91–100 of 194 posts
Subtly dishonest journalism in my opinion. This article could just as easily be titled "Alphabet invests $859M on long-term projects". In fact, that would be a more accurate title since that is precisely Google's intent.
Some projects seem more like the Google-scale equivalent of putting the company name on the shirt of a sports team. Would we expect the Oracle boat to ever turn profitable?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
Well, 98 percent of the market is not asking hard questions, so by dropping support, they are actually making their search product more tailored towards their market.
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…
Alphabet is trying to learn from the mistakes of their predecessor tech giants, who continued to focus almost exclusively on their current money spinners, only to wind up completely missing the boat on the Next Big Thing (tm).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
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…
A true moonshot! :) and :( at the same time...
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…
That being said, it does indeed need a lot of improvement.