apple doing the same. But I feel you paint them as (nearly) opposite ends of a spectrum. Google provides many centralized services that people have come to depend on, whereas Apple creates physical products that would continue to function even if the company ceased t…

you say this now that the smartphone is more of a commodity but indeed apple made huge impact by revolutionizing the smartphone market, google has a monopoly in search platform like FB has in social , thats the only difference.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#432

Post by saddestcatever » Tue, Feb 02, 2016, 9:30 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #219

itcmcgrath wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked on the Drive team, I can assure you Google Apps (which includes GMail, the Docs editors, and Drive) has much more than 50 million. A quick search on public figures for these services will give better numbers. Edit: Those are Apps for Work numbers, excluding consumers - obviously you can't compare just a subset with a total.

Why does Drive lack where Dropbox has succeeded (efficient, reliable syncing)? (Honest question, since you mentioned you're on the Drive team)

In my opinion:

User Interface. Dropbox presented a beautifully clean metaphor for how your files get synced. It doesn't matter if you understand what "the cloud" is. My grandmother understands: "put things in folder, folder available elsewhere".

On the other hand we've got Google Drive. Is GMail using Google drive? Is Google Photos using Google Drive? Why don't folders other people have shared to me not appear in my folder? Why isn't 'Shared with Me' the same as "Mine". Is Google Drive the same thing as Google Docs?

Not to mention - Dropbox really pushed the "Desktop App", while Google Drive pushed the "Web First" approach. Add on referral bonuses, Dropbox had some good solid adoption - well, at least among free users.

I use both extensively - Dropbox Pro for everything personal, and Google Drive for everything at work, and I still get confused about the where I saved/shared files to in Google Drive.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#433

Post by 0xCMP » Tue, Feb 02, 2016, 9:34 PM UTC

modelmodel wrote: post #256

0xCMP wrote: post #147

You're all talking about Google being more valuable as if Apple did not lose a ton of value since Jan 1 in the scares. Majority of the loss has been in generalized fear. Google hasn't really done anything to grow past them. They just stayed where they were and Apple fell below them. Lets please keep this in mind when we throw around ideas like one is better than the other as a result of this.

What were the scares caused by?

First off, never claiming to understand the whole stock market or being an expert. I'm am amateur trying to make sense of this. But here is what I know very tersely (at work, can't write a paper here.)

China is highly leveraged and their stock market was crashing. Their very high spending is often accepted because of their continuing growth which people have been assuming was a lie for the past 7(?) years. They always say it's 7% growth. With a stock market crash people think that maybe people are waking up that the growth isn't there and China won't be able to sustain much longer. Thats not good for apparently many far reaching reasons.

Oil is crashing for many reasons which you could speculate about but not know for sure. The reality for the US markets is that many smaller oil companies are highly leveraged because oil was so expensive and they were funded with the idea it'd stay above something like $50/barrel. Their methods are more expensive than say Saudi Arabia's methods which allow them to sell much cheaper (although they need revenue which they're offsetting by selling bonds). Here is where I'm lost a bit, but somehow this is tied to the banks again who might be in trouble if they all start failing.

Not to mention people have been calling a correction for almost a year now based on debt levels, global banking issues, global economic issues, high P/E ratios, etc. to happen sometime around now till next year.

The stock market fear indicators on money.cnn.com[0] were at extreme levels for several days in Jan. Plenty of issues with fear and emotions in the markets right now. Some of which are well placed fears.

Apple was going down a lot during those periods of fear well before their earning call which is what has been sealing the deal. I think during that major sell off people thought it was the "top" and were getting out.

[0]: http://money.cnn.com/data/fear-and-greed/

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#434

Post by arikrak » Tue, Feb 02, 2016, 11:28 PM UTC

Hermel wrote: post #346

arikrak wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All 10 of the 10 most valuable publicly traded companies are American (multinational) companies. #11 is Chinese and #20 is Swiss [1]. (Not that the largest 4 companies are tech companies, so that explains part of it...) [1] http://www.dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap....

This list is incomplete. Nestlé for example is missing ( https://www.google.com/finance?q=VTX%3ANESN ).

Thanks, you can view a complete list on Google finance if you sort by market cap.[1] The top 10 are still US companies though.

[1] https://www.google.com/finance?ei=BzuxVqG2ItO5euz2pMAO#stock...

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#435

Post by magicalist » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 1:18 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #270

magicalist wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Calling someone an "X company" means that they make their money from X. There are aspects of AI in targeted advertising, but not enough to call them an AI company rather than an advertising company. eh, either way Google is described it's just trying to be a cute soundbite with next to no information. You can call them an advertising company, but they create the products that most of their ads are seen in, so reall…

Data centers are just the modern version of what used to be called plant and machinery, and Google is just an updated industrial corp in the tradition of other former and current household names, but with a slightly more colourful logo. The business focus matters because the ad market is in trouble, and unless Alphabet has something in the pipeline to replace ads, five to ten years from now the company is going to be…

> This seems hard to imagine now, but no one expected DEC to fail, or HP to turn into that thing it turned into, or Microsoft to sit on a grenade labelled "Windows", or IBM to drift off to the margins of the web - and so on.

Sure, but for every unexpected floundering there are many more predictions of failure that never occurred. I'm not sure how unexpected failures in general give any insight beyond that they exist.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#436

Post by jpatokal » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 5:13 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #375

tinalumfoil wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with calling anything AI is that it's such a meaningless word in the context of computers. According to Wikipedia AI is "intelligence exhibited by machines or software" and Merriam Webster define intelligence as "the ability to learn" so I'd say we hit AI long ago. I'd follow the meaning further but I hate arguing definitions. To put it another way, if we define a Scotsman as anyone born in Scotland and/o…

I take the term AI to mean "a thing that people will actually acknowledge as being AI when it exists"—something that can only be defined retrospectively, but which still is a workable definition in that you can sort of predict what people will or won't want to have "wasted" the eventual definition of the term on. My personal bet is on people placing that line squarely on the divide between "Stoic Guru" and "Active Ac…

I think you just described Google Now: https://www.google.com.au/landing/now/

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#437

Post by mcv » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 11:54 AM UTC

iainmerrick wrote: post #424

mcv wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At Google, AI does seem to unite almost everything they do, from search, image recognition, self-driving cars, and ad placement. Of course all their revenue is from ads, so in revenue, they're an advertising company, but in products, they're an AI company.

But all that is true of Facebook and Amazon, say. I'm not saying they don't do AI, I'm just saying it's not their unique focus that sets them apart from other companies. Search-and-ads sets them apart. You could certainly identify very large datacenters, Big Data and now machine learning as tools that Google have pioneered. But they don't have an exclusive lock on those.

No, but I think Google goes a lot further with their research and application of AI than Facebook and Amazon. I don't see Facebook and Amazon developing self-driving cars or Deep Dreaming.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#438

Post by xbmcuser » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 1:30 PM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #379

ubernostrum wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet Google's Go-playing approach still doesn't seem to involve fundamentally novel techniques. Most of the advance seems to come in refinements to existing techniques, and being able to throw resources at the problem on a scale nobody had managed before.

Just like James Watt's steam engine was just a refinement of Thomas Newcomen's model and yet fundamentally changed the industrial landscape in Europe.

It's not the same thing previously rules were being fed into the computers now data is being fed into the computers and it is understanding or getting the rules by itself and then improving itself based on what it understands. AI wont be created, A day will just come when the algorithms that learn and improve on its own will reach sentience. I expect Google to reach it first simply becuase of the amount data and processing power in the Google servers.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#439

Post by eli_gottlieb » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 2:32 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #419

iainmerrick wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you forget the whole "where does the money come from?" angle, they're still an ad company: their flagship products are AdWords and AdSense. OK, to be fair, search is still very important too (in fact the most important content provider for their ad business). So call them a "search and advertising company". They use machine learning and are actively researching it, but that's true of a lot of companies. Is IB…

At Google, AI does seem to unite almost everything they do, from search, image recognition, self-driving cars, and ad placement. Of course all their revenue is from ads, so in revenue, they're an advertising company, but in products, they're an AI company.

So what about Android?

(Said the guy whose work is related to Android...)

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#440

Post by sangnoir » Wed, Feb 03, 2016, 4:10 PM UTC

oldmanjay wrote: post #266

sangnoir wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But nobody was sad when it got killed, you know Oh my, isn't that damning with faint praise? It's an indictment against Apple: Ping was so bad no one missed it.

Well, it's an indictment against Ping anyway. It would be mighty disingenuous to somehow suggest that level of failure is a statement of the possibility of future success for them considering how big their hits are.

It's only disingenuous if you're stripping away the context of the thread, further upstream, ancestor comment said:

>>>On the other hand, that product stance helps [Apple] avoid Google Reader-type situations.

and GP replied:

>>Right, it gets them into more iTunes Ping situations.

followed by:

>But nobody was sad when it got killed, you know? Nobody misses iTunes Ping or iAds or MobileMe

Which is damning Apple with faint praise.

>It would be mighty disingenuous to somehow suggest that level of failure is a statement of the possibility of future success for them considering how big their hits are

That's a non-sequitur. No where in my comment did I extrapolate or attept to divine Apple's future failure/success.