Hacker News Reader

Comment by Thaxll | Hacker News Reader

What a poor article, Google in 2016 has a very large portfolio of services, something that Yahoo never had.

If you give me a few billion dollars, I will build you a nice portfolio of services, too. What Google lacks is a large portfolio of services that actually make money. From a money making point of view, Google has Adwords.

They're working on it. There's no tried and true formula for succeeding as a business, we all know that. I'm not sure why the expectation from everyone is "well, they have BILLIONS, they should just be able to churn out more success shouldn't they?".

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/030416/googles-...

I agree that the article is stupid. No company is safe from Yahoo's fate. Given enough time, there is 100% certainty that all companies will suffer Yahoo's fate.

That said, if they haven't diversified by the time the need for Google's search engine disappears, or if most people start to use the service without clicking on paid ads (e.g. because of adblockers), they will clearly have problems. "They're working on it" isn't the same as "they have it" when it comes to sources of revenue.

You could say the same for Facebook, if facebook.com is no longer relevant Facebook dies they don't have anything else. The fact that Google has Search, #1 mobile platform + many other services is a good sign of diversity.

> if facebook.com is no longer relevant Facebook dies they don't have anything else

Other than Instagram and WhatsApp.

Android is kind of become like windows mobile. It is on a ton of devices. Its super popular in Asia and other countries, but they have morphed android to their own needs and at times don't have google products on there.

https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/20160630_alphabet_10Q.pdf

Page 31

$2B per quarter from "other revenues", listed as "sales of digital content, apps and cloud offerings for enterprise, and sales of hardware".

$2B per quarter would be a huge business in any other context. It's just that ads is so spectacularly successful.

I've always said that Facebook is the one that will end up like yahoo. They may have a popular site and have bought a bunch successful social media apps like WhatsApp and Instagram, but other than oculus, they haven't done anything outside of social media. They're death is probably going to be one by 1000 paper cuts. There are already several social media companies like Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Tinder, ect that Fb doesn't own and I think it's safe to assume that there will be a lot more social media apps/sites/platforms in the coming years, which kill Fbs usage very very slowly.

I think, they are aware of this, since they already made a few defensive acquisitions. Facebook the platform could slow this by buying the biggest of these and by becoming more of a platform underlying the actual communities. Also at least for a long while they can work on creating new markets (Africa etc.).

Facebook the company has several options to branch out with synergies and create additional revenue streams: Identity and content are the first that come to mind, but there are probably a lot more.

Overall the problem of not being able to grow, because you already have all the users is really nice to have.

Nokia had 75 billion dollars in revenue 10 years ago. The cell phone part of the company is gone today. Basically all of googles revenue comes from ads.

Its very unlikely, but if 10 years ago if someone said Nokia wouldn't be making cell phones in 10 years ago who would have believed you.

Everyone was on AOL in the late 90s and now its mostly gone. Tech is just so fast moving I could see it happen. It just isn't likely.

I'm not sure the Nokia analogy applies here. Nokia faltered because others came along and made better phones, where most of the 'better' was because of the app ecosystem of the underlying OS -- but still, they were beaten at their own game, and they only made phones. If you didn't buy a Nokia phone, Nokia was out of your life for good.

Google makes many different kinds of things, making it less likely that Google will be thoroughly replaced in people's lives.

Exactly what I was thinking. Not sure this article is making much sense. Google's cloud business alone is lightyears ahead of anything Yahoo! was ever capable of.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com