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Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

Google's flagship product is an advertising platform, not a search box.

This is an annoying meme. Are concession stands the flagship product of movie theaters?

People use Google for search, email, maps, etc. And that's what the company was built for. If they had a better way to monetize than ads, they would certainly drop ads.

If that was how they made most of their money, yes.

So is McDonalds a drink company? It makes most of its money from drinks...

The way a company makes its money is only weakly correlated to the service it offers to users. Think about it: if McDonalds stopped selling food, it would not have any customers. If Google stopped offering search, it would not have any users.

Google is a ad company who uses search to attract customers.

I don't see the McDonald's reference as the same, drinks are part of their food product. Ads are not a integrated part of search (google did not start out having ads).

So, if set up a fashion magazine and then I fill it with ads, I'm in the fashion magazines business, or in the ads business?

If someone asks, which of the 2 answers would be more helpful to them?

If your magazine starts handling ads in every other publisher's magazines too and then starts handling ads in TV and then starts putting up billboards by the highways, I'd say the answer isn't so obvious.

Sure they are - that is what separates AdWords from other advertising platforms.

If we're going to simplify or generalize, I would simplify McDonald's to being a "sugar and salt" company. Those are the cravings in the human brain that it satisfies.

But yeah, I agree with you. Businesses are more complex than individual touchpoints.

actually, movie theaters DO make most their money in concessions.

eg: http://www.businessinsider.com/movie-concessions-drive-amc-e...

Nope. You don't say "Steven Spielberg is in the cinema popcorn-and-soda business", he is in the movie bussines.

Yup don't say "Taylor Swift is in the online concert tickets business", she is in the music business.

McDonald's not in the hamburgers-and-cokes business, its in the fast food business.

Just because it's the way they make money it doesn't mean is the most appropriate classification.

Technically, movie theaters are in the business of selling "movie experiences", which include the movie, the dark room, the chairs, and yes, the concession stands.

True, it's not a perfect analogy. Popcorn is additive to the experience. Even if theaters could survive sans popcorn sales, they'd still keep it because it's part of the experience.

Although originally theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-do-we-eat-pop...

I was just referring to the fact that theaters make most of their money from concessions, but you wouldn't then call them a concession company. No one would go to a theater just for the concessions. They would (and do) go just for the movie though.

That's a really interesting article!

> "Movie theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn," Smith says, "because they were trying to duplicate what was done in real theaters. They had beautiful carpets and rugs and didn't want popcorn being ground into it." Movie theaters were trying to appeal to a highbrow clientele, and didn't want to deal with the distracting trash of concessions—or the distracting noise that snacking during a film would create.

> When films added sound in 1927, the movie theater industry opened itself up to a much wider clientele, since literacy was no longer required to attend films (the titles used [in] early silent films restricted their audience). [emphasis added]

> Are concession stands the flagship product of movie theaters?

Actually, yeah. I worked in cinema (as a projectionist) before getting into tech, and the management definitely saw the food counter as more important than the movies being shown.

The place was run like a fast-food restaurant.

Either way you cut it (search or advertising), Google's flagship product's success depends critically on their ability to do machine learning better than other people.

I would be inclined to say search is still their flagship. While advertising is their monetary powerhouse, it is still search that leads their fleet of products as a household name.

Nah, Google is a company that turns protobuffers into more differenter protobuffers.

And this is how you recognize a Googler amongst a crowd.

Which, even if true, just proves the thread's point. Ads uses a lot more traditional machine-learning/AI techniques than Search does.

Even that one feeds ads it thinks are relevant to you

And judging from the quality of those feeds, I'd call it AS (artificial stupidity) not AI.

Well it's smarter than running ads in newspapers, which generated a half-trillion dollars of revenue over a century.

Assuming you're correct, that means the whole market for google's primary revenue source took a century to bring in what Apple makes in 2 years.

Really goes to show how much the market works on the 2nd derivative, and how that can result in immensely disproportionate market caps relative to a company's profitability.

If I were Apple I would think about seriously ramping up the stock buyback at this point. If they keep it up long enough they could even take themselves private one day.

No the product is search, it's monetised by advertising.

And Apple's flagship product, and responsible for the majority of their income, is a phone trinket made in China.

I would argue that Apple's reputation for quality design - reliability, build quality, simplicity (though these may be changing), along with first-class industrial and UI design - is what drives their products. The definition of a "trinket" is something that is of little value. Material artifacts with the above qualities have always been of value.

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