Google parent Alphabet ushers in ‘fiscal discipline era’

it is typical example of corporate self-contradiction - a splurge, on CFO in this case, as a first step to 'financial discipline'. Like inviting a wolf to teach and promote vegetarianism.

I remember how Sun killed Wednesday donuts as basically a centerpiece of 'financial discipline' back then. Another remarkable act was to allow business class for a given person only after meeting some threshold of travel - you can guess how it played out - yea, people were basically 'forcing' themselves to fly more (and not to Alaska or Antarctica) to meet the threshold :)

... because none of them are going to succeed? That's an excellent reason to cut.

Just look at Google's financials. If they "sacrifice the future" and nuke everything other than search and search advertisements, they'd make a LOT more profit.

Because every incremental employee costs the company more. It's like sorting an array. Big companies rarely hit it rich with small people working away on pet projects. The organization slows them down through a number of different ways and they cost the organization far more than their startup counterparts. Occasionally a project will be successful, but usually when that starts (like with Xbox) the rest of the organizations stakeholders will find a way of fucking it up.

It's better to focus resources on things that little startups can't do (like self driving cars) and buy up fast expanding companies, like Google did with Youtube or Facebook did with Instagram.

>you can compare the discounted future revenue streams from the non-profitable subsidiaries to their current cost of operations (vs. a sale price).

Not really. CFOs like to think they can. But the idea that anyone can estimate the revenue stream of a company five years - five years - away from profitability is just entrail reading.

No one can see that far ahead. And in Google's case, with the ad industry in serious danger, it needs to give itself as many options for medium term survival as possible.

Relying on Google X or a cloud service to deliver isn't enough, IMO.

Precisely. Both google drive and youtube have the potential to be businesses that are each on their own as influential, as important, and as profitable as google is in its entirety currently. But google doesn't have the drive, or the need, to put in the work to make them such. Instead they just sort of piddle along with half-assed improvements as time goes by. And really at some point some other competitor is going to put enough of its own pieces together to eat google's lunch and then they'll be on the sidelines. Google is only unassailable because the rest of the industry is even more dysfunctional, not because it's so strong. That's also true of Apple and facebook and Microsoft and so many other tech giants.

I think the office integration with google is very good. Recently we switched all of our conference over to google hangout. On the TV you can see all of the meetings and it's so easy to join them.

If I can't make it to a meeting, I simply find it in google calendar and click the video link (that's automatically created) and I'm there.

Not to mention the uptime and spam protection of gmail is renown. Their security is also top notch. I see zero compelling reason to use anything Microsoft.

Hospitals are run by hospital administrators who have special skills in this area and are usually not doctors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_administration

Administrators and doctors usually loathe each other because they see things from very different points of view.

It doesn't matter if a risk does harm a small company - in the worst case it folds and everybody involved jumps into something else. The amount of disruption and economic damage is limited to the participants. If a large company goes broke the disruption and damage spread far beyond the pool of employees.

Small companies need to try to win (and risk dying in the process). Large companies need to try not to lose (and risk stagnating instead). It's an interesting consequence of the effects of scale.

Edit: I would relate it more to an Anthropic Principle than the gambler's fallacy. There is a lot of survivor bias in the stories that we hear about.

Google, Microsoft and Apple have problems finding the next big thing, that's true. But, at the same time, Apple sits on millions of apps developed by external devs, same with Google and Microsoft. Each company has attracted a ton of developer investment and that portfolio will remain valuable.

Nobody wants to go through that again.

Absolutely nothing.

In fact, it's to be expected. Microsoft -> Google -> Facebook -> Uber (ugh).

Each was very successful, and success breeds growth, which is not bad. However, as you keep growing, there's never any pressure to remove the lower-performers or focus. This leads to too many people for the (perceived) good projects, which leads to internal politics carried out in a destructive fashion. At that point, you're pretty much like every other company hated by their employees.

Facebook isn't beholden to its investor's short-term interests.

The company has all the growth advantages while the M. Zuckerberg maintains the voting majority.

A lot of his decisions have pissed off the board but they've generally kept the company moving in a positive/profitable direction.

Google has a ridiculous amount of resources at its disposal and 2 very ambitious founder CEO's to drive the Alphabet parent company but, in reality, only have one groundbreakingly profitable product; advertising.

Mobile is taking over the web and Google's advertising capabilities on mobile aren't great due to technological limitations and the app store walled gardens.

AMP has the potential to put them in monopoly position in terms of web browser market share. They can leverage search engine ranking metrics to drive adoption.

Meanwhile ReactJS and Angular2 will are bringing 'universal' client-side webapps to the mainstream. Basically, the browser SPA frameworks can be used to create native mobile apps. I wouldn't be surprised if native mobile app development as a market collapses in the near future.

As for the rest, they seem to be aggressively pursuing infrastructure development. Customers hate the current broadband/wireless providers and anything that decreases internet usage is a threat to Google's bottom line.

Facebook and Google are driving in a smiliar direction as far as the web goes. Alphabet/Google just has much more resources and a much broader scope of where they plan to go.

If Google hits tough times, they might have more adword clients to the top of search results instead of organic sites using SEO.

No. If the only potential customers are huge car companies, they're going to prefer to build their own self-driving car tech to paying a high price for Google's.

They are not going to come so soon, the fully automated ones. I have watched with interest for years the Google Self Driving Car project and they release very little actual information about the stage they are at and the problems they are solving.

If self-driving cars are a huge success as a technology, it won't be from Google. Google is incredibly bad at developing things where humans need to be involved. (See also: Try to get customer service for most Google products.)

Google has basically glossed over the fact that their cars fail every 1,560 miles and focused on their "1.4 million miles driven" figure. They're pushing an agenda of eliminating the human driver from their prototypes, even though their cars would be incredibly dangerous without them.

Meanwhile, other companies are focusing on ways to make the UX of self-driving cars safe and comforting for humans to interact with: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3054330/innovation-by-design/the...