Granted, this only matters in the scenario in which their online advertising business contracts meaningfully (whether due to ad-blockers or otherwise). If ad-blockers gain usage at an accelerating pace, Google is unlikely to have much time to diversify (and that takes a long time when you're talking $20b in sales to off-set).
So far Google has been flaky, disorganized and unprincipled about developing other real businesses. They should have a dramatically larger cloud services business for example, but they handled that incompetently and ceded years and tons of ground to AWS.
Essentially Google has to spend the next several years praying that ad-blockers don't rapidly bring their spigot of online ad dollars to an end. That's a real bad position to have put yourself in if you're a $536 billion corporation.
This was pretty liberating because before "native" ads I felt a pang of guilt for blocking ads.
If Google wants to stop ad blockers they should hide sites that use these obnoxious "native" ad networks.
This would instantly and Google in court for anti-competitive practices...and rightfully so. Imagine if Google suddenly said, "we are going to punish any publisher that doesn't use Adsense within organic search listings." Holy cow that would be bad, and the scary part is that Google could easily do this without even announcing it.
Sorry other allegedly acceptable ads, but I don't need trashy clickbait at the end of every news story so you all lose out.
I think they are very serious about becoming the market leader in this space. They are behind AWS, but if they can leverage the same technology that they use internally, they will have a compelling offering.
But okay, I guess you must know better.
Would be nice if someone would cater for Startup owners that do not have time to study documentation and overlook multiple processes just to run a simple bot etc.
If only there were cloud products and services that were dead simple and just did one little useful thing just the way you wanted it.
If only ...
You know what, I think I will!
What should I call it ?
I got 300$ in credits on every google account when I first vistited which allowed me to play around with their big data stuff and some public datasets, which was nice.
I know, I know, AWS and Google Cloud is not DO and I agree. But would it hurt to introduce DO or Vultr style UX and make it easier for regular user to launch what he wants without all the expert language and need to jump in to documentation for hours?
Would button "Simple" and "Advanced" UI be really that hard to make?
I, as startup owner, dont really have time to focus on all the noise from large cloud providers, its easier to just launch 5 VPS with DO or Vultr and create my own infrastructure. And while I grow I doubt I will move my business to any of the cloud providers because I dont have time for it. Its easier to just build infrastructure on VPS's for $5 or just go for dedicated servers for backend.
God, I wouldn't want to be on the record saying that. People used to say things like this about web search too.
Some products take a while to build, especially when dealing with less-than-friendly .gov regulators.
But the big opportunity is that they could offer you a car-as-a-service for much less than the current cost of a car. Today's cars are unused most of the time, so if we'd replace them with such a service, we'd need significantly fewer of them, thus reducing the cost.
Self-driving changes quite a bit about cars. If accident rates can be low enough, they don't need as much conventional safety measures; air bags, metal armour that crumples, etc. Less weight there means lower fuel costs. The way they drive should mean lower maintenance & fuel costs compared with human drivers.
One major point against it is that even though self-driving cars may be here soon, none of us will live to see the day when manual driving is banned. Especially not in the freedom-happy US.
A second major counterpoint is that even in this fascist dictatorship where manual driving is banned, external factors (large wildlife, sudden slippery ice, human error in vehicle maintenance, etc.) will still cause serious accidents.
The third major counterpoint is: say you reduce accident rates by two or three orders of magnitude (which would be huge). Still, a tiny tiny fraction of people would end up in accidents. What society would be OK with saying "Oh, screw it, let those people die so manufacturers can build cheaper cars"?
There are set to get self-driving taxis before the end of the year there. And you already need to bid on a pricy permit to operate your own car. (Certificate of Entitlement. A ten year one goes for more than 50k SGD.)
There is no hope of that happening. You're never going to convince people to remove safety features, and even if you could, a car that has 5% as many collisions but logs 50 times as many miles would justify more safety features because there will be more collisions per vehicle despite there being fewer collisions per mile.
> The way they drive should mean lower maintenance & fuel costs compared with human drivers.
All of that sort of thing will be dwarfed by not having to pay a human driver. But in a competitive market it will also be eroded by competition. A cab ride that used to be $20 will soon be $2 because now $2 can turn a profit.
On the other hand, if it now costs $2 instead of $20 then people will start using hired cars instead of owning cars and then you might make a lot of it back on volume. (By essentially destroying the rest of the auto industry.)
There is no hope of that happening. You're never going
to convince people to remove safety features,
With that said, I don't think the savings from removing safety features would be big enough to have much impact on Google's finances. I'd have thought the real savings would be from avoiding the costs of being in accidents. Or capturing some of the value of people being productive when they would otherwise be driving, although that value might be hard to capture.
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/enterprise-rent-a-car-removed-a...
I agree autonomous driving changes some cost dynamics, but on the other hand people not only have higher expectations on rented vehicles as far as cleanliness and safety go (that "check engine" light is no longer optional, dirt from previous passenger's shoes needs to be vacuumed, random leftover trash and water bottles need to be taken out), but are also likely to abuse rented vehicles for random dirty jobs like hauling potted plants from the nursery, as well as plain old bar hopping while drunk with associated sanitary accidents.
There's Tesla, GM (with the Cruise acquisition)...heck even @geohot's startup comma.ai is also tackling the same challenges.
I highly doubt that will be enough to replace the market leader position they have with ads. And believe me, ads are going to die out quicker than a coked out wannabe actor in LA.
But when they're used, most of them are used at the same time - rush hour traffic. If everyone wants to go to work in a car at the same time, you'll still need about as many cars.
What's needed is a diversification of working times: if half of the workforce started work an hour later, it would have a huge impact on traffic density and would also make things like shared self-driving cars more realistic.
In terms of mobile apps, yes. There are rootless-firewalls that register themselves as an all-routes VPN and then blackhole 'unwanted' traffic.
Mobile browsers such as Firefox already have the same ad blockers plugins as desktop.
a) licensing technology to car manufacturers for self-driving cars
b) Manufacturing and selling hardware ( like Chromebooks, OnHub, Chromecasts etc )
c) Google Apps, GCE, Google Drive etc
d) Google checkout/wallet payment processing
e) Online publishing with Google Play, Music, Youtube etc.
If you look through Google's list of products[3], I am sure you will be able to find many more potential high profit products. But they are terrible at turning them into viable businesses.
[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/28/amazons_numbers_for_...
[2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/alphabet-reports-rising-profits-...
b) Low margins
c) Thin margins
d) Lots of competition
e) Maybe
Nothing beats the fat profits of auctioning off ad space to advertisers.
Although I use Google Search a lot less than I used to, I find myself a fairly happy customer of Play Music + TV + Movies, and I am using GCE as the platform for a new book I am writing on cognitive computing.
Google checkout may end up being huge. Google has sufficient funds to do more Google branded products. Their premium Chromebook is sort of too expensive to be a mainstream product, but I could see a Google branded cheaper Chromebook selling very well.
Google branded Chromebooks and Android phones bundled using their Fi wireless data services also seems like a good source of profit.
It wouldn't necessarily eat the entire car industry, but it's close.
That said, yes, they have to target problems that require a lot of capital, because, in practice, a company that will turn a profit no matter what you do is not one that is ever in a rush, or where hungry entrepreneurs go. They have to aim for niches where regular venture capital would never dare to go. This leads to lots of risky bets, looking for one that really moves the needle.
Remember Xerox PARC? That is what a monster like Alphabet ends up doing. It was not great for Xerox, but we all sure benefitted from their 'failures'
I think in these kinds of conversations we sometimes lose a little perspective.
So it seems to me that some of the smartest guys doing the coolest tech in the world is not sufficient to making money.
I'm sure they make money in other pursuits (I'm sure GCE is doing some, and I hear their government contracts are sizable) but $100m just to tick up the revenue decimal point...
One of the main issue i see here is pretty typical for Google in my view, ie. that Google isn't really trying to serve customers - i mean in search Google is monopolist and thus advertisers would pay attention to and follow every whim of Google. In cloud computing customers don't have to appreciate the honor of being a GCE customer, instead they can just go to AWS (where automated tools as well as real customer service are really geared for customer).
I've seen too many instances of pretty simple Google usability / feature bug reports closed as "will not fix / working as intended" to chalk it up to specific teams. "We built the Pontiac Aztek perfectly, and you should love us for it" type project design seems embedded in their DNA.
Short term thinking, that's the problem with the equities market.
What projects? The self driving car? The traditional car companies (that also work on that), Tesla, the Chinese, and even Apple who's verified to be working on such a project can possibly all kill them on that market.
What else of importance is there? Their AWS competitor?
Google Fiber. Note how profitable that is for Comcast as a monopoly. I'm confident Google can still reap double digit margins while keeping costs down for Google Fiber users through their knowledge of network management.
They're not so much struggling to make money, but struggling to make comparable money to one of the most phenomenally successful businesses ever seen.
It's like saying Apple TV is a hobby because it's only a billion dollar business.
Rounding errors at Google/Apple are greater than our wildest dreams.