Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Remember that Larry was CEO twice: 1998-2001 and 2011-2015. During the first period Google was exceptionally innovative. During the second, Google attempted to be exceptionally innovative but largely fell flat on its face.

I'd blame size and market position more. Google was left as one of very few profitable giants standing when the dot-com crash hit, and yet they were young enough to not have the institutional inertia of Amazon, E-bay, and Yahoo. That left them exceptionally well positioned to capitalize on the Internet's deployment phase, where the technology got good enough and widespread enough to really build huge businesses off it. They managed to own the next platform (mobile) but were too large, slow, and entrenched to really understand the implications of it, and they're not even attempting to play in the cryptoverse.

View on HN

> they're not even attempting to play in the cryptoverse.

They aren't even attempting to play in snake oil or astrology either

Crypto is 99% woo, but the 1% is interesting. The interesting stuff isn't world-stompingly amazing, so it gets less press. I like the idea of someday being able to take pennies worth of payments from places where transaction fees alone at traditional payment processors represent a huge % of income. Bitcoin won't be the one to do it, but some of the coins that depend on something other than proof of work might.

At least I hope it's not Bitcoin. The power use is obscene.

Penny payments will never* be viable.

* Never say never. Basically I don't think it could possibly be viable because it would require the total cost of transaction to be less than pennies. That includes the shopkeepers time to manage the automated store, the electricity used in the transaction, and a bunch of other non zero components.

Hell even transactions with real pennies today are almost a net loss. We eradicated 5c coins in NZ because they cost something like 6c to make.

And to be clear I understand you mean micropayments in general and maybe it is something possible im just not yet convinced the electricity costs will allow it unless it's subsidized in an unsustainable way.

> We eradicated 5c coins in NZ because they cost something like 6c to make.

Why would that matter? A 5c coin is spent thousands, millions of times. Why would there need to be any connection at all between how much it costs to make the coin and the value that coin represents in a transaction?

I think it was actually the cost of the metal, i.e. the metal was worth more than the denoted value.

There were other reasons like inflation making 5c coins largely irrelevant (we also had 1, and 2c coins phased out years earlier) (also 1nzd=0.5usd at that time)

NZ has also been largely cashless for at least 20 years now. (Link below has some interesting info/graphs)

https://www.paymentsnz.co.nz/resources/articles/two-sides-of...

I think the only reason this happening was even a big deal at the time was because they replaced all coins at the same time with much smaller, lighter and cheaper versions. I.e. it wasn't a big deal at all but rather the swap over was.

If the extra cost is labor it's fine, but not if it's material cost. People have been know to melt down coins and sell the metal when the intrinsic value of the coin exceeds its face value. This practice is illegal most places, but avoiding the situation altogether is probably better!

Possibly the bullion value trending in such a way people might be tempted to start scrapping them in the foreseeable future :)

I'd say it's 80% woo, 1% of what you call interesting and 19% is solving real user problems with breaking the law. Mostly transactions that you can't depend on banks for - like buying drugs.

I think being able to make small transactions with low fees is a human economic problem, not a technical one. How would crypto do anything better or differently, other than the idea of "let's spend power on proof of work instead of trust" which you seem to dislike?

Transaction costs for small payments on Bitcoin are much higher than the 1.5% a credit card processor takes. Crypto has been nothing but dreams (and sadly lots of scams, as I had to personally witness)

> cryptoverse

What exactly is this and what business is doing well in it?

I assume this refers to cyptocurrency-related businesses. ICOs ('initial coin offerings') collected around $5.6 billion and most of them never delivered any real product: https://www.coinwire.com/ey-report-finds-most-2017-icos-fail...

One could argue that getting enormous amounts of money without needing to produce any results for it is the very definition of "doing well".

I hope there aren't too many people who define "doing well" that way. Seems like it would lead to a total breakdown of the social fabric.

I am assuming he is referring to cryptocurrencies & blockchain tech. There are plenty of businesses doing well but that's irrelevant. Waiting for established businesses in a growing space before jumping in isn't very innovative.

This is an interesting point: is it innovative to jump into any new thing regardless of its actual potential? You could claim that yes, it is. I would argue that it actually isn't. The key to innovation is to be able to correctly evaluate where there are real opportunities for innovative technologies. It's possible "the cryptoverse" will eventually show that it has such potential, but it has stubbornly refused to do that for the near decade that I've been paying attention to it, despite metric gob-tons of money and hype being thrown at it.

On the other hand, in the same time period (actually in a shorter time period!), machine learning driven technologies like voice and image recognition have gone from sci-fi to commonplace. I ask: which is more innovative?

Jumping into a new thing regardless of its potential is a necessary, not sufficient, component of innovation.

If you wait until it's obvious to everyone that something's a good idea, you're not being innovative, you're just an opportunist. Similarly, if it turns out that it's not actually a good idea, you're not being innovative, you've just wasted a whole lot of time.

Innovation happens at the intersection of contrarian & right. You have to be willing to stake your time, energy, and ego on an idea that many people believe is bad, impossible, or not worth it (otherwise it would've been done already), but you also have to be right in your judgment.

I'm confused by all the assumptions in this thread, including

1. That Google didn't research crypto internally and purposely decide not to pursue it.

2. That crypto is worth staking Google's time, energy, and ego on.

3. That crypto involvement is a direct reason a company is or is not innovative.

Hard lesson learned from a couple of research projects within Google and then again from my first couple years as an entrepreneur:

Internal research is useless.

The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it. People are complex; sometimes they do things that all rational thought says they shouldn't (buying Bitcoin and investing in ICOs would both fit into that category, IMHO), and many times they don't do things that all rational analysis says they should (I participated in research projects while at Google for both micropayments for content and for labeling trustworthy sources on the results, both of which most people would agree are good goals but neither of which has ever worked, and I founded a startup afterwards to provide career guidance to undergrads, which every adult we talked to said "I love what you're doing, and totally wish that existed when I was a student" and every student said "I love that idea and would totally use it", and then promptly never looked at it again once we built it.)

There's no guarantee that external research works either, but at least you've learned something applicable to the next idea.

> The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it.

And then get skewered left and right for shutting down products? You can't have it both ways.

Take a look at Google Reader, though. They got skewered for dumping that. But despite being shuttered years after RSS was a thing, even then it was limited to RSS wonks like a lot of us who were the only ones lamenting it (and the decline of RSS).

Fast forward to today and 10x to 1000x the number of us wonks are getting an overlapping amount of Reader's value (plus new value) from Twitter. The purging of Reader is a distant memory, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily bad to try a bunch of things and kill the non-viral losers (in a relative sense).

Exactly. I don't think Google is making the wrong choice, given their size and prominence. I do think that making the right choice means that they inevitably lose their ability to innovate, and hence miss out on the next technology choice.

> Internal research is useless.

> The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it.

And in the face of a universe of potential ideas how do you determine whether you invest time into prototyping pre-sneezed tissues? Internal research. You’ve just moved the goal post.

Who is making those assumptions? My comment assumed the opposite of #2 and #3.

Most people, not you :P

a) Opportunism is good business.

b) 'Wasting time' is a part of research. If you never fail, you're missing opportunities. That said, you pick your failures with the hope of getting the right kinds of wins... which brings us to...

c) Giant centralized cloud-based businesses have giant centralized and for-the-most-part trusted datastores. There's no reason to use a blockchain if a standard distributed database suits your needs. From where I sit, blockchains are mainly a solution in search of a problem.

(and just imagine the press cycles if a FAANG company rolled out a blockchain, and thus burnt god-knows how much coal bringing it mainstream...)

Yeah, I totally agree that for the sort of problems that Google or Amazon faces, blockchains are a terrible solution. There are well-known best practices for scalable distributed computing, and blockchains are not them.

I'm equally convinced - and I suspect I disagree with most HNers here - that there are also some problems for which blockchains are the only solution - they just don't work with centralized data stores, mostly because nobody would trust a single entity to manage that data store. Google isn't even looking for those problems. In general, Google does not look for problems, it takes problems that everybody knows about and looks for solutions. There are thousands of entrepreneurs in the cryptoverse who are looking for those problems.

There was a time, early in its history, where Google was willing to take a solution - download the web and keep only the links - and then find the problem (search) for which it was the solution. And then they leveraged that solution into all sorts of other problems - webmail, navigation & directions, news, academic papers, video, etc. But the thing is that this is a risky business: most solutions in search of a problem don't actually solve anything, so the time spent solving them is wasted.

It's just so hard to imagine, at least in the current version of the world, a problem for which a distributed trust algorithm is the right solution, instead of a centralized one, probably state-owned if high levels of trust are needed. This is especially true given the advantages that a trusted authority has over blind consensus (e.g. the ability to revert fraudulent transactions).

> that there are also some problems for which blockchains are the only solution

Name a single actual problem that is only solved by the blockchain.

The forces of capitalism and most existing forms of government are anathema to decentralization (inherent in the crypto-blockchain premise). The idealism of decentralization exists only until it meets the overwhelming real world gravity of money. At which point blockchain tech and crypto could only thrive if carried out by hand-calculated hashes on paper transported by motorcycle and carrier pigeon.

> and just imagine the press cycles if a FAANG company rolled out a blockchain

I'm not sure if you're being facetious, but assuming Amazon is a member of "FAANG": https://aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/. Does that count?

Which one is doing well? Which company has actually delivered something? And what is it?

The set of companies & foundations centered around blockchain, cryptocurrency, distributed ledgers, and related technologies. Coinbase, Binance, CoinMarketCap are doing great, Bitmain would be doing great except they made a terrible bet on Bitcoin Cash, a number of other organizations (VeChain, IOTA, Ripple, Stellar, Ethereum) are doing "we'll see", and still others (Bitfinex, Tether, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV) are imploding dramatically.

The whole space is a pile of scams the entire way down. As we are just now learning, tether, the "stablecoin" that makes up the backbone of the entire crypto economy was basically a fraud.

The tech has had 10 years and so far it has produced absolutely nothing of value. In fact considering the damage it has done to the environment, it has been only contributing negative value to the planet.

Looks like the only ones doing well are the traders.

Nah, it's the folks who sell shovels to the traders.

Just like every other gold rush in history. Fortunes get created, but often not for the folks who think they're going to get rich.

Cryptocurrencies. For example Coinbase is doing well—raised $300M on a $8B valuation: http://fortune.com/2018/10/30/coinbase-series-e-funding/

Google's market cap is 850B. The existence of some very successful companies in crypto does not mean that Google made a mistake by not jumping on that train.

Raising a bunch of money at a high valuation isn't enough to make a company "very successful" either.

Coinbase grew from zero to an $8B valuation in just over 6 years. If that isn't "very successful", what is? ;)

Getting to the point where you don't have to sell off parts of your company to get the cash to sustain your growth. Coinbase is certainly on a nice trajectory, but assuming your goal is to build a real business you haven't succeeded yet if you're still talking about your funding rounds rather than how much money you made last year.

They made a billion dollars in revenue in 2017 and about $520M in 2018, in the midst of a massive bear market. For a company whose primary product is software and doesn't need to worry about cost-of-goods-sold the way that sharing economy companies do. Supposedly they made $450M in profit. They're doing way better than Uber and Lyft are, which continue to lose money even after going public.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/04/how-a-major-cryp...

>they're not even attempting to play in the cryptoverse.

Which is a good thing considering how much of the population's life is already intertwined with and recorded by Google. I can't imagine anything more dystopian than a Google issued currency.

Google also grew to dominate the browser market during 2011-2015.

Through Chrome, which was started internally in 2006 and launched externally in 2008. Though that also was one of those projects where Larry sponsored a couple of talented engineers behind Eric's back and they put out something awesome.

Behind Eric's back? A company that has tens of thousands of employees and you think the co-founder would have to hide a small initial implementation of a project he believed in?

Absolutely. If it isn't hidden, the developers will have to deal with management, credit taking, metrics, attempts to squash the project, jealousy from other employees, unreasonable pressure (surely a browser can be written in 3 months ...) and being treated as a cost center.

All this would happen even if backed by Larry.

It is a miracle that new projects happen at all in companies, though Google of course actually bought many successful projects.

There's no way Google had tens of thousands of employees in 2006. Although it was probably large enough (between 5,000 and 10,000) that your point still stands.

Yes it is quite amazing how they have almost complete browser dominance and video content creation/hosting dominance as well as search dominance but are unable to come up with even a simple in browser tipping system to hedge against the downfall of their almost entirely ad based revenue.

> unable to come up with even a simple in browser tipping system to hedge against the downfall of their almost entirely ad based revenue

Google has launched multiple micropayment products as replacements for ads. Nobody uses them.

You're assuming that an "in browser tipping system" is a viable hedge to the also assumed downfall of their ad based revenue.

Well Patreon is proving to be somewhat successful, I don't see why something similar, or donation/tipping shouldn't be easy to incorporate.

Patreon launched in 2013 and estimates $1 billion in total payments to creators by the end of 2019. That averages out to $166M/year. Google reported $30 billion in ad revenue for Q1 2019, that's 6 years of Patreon transaction activity compressed into 3 days (or their entire 2019 activity of $500M in payments in less than 2 days).

Can you still extrapolate from this that the tipping model is even anywhere near a threat to Google's ad based business model that they should be incorporating it? And is it even an apples to apples comparison? Many creators don't use Patreon in spite of or to replace ads, they use it as a supplement.

Moreover, just because something is technically simple to integrate, doesn't automatically make it the correct business decision to do so.

First of all, I guarantee a native Youtube donation/subscription/tipping service would already have far more users than Patreon even does currently (see twitch.tv for a great model) due the enormous network effect Youtube already has. Second of all, $1 billion and growing rapidly for a third party service. Nearly every quality Youtube channel I am subscribed to has a patreon at this point, and I can only imagine it increasing as a percentage of income the content creator generates.

> Can you still extrapolate from this that the tipping model is even anywhere near a threat to Google's ad based business model that they should be incorporating it?

No, but we can extrapolate from twitch, and guess that it probably would be.

> Many creators don't use Patreon in spite of or to replace ads, they use it as a supplement.

Because it is a third party site, there is no such option. It would be trivial to incorporate an ad-free experience for donations/subscriptions similar to how twitch does.

>> native Youtube donation/subscription/tipping service

This exists, already competes with Twitch, and is part of an even bigger portfolio of media services from Google. You're arguing for Google to do something they have been doing for years.

https://www.youtube.com/premium

https://support.google.com/youtubegaming/answer/6304294

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7277005

Well I use YT nearly every day and didn't know you could become a member of a channel or what the benefits are. Guess it is just poorly marketed. My bad!

Its up to individual channel owners to enable it. If you don't know about it, that's probably because nobody you watch uses it.

Youtube is their content business division and already has tipping, superchat, subscriptions, ecommerce and premium channels. It also has ads and is highly profitable.

You're vastly overestimating what people will actually pay for and underestimating how big and critical the ads industry is.

Then they should just buy Patreon like they bought YouTube. Why risk failure if that’s actually a good hedge? A: It probably isn’t a good hedge because they know Patreon can’t even remotely scale to the size of the AdWords business. People just generally don’t want to pay much for content. Better would be leveraging subscriptions and then developing a money distribution process to support the content people will come for. I think they are trying with YouTube TV and Red.

There have been experiments that you probably didn't hear about. I liked the old version of Google Contributor, but apparently few others did.

Are you talking about contributor.google.com?

Corporations are not meant to disrupt themselves. It just doesn't happen.

Apple disrupted itself at least twice.

macOS are the Apple II series iPhone clobbered the iPod.

Both of those are examples of parallel product groups that eventually migrated one set to the other.

The Apple II product line lasted until 1992, by which point the Mac product line had become affordable to the people at which the apple 2 line had been marketed.

The iPod continued as the iPod classic and iPod touch products until 2015, nearly 10 years after the iPhone was released.

Netflix did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com