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Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

fortune.com

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Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#61

Post by [deleted] »

Retric wrote: post #52
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Search, on the other hand, still has massive room for improvement. This is true, but it's also a really hard problem and most likely any improvements will require enormous scale to implement (because they'll be based on statistical analysis of prior search queries), which only Google and a handful of others have. So no network effects, but huge economies of scale. Plus, having used some other search engines (DuckDu…

I suspect you could go a rediculusly long way with crated searches. Basically page rank with ~10-100x the hand tuning to more or less kill off SEO.

[deleted]

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#62

Post by adventured »

melling wrote: post #7
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #5

But while the company still earns the majority of its revenue from advertising, during his tenure Page has helped to diversify the business. Notably, YouTube is expected to generate nearly $6 billion in revenue this year Maybe I am being pedantic but aren't revenues from Youtube also based on advertising? To the broader point though, why aren't more investors also putting money toward these "moonshots?" Is it because…

That probably should have said 'search advertising'. YouTube is a different type of advertising. Google needs to plan for a day when search advertising comes under attack from the next big thing. Maybe traditional search fades away, etc.

Traditional search will never fade away, it'll be diluted. It's the same premise as what's happening to Microsoft with Windows, or Intel with the 'old style' CPU. The traditional desktop type OS isn't going to disappear, as people have been regularly and incorrectly claiming for ~20 years - it's going to be / has been diluted in terms of usage and importance.

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#63

Post by dummyfellow »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #29
melling wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That probably should have said 'search advertising'. YouTube is a different type of advertising. Google needs to plan for a day when search advertising comes under attack from the next big thing. Maybe traditional search fades away, etc.

The interesting thing is that neither YouTube nor Google search have much user lock-in. YouTube has content producer lock-in, which is tremendously helpful. And it may be that there's just no room for improvement massive enough to pull people away, that video delivery is close enough to its peak to not leave any room for real competition. But if content was elsewhere, YouTube revenue would vanish very quickly indeed.…

content producr lock-in, is from some contract, technological issue or just ubiquity of Youtube? If Facebook starts its video service pushed heavily on Fb, it will get eyeballs, what is stopping it?

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#64

Post by grecy »

kurtle wrote: post #6

Disney is a classic example of a company that made huge leaps and transformed itself from a single revenue stream to a very diverse one. Can you think of what the board of Disney said to Walt when he decided to open a brick and mortar theme park when their only product to date had been a few animated films? Or how what they said when he unveiled the original vision of EPCOT as a real city with a theme park bolted on.…

> * you think of what the board of Disney said to Walt when he decided to open a brick and mortar theme park when their only product to date had been a few animated films?*

I read an article on Walt once that covered this.. he went to all his friends and family and told them his plan. Every single person told him he was nuts and it would never work.

That was how he knew he was on to something - the fact it had never been attempted before only made him more certain it was going to work.

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#65

Post by zaroth »

mehwoot wrote: post #60
Retric wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you could go a rediculusly long way with crated searches. Basically page rank with ~10-100x the hand tuning to more or less kill off SEO.

http://searchengineland.com/google-25-of-queries-are-new-add... 25% of google searches are unique. I bet another 25% would be so rare and numerous you couldn't possibly have time to tune them. In fact, when you think about how much revenue a single search brings, a search is going to have to happen on the order of 1,000 times (at least?) before you can have a human hand tuning them.

That's from 2007. I wonder how much Google's autocomplete has changed that statistic. Even still, 25% of searches may be unique strings, but I doubt 25% of searches are meaningfully/semantically unique.

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#66

Post by afro88 »

grecy wrote: post #64
kurtle wrote: post #6

Disney is a classic example of a company that made huge leaps and transformed itself from a single revenue stream to a very diverse one. Can you think of what the board of Disney said to Walt when he decided to open a brick and mortar theme park when their only product to date had been a few animated films? Or how what they said when he unveiled the original vision of EPCOT as a real city with a theme park bolted on.…

> * you think of what the board of Disney said to Walt when he decided to open a brick and mortar theme park when their only product to date had been a few animated films?* I read an article on Walt once that covered this.. he went to all his friends and family and told them his plan. Every single person told him he was nuts and it would never work. That was how he knew he was on to something - the fact it had never…

> he went to all his friends and family and told them his plan. Every single person told him he was nuts and it would never work.

> the fact it had never been attempted before only made him more certain it was going to work.

Those are interesting reasons for being certain it will work. The combination of all the people you cherish the most telling you it's a bad idea and the fact that no one had tried it before. I mean, sure, I understand the romance of it and these reasons giving someone the drive to try it and succeed. But making you certain it's going to work? That I don't understand.

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#67

Post by ghaff »

amaks wrote: post #49
millstone wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enterprise (with Google Docs), and maybe Chromecast, are the two arguably profitable non-advertising products. The other product areas are surely in the red. Google is trying to diversify, but they haven't been successful at turning a profit on non-advertising products, at least not yet.

How can you possibly know (unless you're a member of Google leadership team)?

Because they're a public company and are therefore required by the SEC to provide a certain level of disclosure about the sources of their revenue.

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#68

Post by adventured »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #29
melling wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That probably should have said 'search advertising'. YouTube is a different type of advertising. Google needs to plan for a day when search advertising comes under attack from the next big thing. Maybe traditional search fades away, etc.

The interesting thing is that neither YouTube nor Google search have much user lock-in. YouTube has content producer lock-in, which is tremendously helpful. And it may be that there's just no room for improvement massive enough to pull people away, that video delivery is close enough to its peak to not leave any room for real competition. But if content was elsewhere, YouTube revenue would vanish very quickly indeed.…

One of the biggest lock-ins for Google search and YouTube, are the moats around the services (the moat being how hard and expensive it is to build a legitimate competitor).

To compete with Google search you need... perhaps billions in funding to build the scale, speed, accuracy, redundancy, distribution, etc.

To compete with YouTube, you need to spend incredible sums of money to host and stream 720 or 1080 videos; the volume of content uploads; and then to be able to afford all the lawsuits that come with the business regarding content. That's a billion dollars in financing just to get up to proper YouTube punching weight.

The same is true of Facebook. One of its best shields, is the immense cost and scaling challenge to handle a billion users, regardless of if it's gradual. It's incredibly difficult to do well, and with the reliability that Facebook has always had.

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#69

Post by hyp0 »

Looks like Xerox PARC to me: one fantastic business funding great research projects.

They are protecting that business well, by seeing and acting on mobile early, by acquiring Android and developing it.

I think heads-up displays (eventually) will be the next big thing, because they remove hardware size-limitation (cf. watches), and Google is at least ready for that, with Glass.

Re: Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology

#70

Post by adventured »

afro88 wrote: post #66
grecy wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * you think of what the board of Disney said to Walt when he decided to open a brick and mortar theme park when their only product to date had been a few animated films?* I read an article on Walt once that covered this.. he went to all his friends and family and told them his plan. Every single person told him he was nuts and it would never work. That was how he knew he was on to something - the fact it had never…

> he went to all his friends and family and told them his plan. Every single person told him he was nuts and it would never work. > the fact it had never been attempted before only made him more certain it was going to work. Those are interesting reasons for being certain it will work. The combination of all the people you cherish the most telling you it's a bad idea and the fact that no one had tried it before. I me…

If people are universal in their opinions that something isn't going to work, you then have to assess their credibility.

If you decide that the problem is they lack some specific insight that you possess (and you're really sure about that fact), then in combination with their universal negative position, I believe you can be confident that you're on to something. There's a tendency for strikingly new things to be laughed at, or otherwise denounced as absurd; once you notice that effect at play by people, and you can reasonably confirm your own thesis that you know something they don't, it's a great indicator.

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