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Comment by PLenz | Hacker News Reader

I'm beginning to think that Alphabet (read: Google) just isn't very good at things that aren't related to advertising. There have just been so many failures (Verily, Nest, Glasses, etc.) as they have tried to get away from their core business - it almost looks like IBM back in the 90's as they tried (and mostly floundered at) becoming a services company over a mainframes company.

You can argue that they are trying 1000 things and 999 can fail as long as that 1 succeeds - but I don't think this is generating a good public view of them.

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Email, maps, phones...

They are tremendously successful in areas beyond search ads, but it's easier to remember the failures.

Also, reducing their successes down to their monetisation strategy isn't exactly fair. Search is the product, ads are the business plan.

I'd say that what Google aren't good at, is anything that can't be easily quantified. Anything where they can't just examine reams of data and A/B test to success. If it involves some sort of intuition or informed design, that is where Google fails.

EDIT: I might also add that future speculative profits are also something that can't be easily quantified. Hence all the myriad project cancellations.

Email, Maps, Android - those are all in existence to feed data to Google's core product - ads.

Well, as I stated above, I believe it unfair and misleadingly reductive to simplify a business down to its monetisation strategy. They are primarily a search company that makes money from ads. They could probably make money other ways, but not as much.

The product is always what people use. There is a simple test for this: Without ads, people would still use search - Google would lose money hand over fist, but people would still use it. Without search on the other hand, no-one is looking at ads. Therefore the product is search.

If you are overly reductive about companies you end up talking absurdities. Newspapers are just ad companies. TV shows are just ad companies. Sports teams are just ad companies.

Just because the monetisation is indirect, doesn't mean that ads are what they are...

>> I believe it unfair and misleadingly reductive to simplify a business down to its monetisation strategy. They are primarily a search company that makes money from ads.

Except that Alphabet is publicly traded (GOOGL). They exist for no other reason than to keep shareholders happy. They are a company that makes money. They'd sell chickens if that would turn higher profits. While circuitous at times, every aspect of the company that isn't generating funds only exists to somehow support those that do.

That's exactly my point.

If you get excessively reductive about any business you essentially boil it down to "they make money". Saying Google is an "ad company" is almost as useless as saying they're a "company". If you want to distinguish their industry from others to analyse them, ie. their products, their method of doing things, their reaction to market conditions, etc. then calling them an ad company helps no-one.

You reduce them down from search company -> ad company -> company, to the point where the reduction becomes meaningless.

It just serves no purpose to state that they are an advertising company, you could say the same thing about a sports team. Their product is search, the monetisation is ads. Just like no-one is watching their favourite football team for the beer ads, no-one is using search, maps, email or their phone for ads.

It's really more accurate to say that Google is a company whose goal is, and I quote, "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" -- and to do so while being revenue-positive so they can keep operating. This interpretation leads to better predictive value about Google's likely behavior. They probably wouldn't sell chickens. They might well offer subscription / ad free versions of their products (see YouTube red, contributor) to keep the revenue flowing via a different monetization strategy.

(They're paying my bills this year but this is purely my opinion from watching the company for a while).

Going by the articles that created the company...

"The purpose of this Corporation is to engage in any lawful act or activity for which corporations may be organized under the General Corporation Law of Delaware. "

I know - but that's standard boilerplate verbiage used in almost every company's delaware filings. Again, I think it's worth going by whatever description of the company has the best predictive power. For example, Facebook has exactly the same language in their filing: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512...

But it's much more predictive to go by their mission statement, even though facebook too monetizes by ads and has given themselves permission to do anything. "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. " - it's fairly descriptive. Facebook is more likely to buy a messaging app (Whatsapp) that lets people communicate than to sell chickens.

I wouldn't call FB an advertising company either, even though 85% of their revenue comes from ... advertising. It's a boring, content-low descriptor that lumps many different companies into the same bin. I suspect that FB, too, if they thought there was money in it, would happily pivot to offering users a paid, ad-free subscription service. In contrast, they probably wouldn't pivot to running ads on billboards.

You can argue that they are trying 1000 things and 999 can fail as long as that 1 succeeds - but I don't think this is generating a good public view of them.

That is a real problem. Organizations (not exclusive to Google) seem to quickly jump out and announce something before anything real is in their hands. Anytime you announce something a countdown starts in the minds of people. I learned this the hard way, of course.

Google seems to have a hard time with this. It seems like a majority of announcements at I/O are half a year away (or more) from being released.

Could be an internal pressure to quickly provide the image of results. I know that was my problem.

Can you share your story? I know I'm curious...

There is no one story. Just experience. I don't really announce projects unless I intend to release a BETA or if I'm willing to make the failure of the project public. Don't confuse this with a fear of failure. Its more in line with managing the expectations of people. I once made a public comment of currently doing (a small bit of) research in the area of hydroponics (mostly brainstorming and prototyping). People mistook it as me going full blown into hydroponics. Still get emails regarding it.

I think the start of the count down clock is intentional. I have been on the opposite end where with out the countdown clock nothing real happens. And given the fiduciary duties of a publicly traded company talk first, results second is par the course.

Too many clocks counting down gives the impression of a high failure rate. Failure is fine. Problem is when you publicly continue to fail as an organization. Public opinion goes negative. For a publicly traded company public opinion is important.

I agree. Given the quarterly earnings report cycle publicly traded companies are poor fits for developing innovative work. It is not the investment vehicle most conducive to long term investing.

Just wait until they get into building cars and then abandon the project after a few thousand have been delivered to consumers.

The whole attitude that goes with software-as-a-service development does not go well with developing hardware. Many companies have tried, IBM, as you quote went the other way and made plenty of mistakes. Google (sorry, alphabet) is still seeing this as diversifying but that doesn't change much, I don't see how they will pull this off if they can't do a thing like 'glass' without damaging their reputation.

With regards to the self driving car - they seem to take a very serious, risk minimizing approach, far from software-as-a-service.

Just compare their slowness and deliberation vs Elon Musk's carelessness and speed with recent stuff.

I think we're looking at different aspects of the whole 'car' thing. I'm talking about selling cars to the general public needing a different mentality than developing that car took in the first place. You need to support that car for the next 2 decades or so with parts and service and I really don't see google as capable of doing that. They have a hard time servicing their phones and tablets that are only a few years old and those are much easier to service than a car would be.

They're probably going to go for a services model (à la Uber), rather than selling the cars.

It's not that they are incapable, but they made a mistake when they designed the Android ecosystem(or they didn't have a real choice or time) - and now there are all sort of misalignment of incentives. Also the consumer electronics ecosystem tends towards disposability anyway.

But the automotive ecosystem in general is more aligned with long service, it's one of their main income sources. And since Google will most likely partner with some automotive OEM/OEM's, the infrastructure would be there, so it would be easier to align incentives(altough cars-as-a-service makes it a bit different, it may be for the better i think).

has their car been a failure? arguably one of the best economic upsides is being the first one to have a fully road-ready autonomous driving system.

chromebooks seem to be gaining in popularity (though that may be driven by shortsighted education purchases like the early iPad)

their broadband services seem to be incredibly popular in the areas they are servicing. (this is just anecdotal, i havent seen any hard numbers)

But i agree, they have had some high-profile failures in recent history, and its possible thats a sign of the organization growing to large/complex/whatever to be successful at exploring new product categories.

Their car will be a failure/footnote. Car manufacturers are already doing far more interesting things than Google is in the space. While Google is obsessed with replacing human drivers, and telling people to just trust the car, companies like Volkswagen have worked on self-driving UI that works with the user, telling them before the car makes a maneuver and such. While Google hasn't tested in snow, other car makers (like Ford) have.

Google's really only power in the self-driving car space is that Google is rolling out Apple-level marketing on the topic. People associate "self-driving car" with "Google" by default, because that's where all the media hype is.

But when it comes down to market time, car manufacturers know how to make cars. They know how to make vehicle interfaces people are comfortable and familiar with. They know how to built reliable, relatively bug-free products that don't need a software update every week to work correctly.

It's not really road-ready. Right now it requires a very precisely mapped set of roads. Plus, they've only been testing it in a state with very good weather. I'm very curious to see how it behaves in a harsh winter. Even then, there's the pretty public mess up with the bus a few months back.

Being the first one doesnt guarantee they 'll be the successful one! It's the last one that always gets the market.

To be fair, nobody else has been successful at any of the moonshots Alphabet is going for either. It's not like they're getting trounced by the competition or anything, for the most part there is no competition.

I'm not sure how one would quantify the effect that the Google Glass' faceplant has on Joe Blo's decision to choose between ios or Android, but I'm guessing it's negligible.

With Alphabet's space camp subsidiaries there does seem to be some dissonance. While pursuing far-sighted pie-in-the sky projects is laudable, the expectation that these projects be monetized within visible horizons is a bit naive. Lately Alphabet has been dealing with a reckoning of sorts. They kind of have to decide whether or not they're committed to throwing money at these projects indefinitely.

Larry and Segei have allowed themselves to get swept away by their grand visions for the future.

To be fair, Google has also failed at many of its attempts to compete with established players. They haven't made a dent in Amazon for shopping, Facebook for social, etc. I suspect they're strongly looking to create new markets because they're aware of how difficult it is to break into established ones. And Google doesn't seem to be happy settling for "third biggest social network".

They don't need to be. Search advertising is their golden goose (and i don't think they are trying to get away from it!). The question is whether these failed experiments are informative, if they have contributed a body of knowledge that is proportional to the investment taken. Their car experiments seem to have sparked a bout of incremental improvements that is probably gonna create a wave. As for the rest, i am not sure if there are lessons to be learned here.

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