Alphabet Finishes Reorganization with New XXVI Company
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The future is uncertain, but this will sure be interesting.
1: http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/27/technology/business/google-e... 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-...
Gmail, Google Translate, Google Map, Google Earth, Chrome, Android. These were all unique in their own way when they came out and found hundreds of millions (mostly free or low paying) users.
But what is the one thing or service that you use from Google which was launched in the last 5 years and are widely used? Nothing.
What is the one thing that they charge for, except advertising, and that scores of people care to pay for? Nothing.
Sure, there have been ongoing improvements of their services and lots of tools, languages and frameworks released for developers. They have been testing self driving cars and there have been rumours about what they do in their lab. There have been laptops, glasses and loudspeakers, but none of them have really been successful or close to be considered market leaders.
Apparently, it's really difficult for one of the richest companies in history with tens of thousands of the most talented engineers, to market just one new product every few year. Was there ever in history so much money gathered so easily by such an amazing force of engineers?
Even within software services that you would think a global company with the largest user base ever, and millions of paying webshops, could dominate; Why is Google not a leader in payment technology? Why are they not dominating hosting services? Why are they not dominating cloud storage? Why don't we buy content such as books, news, movies or songs on Google? Shared economy? Social networks? Why are they not dominating anything else but a few software services that help them sell their core product, the ads?
Google can make such huge amounts of much money selling ads, that everything else is dwarfed in comparison. How could you ever get the attention of management for a project that could potentially - if everything goes well for 5-10 years - make 5 billion in revenue, when Google makes more than that in a month right now?
Not despite of their money but because of their money, Google cannot innovate. Take 1,000 Google engineers elsewhere and they could do amazing things. Have them in Google, and the world would barely notice if they all called in sick for the next 10 years.
Maybe Google's restructuring will help on this. I doubt it, unless the umbilical cord to all the advertisement money is cut completely. Size matters. Google has gotten way too big.
On one hand you acknowledge that they are constantly improving existing software, launching new hardware, new frameworks, new tools and on the other you criticise them for "not launching even one product". It's strange because I've actually heard the opposite criticism of Google on HN, that they launch too many products and don't focus enough on existing ones.
The grandparent is right - they basically haven't been able to capitalise on their incredibly strong position, except by becoming better as selling ads.
My only major complaint about maps is that it isn't friendly to people with limited data. Tapping on a restaurant in Thailand where I might have 50 megs of data for the whole month loads around 1-3 megs of images when all I want to do is see what time it opens. There are minor UI annoyances but overall Maps is a much, much better product than 5 years ago.
Now they have rankings, hours, sometimes details floor plans on almost every business, every park, every location in the world, that is mind blowing!
On top of that they have photos of everything, those photos, can be used to generate 3d maps for the web, VR, MR. Those photos are also used to train AI.
I think they are doing a great job of capitalizing on their position.
Project Fi? Launched 2015, unsure of subscriber count.
Google Cloud Platform? Launched in 2011.
TensorFlow? Launched in 2015.
Kubernetes? Launched in 2015.
> Why are they not dominating anything else but a few software services that help them sell their core product, the ads?
A lot of it comes down to first mover advantage. Lets take your payment tech example. Paypal was founded to accept online payments within months of Google being incorporated. The way I recall the dotcom era, Paypal was paying customers 10 bucks to open an account. And that money was useful because virtually everyone on ebay accepted it. Network effects are critical there.
Google Wallet tried that same trick and it doesn't really work because there's like a billion startups in the space competing to offer virtually the same API and customer UX. Venmo, Braintree, Android Pay, Google Wallet, fuck, even my own credit cards are now in promoting their services in the 'p2p payments' space. None of them are going to end up looking like a Paypal success, because the market is comparatively fragmented.
Same goes for hosting services: AWS has something like a 5 year head start on customer acquisition, and many of them are locked in to AWS for the forseeable future. Between the AWS specific API deps, and the cost of cloud:cloud networking, they have their work cut out for them. And again, there's a fleet of startups flooding the market, as well as major companies: Oracle and AliBaba are bootstrapping cloud hosts in Seattle, where they're pretty transparently recruiting burnt out AWS engineers.
Arguably, they're structurally at a disadvantage. Google's competitors can freely subsidize user growth, whereas Google doing the same would likely draw antitrust complaints today. It's already kind of a big problem for them, and other market incumbents. I just listened to a fairly level headed discussion on the FT podcast about why Amazon might need to be more strongly regulated. Going forward this restructuring is likely going to be the way Alphabet works: instead of directly innovating, they use the proceeds from Google to buy winners from those overcrowded markets, some of which they may have had VC funding rounds in.
The users are using it indirectly.
I think you forgot Google's enterprise tools (i.e. Google mail, docs et all with an actual helpdesk to call to). People do pay for those. But I have no idea how many customers they have.
Forming separate LLCs does that.
> Google has gotten way too big.
Alphabet — and especially the non-Google subsidiaries — isn't Google, and this transformation makes that even more true, legally and financially.
Tensorflow and Keras would be example under "one thing"
It's widely used as in the backend of it and many software and research papers are using it.
I'm using it.
Because Google's Ads business is so successful, comparing anything else to it is difficult.
Chromecast has sold 30 mio units since it was launched 4 years ago. Whereas that might be a lot for you and me if we launched a company, it's very little for Google.
If it had been an independent company selling 30 million units in 4 years for maybe $10-15 a piece to the stores, making maybe $5-10 per unit, you would likely never have heard of them. In 4 years Chromecast has probably made less revenue for Google than the ads make per day.
TensorFlow, Keras
I don't get the "If you exclude (thing that makes them 70billion $ in revenue) what do they really do?" logic.
I'd also agree with the following:
> Not despite of their money but because of their money, Google cannot innovate.
Ps: google employee, but would have done the same if i werent.
they already are...relatively speaking they make no money.
It gives them much greater freedom to innovate.
The folks who work at Google may have been appeased but it served as a lighting rod to gather those who oppose the culture in urban areas like Silicon Valley.
I think it's very likely we will now see an accelerated push from the Trump administration and conservatives to break up the big firms in Silicon Valley.
I hope I'm wrong.
Internet search has evolved past that of a free market entity; search is now a public utility as much as power and water.
You can't imagine a neighborhood without power and water. You can't imagine the internet without search. Google today is like the AT&T of old. When we bust it up the goal should be power-utility-like entities (bland, unbiased, purely functional entities with mostly technical oversight and immunity from liability)
Said tool pissed of the party that is most strongly associated with "never regulate!".
This would drop what Google makes, but would also reduce what Google can be fined in the EU.
*edit, I mean the legal entity that sells the ads. DoubleClick, adsense,...
- Amazon's "smile" points from A to Z.
- Google's parent is Alphabet.
- A2Z Development Center Inc is Amazon's holding company for a number of subsidiaries.
- Google's holding company is XXVI -- there are 26 letters in the English alphabet.
- Lab126 is Amazon's digital product development arm. 126 meaning letters 1 through 26.
Surely the leaders of some of the largest tech companies can come up with better names -- or is naming truly one of the hardest problems in computer science?
A: cache invalidation, naming things and off by one errors.
You don't want to read my code.
It must be a really existential problem!
Both 'Google' and 'Amazon' have 6 letters.
23+6=29
29-3=26 (letters in the English alphabet)
('Twenty_Six').length == 10
'[object Object]'
> ([] + {}).length
15
> ([] - {} + '').length
3
> 15 - 3
12
> 12 * 3
26
that makes sense, thanks.
"XXVI" for "2" => "13" + "13".
naming is hard and these are fine names. they need no "introduction".
Alphabet owns google and the other bets.
If one of the LLC under Alphabet get sued it doesn't effect the other LLC (bets or Google).
Now, it’s owned by Alphabet, so it effectively has only one investor and no public disclosure obligations.
That would be a big deal.
Alphabet
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Google
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Other Bets
Alphabet
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———————————————
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Google XXVI Hldg.
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Other Bets"The new entity, called XXVI Holdings Inc., will own the equity of each Alphabet company, including Google."
Are the "Other Bets" still subsidiaries to Google or are they owned directly by XXVI?
> She called the process a legal formality that won’t affect ultimate shareholder control, operations, management or personnel at the 75,606-person company.
I believe it's just updating the business structure right down to the low level corporate/legal structure to reflect their multiple silo'd "bets" business strategy. It doesn't seem so nefarious if everything else is already functioning that way in practice.
> "The change helps keep potential challenges in one business from spreading to another, according to Dana Hobart, a litigator with the Buchalter law firm in Los Angeles."
Effectively, I take it this means Google isn't responsible if a self-driving car goes on a Skynet-esque murder spree, nor can their self-driving car property be sold off by the government to pay all of Google's antitrust fines coming down the pipe?
> “By separating them, it allows the parent company to limit the exposure of the various obligations of the LLCs,” Hobart said. “For example, if one of the LLCs has its own debt, only that LLC will end up being responsible for payment of that debt.”
Is it that the act of making them separate companies under a holding company that grants them this, rather than the change to an LLC specifically?
What is needed now is an update to our laws that will prohibit carriers/hosts of information from censoring content that does not violate the First Amendment, the way GAB is doing it. GAB's efforts are worthy of an applause, however, they are a lone wolf, a reaction to the usurpers at Google, Twitter, Facebook, Apple, etc.
Speaking in disagreement with whomever on the internet isn't the same as speaking in disagreement in someone's house where you can most certainly kick the person out, or speaking in disagreement with your employer, James Damore style and getting fired for upsetting the groupthink.
The wireless spectrum should be sold with these guarantees of freedom of speech attached and new laws needs to be passed that will NEVER again allow Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple or whomever, regardless of size, to usurp America's most precious freedom.