Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 194 posts

Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016

#81

Post by redthrowaway »

jahnu wrote: post #71
Normal_gaussian wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Moonshots maybe should come once you've mastered all your core products? Then they'll never come.

They mastered search. They mastered mapping.

Search has stagnated. Google has gotten scarily good at anticipating what I want to know, but conspicuously bad at answering hard questions. There's tons of room for improvement.

Similarly, Google Maps has added features that make it a better map, and it's a great place to find what time a store closes and what their phone number is. But it's been essentially the same service, with iterative improvements, for years. There's a world of possible uses for that data beyond what we imagine when we think of a map.

Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016

#83

Post by zamalek »

> The money that Google spent on areas that have little to do with internet search and advertising used to frustrate investors who wanted to see bigger profits.

"Dear Hen, the process of laying eggs is too expensive and should be eliminated. Furthermore, we're expecting a 5% increase in golden eggs by the end of the year."

Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016

#84

Post by redthrowaway »

brador wrote: post #77
bitL wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moonshots are called that way because they bear both immense risk of failure as well as a potential to bring in billions. So individual moonshots are almost always failures; the ones that are successful pay the other ones. Google is doing the right thing to remain alive in the future without enforcing lock down on their users (like other companies not producing moonshots do).

They're only good investments if they tap that well someday. If you sit around moonshotting all day and never shipping they're worth $0. So far, no moonshot by a big corp has paid off. Maybe it's too early, or more likely Google is hoarding tech and filing patents like a rational engineer running a business using machine learning would do, and while that's good for Google it's bad for Society to have so much cool tec…

Self-driving cars look poised to pay off in a big way in the next 5-10 years.

Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016

#85

Post by redthrowaway »

Google seems to be actively attempting to avoid the trap that Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, etc have fallen into. When you completely dominate a market, it can be tempting to optimize and be the best at serving that market. But the nature of tech is such that markets have a short lifespan. New innovations are constantly overturning old monopolies--just ask Microsoft. By investing heavily in high-risk, high-reward prospects, Google is insulating itself against future disruption.

If the display ad market collapsed 5 years from now, Google's investment in AI, self-driving cars, AR, robotics, etc. might be the difference between continued dominance and irrelevance. Tech companies rest on their laurels at their own peril.

Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016

#86

Post by usrusr »

bitL wrote: post #55
brador wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is can these moonshots pay off their expenses in the long run. Given how little Google is known to actually ship I question if they can.

Moonshots are called that way because they bear both immense risk of failure as well as a potential to bring in billions. So individual moonshots are almost always failures; the ones that are successful pay the other ones. Google is doing the right thing to remain alive in the future without enforcing lock down on their users (like other companies not producing moonshots do).

> Moonshots are called that way because they bear both immense risk of failure as well as a potential to bring in billions.

Which is kind of funny because the original moonshot was a rather predictable thing (build bigger rockets until one is big enough) and success only meant that you could stop spending billions.

Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016

#88

Post by bachback »

zaroth wrote: post #33

I don't think it's right to equate R&D spending with "losses". Google makes a profit, not a loss, so technically it does not have losses. It has expenses, and among those, investments in future technology. If all Google could do with their cash flow was pay a dividend, that would be very sad, and it would call for a much lower P/E ratio. This article completely misstates the facts. Perhaps the way they break out thei…

yes, absolutely. they do have 75B$ in cash and another 60B$ in short-term investments. So they have 135B$ to spend. judged by that number Google is too conservative.

Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016

#89

Post by lorenzhs »

slmyers wrote: post #74
jahnu wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They mastered search. They mastered mapping.

Is anything truly "mastered"?

Just yesterday I got a blank result page for a sensible query, seems to have hit some rarely visited bucket combined with a busy machine somewhere or the like, and the background request timed out. Of course a refresh fixed it, but software is never perfect.

Re: Alphabet Loses $859M on 'Moonshots' in 2Q 2016

#90

Post by wastedhours »

jahnu wrote: post #67
zaroth wrote: post #33

I don't think it's right to equate R&D spending with "losses". Google makes a profit, not a loss, so technically it does not have losses. It has expenses, and among those, investments in future technology. If all Google could do with their cash flow was pay a dividend, that would be very sad, and it would call for a much lower P/E ratio. This article completely misstates the facts. Perhaps the way they break out thei…

Playing devil's advocate here (a little) but imagine they took a few dozen million of that and, say, improved their development tool chains for Android (which are disappointingly flaky). Or another few dozen millions and extended the security updates for Nexus phones by a couple of years. That could grow their market share of both developer mind-share and consumers. Moonshots maybe should come once you've mastered al…

Since Other Bets are separate in Alphabet (compared to Google), these aren't technically Google's investments offset by revenues, so would actually be losses for Alphabet as an org, no?
Post reply on HN