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Comment by BinaryIdiot | Hacker News Reader

Looks like the author wanted to write something, anything about Alphabet since today is the one year anniversary but there isn't much substance in here.

I would agree with some of the assertions that yes Google is still Google and Alphabet seems almost non-present but I don't know if they have finished their integration / breaking apart of groups or really much of anything. I still think Android and some of the other parts of Google should probably be split out but I have no idea if that's the best choice for them or not.

I would love some more information on the whole formation of Alphabet. This, unfortunately, is not that article.

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They cannot split out Android or Youtube from Google for regulatory reasons (but not only), specially in Europe. The thing is, both Android and Youtube rely on its ads business and users need to accept the privacy policy of sharing their search history accros all platforms so that google can optimize ads for them. Splitting Android, Youtube and Google Search into different companies would make it very hard for Google to share user data between the 3. Also, it makes sense to keep them together given that they are still highly integrated, Android has great Youtube integration and Google Search integrates Youtube videos directly in results and of course Google Search is at the center of Android (Google Now etc). It would be more troubles than necessary to split them all.

> Android has great Youtube integration

Can you give some examples? I'm mostly interested in what Android has compared to iOS?

As far as regulations / laws go it would not surprise me if that makes it impossible but as far as technically? I don't buy it. I'm not sure what their current infrastructure looks like but it was conveyed to me that each group basically "consumes" the others through various types of APIs.

It would be interesting if they explored it at least. In my opinion anyway.

Their may be some APIs involved but they also use the backend directly when convenient for example Google Search may fetch directly from the google cloud to fetch youtube videos as that's faster than doing http requests. Also, I think they have one gigantic repository where all the code is shared, splitting this repo would be more trouble than necessary.

Fair points

Since they merged their services a few years back, I've noticed that lots of (my and others I know) requests for login appear to go through youtube. This is presumably because it had the largest number of logged-in users historically.

So yeah, that would be difficult to split out.

> Google Search integrates Youtube videos directly in results

It also integrates results from Dailymotion and others. YouTube would probably be the easiest property to spin out if it wasn't for the interest tracking data sharing.

Eric shared some of his thoughts shortly after announcing Alphabet at Stanford's Technology-enabled Blitzscaling class if you're interested in some of the motivation and types of problems they're trying to solve with it [0]

[0] https://youtu.be/hcRxFRgNpns?t=1h2m9s

Thanks that was pretty interesting! Seems like a good way to do lots of things (don't think about it too much just start and figure it out as you go).

The only metric the author proposes for measuring success is the stock price, which as they point out, is up.

It might make sense from an organizational point of view, but not from a business point of view. I'm pretty sure that the main reason Android exists is to ensure the dominance of Google Search, and the ads that it serves, along with all of the other Google services and their ads. Or more precisely, to make it impossible for Google services to ever be cut out of the majority of the mobile market based on the whim of another company. Even the theoretical possibility of that happening would make Google highly subservient to whatever company or companies had the power to do that.

Same with Youtube, Maps, etc. They exist to preserve the dominance of and prevent other companies from avoiding Google's key moneymaker, which is ads on searches. Thus allowing them any real independence would destroy their reason for existence.

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