Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment
wsj.com
wsj.com
Page and Brin ran Alphabet as a highly funded system of moonshot programs with near-infinite runway to make profits, which is unusual or unique. Basically it only worked that way because Page and Brin were idealistic visionary gazillionaires who were bored of thinking about the somewhat dirty business of selling targetted ads. With a more standard corporate governance under a common CEO with the google ad business, the expectation is a more standard corporate focus on making profits from its ventures in some defined timeline.
But read Levine's version; it has detail and humor and insight I can't convey in a summary!
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...
This is so typical of Apple criticism. They did do well with the iPhone and Mac that now any new innovations seem boring in comparison. It’s wrong.
The Apple Watch came out under Cook. That is more than an “accessory.” It’s a new platform, new OS variant, etc. It’s dominating smart watches.
The AirPods are pretty innovative in terms of the fine grained details that have made them super successful.
Latest OS builds included evidence of stereoscopic glasses in the pipeline.
Remember Apple isn’t always the first with stuff, even smartphones. Their innovations are more around key details and hardware/software integration that makes the whole system work like magic.
The Apple Watch is literally designed to be an accessory to the iPhone - you can't use most of its features without an iPhone. I wanted one for my Android phone but tough shit for me.
If you like it as a product that's fine, but it is absolutely an accessory to an iPhone because you can barely use it without one.
As of the latest OS you can download apps directly to it.
Versioning wise it feels more like following up the v1 with v2 and a 1.1 revision.
If Apple doesn’t make sufficient changes and upgrades, nobody else can - and the device is back to being an appliance that has the functionality that it has right now and nothing further, and it’s not “just a software upgrade away”.
There’s still no way to get the time display off of the face of my Apple Watch. You can customize everything except turning off the clock.
The Newton is an interesting foil.
Why wasn't the Newton the first smart phone? Early internet, barely a high-speed cellular infrastructure, silicon not quite small and efficient enough, no lithium batteries, cost....
Saying the Newton was "ahead of its time" is really a way of saying all the right bits and pieces weren't there yet.
We'll know what the next "big thing" is after it happens. You can't force it though regardless of the dollars you have for R&D.
Just MHO.
They almost did it with wireless speakers (the HomePod is an absolute engineering marvel, entirely unparalleled as a speaker), but they left out bluetooth in a platform play for AirPlay on their own phones/tablets, and it basically flopped. It would have been an airpods-level success if it were a record player that could play everybody’s records.
People keep talking about how they might do it with cars, or televisions, or glasses, or whatever. But so far, as yet, that has failed to materialize.
Edit: I left out the watch, despite it being the best selling watch. It isn’t as better than a normal watch as an iPhone was better than a blackberry; it is merely sufficient: great, but certainly not insanely so. If it could support Google Assistant instead of Siri, and had better bluetooth device support, and didn’t require an iphone, it might be. But the watch presently really just falls short of the Apple level expectation for a product. To be fair, that level is literally “insane”.
I mean they just did that with smart watches and earbuds, under Cook. They are totally dominating those categories with uncontroversially the best designed products. Not good enough for you?
I’m at a point where I’m surprisingly preferring Windows and Linux for my desktop work. I just wish there was a better alternative in the mobile space than Android, which I feel is in an even worse state than iOS.
I'm not familiar with the Apple Watch (nor the iPhone much to be honest). I'm kind of an old-timer that fondly remembers the Apple II and the early Macintosh.
Should have added an emphasis that, _for me_, I feel that their magic is fading. Same with Google, in their early years I was amazed - now, not so much. I guess miracles don't happen so often, and I should respect their continued growth and renewal. (And there are still elves working there.)
But that feeling is irrelevant to whether or not they are innovating or not.
That philosophy was Steve Jobs' key insight back than. Today many companies excel at magical ux design.
And sure, their control over iOS and their rich clients allow them to do stuff others cannot. And definetly, it's incremental innovation.
But that's very little innovation, considering their size or compared to their competitors - Google AI and moonshots, Amazon(where do i even begin), or Microsoft(Cloud and their research efforts).
People seem to forget that one of the first things Jobs did was get rid of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group and focused research on profitable products.
Google’s lack of focus explains why it has had five failed messaging apps.
And they have a few bets that with time and some luck could make them a lot of money.
It's very likely they would be able to cover their investments, at the very least.
And they have ackuired many new capabilities as a result.
It makes for a better financial future, a stronger company long term, and also, contributing so much value to the world is simply a good thing.
In 2001 Google probably only sold search ads.
Today they sell ads on so many digital places, some of those they own.
As for the question of "long term" - Google X was founded only 9 years ago.
That probably a reasonable time for a drug startup to show sucsess.
And they recently started testing self-driving cars with no safety driver , with real passengers. So they're close to some deployment.
That seems quite good.
Microsoft has released Azure.
Saying that a Google sells ads in more places is about as “diversified” as saying Apple sells iPhones on more carriers.
YouTube profits from selling ads, that's true.
Yes YouTube makes all of their money from selling ads. But it's fate is highly independent from Google search. That's diversification.
Same idea goes for Other Google businesses.
As for Apple - it's less diversified than it seems: the fate of the watch, for example, is highly dependent on the fate of the iPhone.
You don't get these kinds of problems when you aren't trying to mass produce cyclical consumption.
Innovation at Apple scale takes time. Let’s see what happens with AR.
Compare this chart to Google’s
https://sixcolors.com/images/content/2019/financials-2019-7-...
The iPhone was a once in a lifetime thing. Even in 2007 there were 1 billion phones a year being sold (Apple said they wanted to capture 1% of the market by selling 10 million in its first year).
By definition, what electronic market can be much larger than one that has a 80%+ penetration?
(As an illustration for this post: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/10/why-apple-doesnt-care-abo...)
By 2009 Apple's iPhone business was larger than its personal computer business. By 2011 it was larger than all of Apple's other businesses put together. By 2015 it was several times larger than all of Apple's other businesses put together.
Which is why, even though I'm not the world's biggest Apple fan, it always amuses me to hear people complain that Tim Cook hasn't pulled another iPhone out of his hat. The iPhone was the kind of hit that only comes along every two or three decades. I'm struggling to think of anyone who's produced two hits on that scale.
If you look at Google’s revenue and profit mix, it looks the same as it did in 2007 - advertising.
Microsoft and Apple have been able to pivot. Even while the Mac is only 10% of Apple’s revenue, even it has grown slowly throughout the years.
Another note from your article - Apple sold $23 Billion dollars worth of Macs in 2016.
Between 2010 - 2016. Google has only made $31 billion in revenue on Android (https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...).
What limits Apple to the electronics market? It's been clear for a long time that they need to grow outside of electronics. Apple's value is in its design and brand. They could be so much more than an electronics company, under different leadership.
AOL/TimeWarner
General Electric/Universal/Synchrony Bank
AT&T/DirecTV
Google/Motorola
....
It's really not healthy for a company to build a whole constellation of products and services around one product only. It creates unnecessary risk because if that product ever sours, everything will fall apart.
None of the tech giants are well diversified - with Google being the least diversified. Facebook just buys up competitors.
Amazon has retail and AWS. Microsoft has software and Cloud.
Source: I was briefly a product lead for a large tech company's anti-adblocking efforts and worked with publishers and others globally to measure these rates.
Beyond that, even though I've been out of the game for a few years, I have to be careful what I say. But I've been planning on writing something soon.
Someday soon we will put AdGuard in as the DNS provider for our parents and other relatives.
The same way Firefox and Google Chrome got adopted.
Advertising has gone from an annoyance to a potential serious threat to our well being from an increasingly surveillance oriented ecosystem.
Pi Hole blocks anywhere from 35 - 50% of all requests in my home. That's an astounding number of requests for an apartment with two residents.
Continue, not begin.
Directly to advertisers and indirectly through content creators, so they have multiple channels at least.
Not an Apple fan at all, but if I could pick an employer, Apple actually is on a track to become more favorable. Still, their locked down environments aren't really interesting if you don't care about monetizing software directly.
Apple has definitely slowed down quite a bit under Cook. But that is comparing from Apple's best to Current Apple. iOS 13 and macOS quality has definitely slipped. Along with the extremely long denial and no reaction pattern of Mac, Mac Pro and MacBook Pro Keyboard problems. But they are still Innovating like hell on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPod. Getting a decent iPhone out every year, which also happens to be the best selling Smartphone around the world is no small task. Services is also growing, although I am still not too fond of the idea of Apple TV, Arcade and News.
Those so call "bunch of accessory and services" would have been a Fortune 2000 company on its own, and likely to be Fortune 500 soon if not already.
isn't Apple+ the largest diversification Apple has had in a long time?
One of the best and most tragic short fiction stories ever written. It is scary how accurate the metaphor is.
I don't see why people think that story is in anyway interesting or tragic. It's non-sensical, when reality isn't so. It's only deep if you have never read an account of a war or read history or basically know anything about how anything works outside of your suburb.
Alphabet's problem is simply that they mostly failed. Robots - fail. ISPs (Fiber, Loon) - fail. Self-driving cars - in test, but a long way from profits. Android predates Alphabet and is really part of the ad system.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...
That's a reasonable prediction. It's the way Sundar started running Google anyway (demanding profits of the non-ads products or killing them).
Make a lot of money in advertising and spend some of it to invent the future.
Without the second part, the entire company changes.
We need another company to take the mantle:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation...
When will technology/product/engineering/creative companies learn that the value creation is more important than the value extraction? With value creation there is always the ability to value extract. With value extraction the focus, and little research and development or innovative value creation, eventually it stagnates and sputters.
The product before the sales/marketing is key. A product of value can always be sold or marketed. You can't sell/market your way to a product.
As a developer, and investor, in Google this concerns me the move away from Alphabet, moonshots and research and development. The open mode is needed just like the closed mode [1]. The open mode is where value is realized, the closed mode is where it is produced [1]. Value is created in a state of play or creativity, this is usually the first thing to go in these phase changes at a company.
This happens at every company that creates immense value, eventually the research and development is hard to quantify the value so they cut and cut like Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, eventually it is just a stump and all the grace and built up value is tapped.
When MBAs stop thinking that every penny has to be returned to investors.
So it is probably time to sort through the Alphabet ventures, pick the one or two that have a good chance, invest in those, kill the rest, and start some new ones.
https://www.bell-labs.com/about/history-bell-labs/stories-ch...
As for Tesla, their last quarter was profitable, sure they aren't profitable year over year yet, but saying that 'neither of his companies are remotely profitable' seems pretty far from the reality.
Instead of needing a big company to bring the best minds together and give them money, random people in garages can have good ideas and build proof of concepts relatively easily.
Maybe.
I think this gives a false impression of the value of the non Google bits of Alphabet
Currently the market cap of Alphabet is $924bn and "Waymo is worth about $105 billion" (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-27/waymo-val...) which would make that 11% of the valuation and probably other bits of other bets are worth something too.
[edit: note that the parent comment originally spoke to the `market cap' of Waymo before an edit, giving context to this reply]
An analyst independently made up a number, likely to justify an outsized Google target number. There have been rumors that Google will seek outside investments in Waymo that might legitimize some valuation, but they haven't.
And for now Waymo's revenue is estimated to be $5M. While Google's revenue is about $160,000M.
So I don't think they're giving a false impression of anything. Google has been pouring enormous sums of Adword cash into Waymo and it's still a stuttering business ten years later.
Waymo may not be a revenue behemoth currently but there is immense value there not only to self-driving but to maps improvement and more.
I am not a fan of software patents but they have surpassed Toyota in patents [1] and there are hundreds of patents from Waymo [2].
Everyday in Arizona Waymo vehicles you see them on every block.
The value extractors may not like not being able to extract value yet, but the product, research and value creation is very high and contributes today to improving Google product offerings outside of Waymo such as Maps [3].
Waymo has waymo value than is being extracted because it is still emerging from the product value creation nebula that business/marketing/analysts can't see and don't value as much as product/engineering/creative people.
[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-trends/Google-s-Wa...
[2] https://patents.justia.com/assignee/waymo-llc
[3] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-09/waymo-mapp...
Google is a data/information company and you are completely disregarding the impact Waymo has on that especially for the Maps product.
Waymo is also already a market leader in their space.
Just because it isn't registering big enough revenues to McKinsey level value extraction only MBAs like CEO Sundar Pichai and Wall Street doesn't mean anything. Most of those in that space have no idea how to create value, only extract it.
This type of 'it isn't making money' thinking is similar to how Jeff Bezos at Amazon was attacked for putting all profits back into R&D, or how Elon Musk at Tesla/SpaceX pushes products, or even when Jobs came back to Apple. The bean counters do not understand value creation and do not have product/engineering/creative mindsets.
What product/engineering/creative people do is value creation that create the engines for 'making money', the engine doesn't just pop in, there is a concerted effort of play, production, design, creativity, engineering, crafting and refinement that takes value creation to get that engine running which results in value extraction.
The business/marketing/managers should just stay out of the engine room and just make sure there is enough runway.
The product before the sales/marketing is key. A product of value can always be sold or marketed. You can't sell/market your way to a product.
AWS on the other hand is printing money.
Google hasn’t had a non advertising based hit besides maybe Android since it’s inception and even that has only made $23 billion a year in profit from its inception until the Oracle trial where the number was revealed.
AWS was created out of the continual re-investment by Bezos back into Amazon.
Amazon also has many acquisitions from it and associated to all their businesses: IMDB, Twitch, Zappos, Whole Foods, etc.
Google with search, maps and mobile won some intense battles via innovation and a better product in many cases. Google became the biggest OS on mobile with Android and beat out Microsoft that really should have been better positioned and won (Windows Phone was probably better as well). Google also beat Microsoft at their own Office game and storage with Drive, Docs, etc. That was huge. Mobile is a massive victory within the last decade, search the one previous, others in play. Those wins shouldn't be discounted.
> only made $23 billion a year in profit from its inception
Yep, only $23 billion, horrible. /s
Microsoft also gets a chunk of that with their Android used mobile patents [1].
In a way I wish Microsoft didn't get a chunk of Android devices and instead we had three competitive mobile platforms. Android is fine but it isn't the best development platform, iOS and Windows Phone both better (was in the case of Windows Phone), Android was just positioned well and timed right.
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/183766/why-microsoft-makes-5-to-15...
As far “winning” mobile. $23 billion in 7 years and they still pay Apple a reported $8 billion a year to be the primary search engine on Apple devices. Apple has made more money from Google than Google has made from Android.
Android definitely didn’t “win” against Apple. The entire Android ecosystem is a profitless race to the bottom.
As far as Google Drive, like Jobs said about DropBox, storage is just a feature - not a product. MS gives away 6TB of One Drive space with the $100 a year Office 365 subscription. Office 365 has much deeper penetration that Drive.
They beat them to online documents, spreadsheets, storage by years. Google Docs launched after they bought Write.ly in 2006. Lots of teams don't even use Office anymore and use online office like Google.
Yes lots of places still use Office but there is no denying Google beat them online and it was Microsofts share to lose. Microsoft really just got their online offerings put together nicely finally in the last maybe 5 years, they didn't want to cannibalize desktop Office and that delayed them immensely.
Before Google Docs there was only Office, OpenOffice and LibraOffice but people really only used Office. That has changed, I rarely use it unless I work with a company that is Microsoft-centric. It may change now that Office 365 is finally decent but they still want large purchases of licenses that really only is enterprise focused.
> As far “winning” mobile. $23 billion in 7 years and they still pay Apple a reported $8 billion a year to be the primary search engine on Apple devices. Apple has made more money from Google than Google has made from Android.
There is immense value in controlling the platform which Google has. There is even more value in controlling the hardware and software platform like Apple.
Because they control Android they don't have to pay another mobile provider to be the search provider.
Don't leave out Chrome either, that was a big thing for a long time. That really came from Webkit and KDE that Apple open sourced to become Chromium and Chrome.
> Android definitely didn’t “win” against Apple. The entire Android ecosystem is a profitless race to the bottom.
Android won against Apple iOS and Microsoft Windows Phone in terms of market share. There is value in being the biggest market share, ask Microsoft with Windows.
> As far as Google Drive, like Jobs said about DropBox, storage is just a feature - not a product. MS gives away 6TB of One Drive space with the $100 a year Office 365 subscription. Office 365 has much deeper penetration that Drive.
Drive is still bigger than any effort of Microsoft. OneDrive did not compete for a long time. Dropbox even beat Microsoft. Google Drive and Dropbox pretty much own this space except for Microsoft Teams or enterprises that used Office.
Nadella fixed lots of issues in Microsoft and finally has Office 365 online in a good way, Teams, free IDEs/editors (VS and VSCode) and their new OS is really Azure which was his baby.
Microsoft is doing well in lots of areas, even Surface Pros/Books are probably beating Apple laptops right now in terms of growth. Apple doesn't want to cannibalize iPads so they don't have touch screens on their laptops still, Microsoft does and it is a solid device. Hopefully they re-enter mobile one day but right now they are too fat and happy off of profits from Android patents.
I like Microsoft, use them plenty and do lots of .NET. I also like Apple and develop on Macs/iOS devices. I also like Google and use Android and develop for that platform. They are all good in different ways.
However, you are really downplaying what Google has done.
Again we didn't even mention Chrome which did take the web by storm, which they are starting to abuse now with the ol' Microsoft embrace, extend, extinguish but they still did win the browser wars as well from an entrenched IE/Microsoft and over Firefox which was an early developer favorite of Netscape origin.
Being first is just a nerd victory like saying Apple was the first desktop operating system with a GUI. “Winning” in a for profit business is profit.
There is immense value in controlling the platform which Google has. There is even more value in controlling the hardware and software platform like Apple.
We know the value - $23 billion over 7 years. The fact that Google still pays Apple $8 billion a year shows that there is more value in a platform that attracts people that can afford to spend money than people who only spend $240 on a phone.
Drive is still bigger than any effort of Microsoft. OneDrive did not compete for a long time. Dropbox even beat Microsoft. Google Drive and Dropbox pretty much own this space except for Microsoft Teams or enterprises that used Office.
A “bigger effort” doesn’t put money in the bank and DropBox not only has never been profitable, they have repeatedly said that they don’t know when or if they will ever be profitable.
If Google has to pay $8Bn to Apple, then all of the money Google doesn't have to pay by dint of Android existing should count as value creation by Android.
Before Google Docs / G+ suite there was really only Office. Now everything is Google vs Office 365. Most small/medium even startups use Google Docs as it is good enough. Yes like I said, entrenched Microsoft companies use Office and Office 365 is finally good and is winning in businesses because business/marketing like Office. But Google made it to 'versus' level with Microsoft.
We also glossed over Gmail, that has been immense for attracting people to Google apps.
Apple is also in this space but the desktop market share is so low that they don't compete here.
> We know the value - $23 billion over 7 years. The fact that Google still pays Apple $8 billion a year shows that there is more value in a platform that attracts people that can afford to spend money than people who only spend $240 on a phone.
If Google has to pay Apple $8 billion for mobile search. How much would they have to pay another mobile platform if they didn't run it? Probably $5+ billion or more since it is bigger, there is still value in the platform. I can't even believe I have to state that. Apple also shows this by what Google has to pay them, platforms are value as they bring in revenue opportunities.
Android OS and devices were shoddy for a long time, but they are immensely better now. Apple does own the high-end market but that won't always be the case and there is value in the market share even if it is less per phone.
> A “bigger effort” doesn’t put money in the bank and DropBox not only has never been profitable, they have repeatedly said that they don’t know when or if they will ever be profitable.
Dropbox is probably in a more precarious situation than Google or Microsoft in terms of storage competition. To compete they probably can't make a profit for a long time and will probably end up getting purchased maybe.
You can simply not deny that Google Drive was first and is mostly winning the storage battle.
OneDrive is rarely used even in enterprise settings even at Microsoft shops. Yes entrenched Office based companies probably use it like they used sub-par Sharepoint.
For storage though, most are in Google Drive or Dropbox. Branding/usage also creates value in marketing and cross over products, obviously more for Google than Dropbox as the latter is boxed in and can only raise prices or push people to business plans.
GSuite is losing market share.
http://www.cloudcomputing-news.net/news/2018/may/30/office-3...
And if DropBox is “winning” and losing money, isn’t that a Pyrrhic victory?
You can simply not deny that Google Drive was first and is mostly winning the storage battle.
Being first is again, a nerd point. Where is the money?
For something supposedly worth almost $1 trillion, it's not great. If you bought Google and then kept the profits, it would take 28 years before you broke even. That's longer than the company has even existed.
The value of every corporation primarily reflects expectation of future profits. That's the reason P/E ratios differs a lot even for established companies.
Why the decision to write $160,000M vs $160B? Was it so the same as the previous $5M number? Even still, it seems unnatural to me.
That's not what's happening here, but it's interesting.
What's your definition of global?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_...
Edit: I guess you meant global as far as the English language is concerned only, ignoring the equivalent words in other languages. But even that would be wrong, as apparently Australia adopted the American usage after the UK.
In any case, it's interesting that the US diverged from the European use following the French (who since then went back to the original meaning of billion).
In writing you can't do that as easily or effectively, so I think keeping the abbreviated units the same is effective writing.
In fact stating income in thousand millions is exactly how financial statements are formatted. In alphabet's 10k (at https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204419...) there is a table showing that the google segment had $136,224M in revenue, while "all other bets" had a total revenue of $595M. I suspect that the SEC would have some stern words for alphabet if they expressed on measure in billions and one in millions...
That said, it makes sense from the Page/Brin perspective, perhaps. It's a lot more difficult to 10x a company that's already worth $Y billion. Perhaps better to start the ventures separately in a way that is more exciting to investors.
My view is that the market undervalues Google and overvalues Waymo but unfortunately Mr Page and Mr Brin force me to invest in both.
I would love to short Waymo. And now that Sergei is no longer there to shield it from Ruth Porat - who is well known for hating risky bets - I don't see a bright future for the company. And working conditions there have already deteriorated to the point where most talented people don't stay (just check glassdoor reviews if you don't believe me).
I'm pretty sure Larry and Sergei wanted their legacy to be Waymo. I'm pretty sure Ruth Porat wants her legacy to be killing Waymo.
Both Larry and Sergei are still on the board, so I don't see what changed? If you are thinking along that route, wouldn't it be more important what Sundar Pichai's opinion on Waymo is?
The screws are definitely going to tighten, moreso than they already have. The majority of the original talent that made up Waymo left years ago - that doesn't happen when you're on the brink of an actual breakthrough that can truly transform the world for the better. If Waymo can't pull a rabbit out of its hat, it's going to the Google graveyard. This isn't going to play out immediately, it will take a few years.
And that's probably optimistic.
Who will fund that ?
I wonder if Google was too ambitious. Maybe if they focused all the effort on making trucks that could only ride the highway safely, in limited conditions, they would have had a working business by now.
And you're right, about self driving cars and that i'm still living in 2005 :)
Does not work on my Firefox though as block sneaky redirects.
From https://www.outline.com/dmca.html
Notice to Users If someone else might own the copyright to it, don't submit it. Outline is for reading pages that:
you own the rights to, is in the public domain, constitutes fair use, or you have consent of the copyright holder.
If we find you repeatedly submitting content that does not meet the above criteria, we will block you from using our service.
Also, sites that want paywalls are technically capable of doing that in a way that archive.is, outline.com, etc, can't scrape them. They don't, though, because they want the best of both worlds. Want to charge for your content? Fine, do that, but you lose exposure from search engines, HN, Facebook, etc.
Curious how they are going to "block me" though. I don't have an account with Outline.
And another thing to consider is that a significant portion of Alphabet's value already comes from potential growth of "other bets" (e.g. Waymo). The major driver of digital ads' growth has been cannibalization of traditional media ads budget. This is no way sustainable over the next decade so the growth will be eventually saturated. Unless Google can find another strong driver (Maybe Cloud?), it's pretty natural to keep investing "other bets".
My understanding from the rumour mill is that's essentially what's been happening for a while now.
It seems like a much more honest approach would always have been for Google to be one company... for Alphabet to be a separate one... and for, say, Google to own 33% of Alphabet, for Larry and Sergei personally to own another 33%, and outside investors to own the rest and be the ones principally determining its own, separate valuation.
All I can find is that, as of 2019, nobody knows [1]. (Unfortunately I can't read the full paywalled content.)
Also, it might not be profitable but could still be break-even.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/ok-google-hows-youtube-doing-11...
But also, given YouTube's astronomical growth over the past 15 years, I can also see it operating similar to Amazon -- not technically making a profit, but only because it continues to massively reinvest what would otherwise be quite profitable, for even greater future eventual profits.
Of course all this is conjecture...
So I was assuming all this with the hypothetical inclusion of the actual cost of YouTube.
I agree with the Google servers and bandwidth being essentially free, YouTube likely breaks even at least.
The amount of people using ad-blockers had increased a lot and there have been a lot of demonetization events where the bar for acceptable (advertiser-friendly) content has been raised. This also caused a lot of creators to move their income streams to merch or Patreon, sometimes even fully disabling advertising on their videos.
Still just conjecture, just wanted to point out that there have been a lot of things that hurt Youtube's ability to monetize despite their good growth.
I would not be shocked to hear that video encoding is actually the biggest cost of running Youtube, much more than the hosting cost itself, at least when you factor in their close connection to Google's networking infrastructure that probably brings bandwidth cost way down.
Along with that, if you take away the massive subsidies they get with Google’s infrastructure, and the money they split with music studios and makers. I don’t see profitability being the case.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
Google could benefit a bit from the Bezos API memo AND a bit from the Jobsesque "singular vision not kitchen sink of requested features" refinement. Paring google down and giving sects more singular visions, while encouraging cohesiveness might need a Bain Capital type chopman, but after that is said and done, Alphabet Chief should be more important than Google Chief.
Pichai's job should be demarcing responsibility and org chart, giving focus.
Whoever else decided to allow iTunes onto Windows should be shown a lot of respect as well. That was a very uncharacteristic and forward thinking move.
Putting a visionary in the drivers seat of google doesnt mean that operations should be thrown to the wayside. And part of that pretense is paring down and refining what "google" is. GCP obviously needs a more salesman/finance/trustworthy leader at the moment. One who can walk into a Fortune 100 company and say "trust us to be your foundation." That div reinventing itself shouldt be hampered by Google needing to become truly innovative again. The worst part about reinventing search specifically, is that if done right, its a bit of a thankless endeavor. Google search is so seamless and chromeless, that when it works you dont even notice it. It's job is to present other information.
While I haven’t worked with Azure specifically besides what is now called “Azure Devops”, MS’s enterprise support is legendary.
I work for a company now that has AWS business support. I use the live chat all of the time as an “easy button”. Not when something is wrong, just when I don’t want to spend too much time trying to figure something out. They are excellent and batting close to 100.
That is how support should work in general. Support has become so much "thats outside the scope of your contract" or "blame other vendor" instead of a shortcut to training. If my provider has already seen a problem I've run into, its in their best interest to get me moving again, so I can use more of their product and extend their tentacles further into my business.
Because there’s no financials to analyze, the companies that succeed this way basically go from making nothing / losing money for many years before all of a sudden becoming exponentially profitable. The signal doesn’t exist on the financial side, which is why so many people in Wall Street often fail so badly when valuing hard technology companies.
It’s why a company like Waymo will in 10 years be valued more than the entirety of Google, yet many in finance won’t even have an inkling of this in the present day.
Also, by the way, this is why I believe the venture capital industry in Silicon Valley was able to uniquely succeed in the beginning due to a heavy concentration in extremely technical investors compared to the rest of the United States and the world in general (i.e. the VC capital of the world is in Silicon Valley and not New York for a reason).
What should be scary if you're at the top of the company is that Google has not had a home-run product in a very long time. It's a strong signal that wherever made Google special in the past is gone (though that doesn't mean it couldn't come back).
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...
Seriously off topic. There have been two huge threads about AMP in the last week and something like 9 of them in the last year: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Most mobile browsers now have "reading mode" anyway.
This is obviously silly, but follows the same reasoning that you have stated. Drinking water reduces thirst, not running water from a faucet. Redesigning a website to be less bloated results in a better mobile experience, not designing around AMP. It is possible to redesign a website without using AMP.
Causation does not imply necessity.
But it doesn't seem helpful to analyze faucets as being a monopolistic plot by Big Water rather than a technology for letting you drink when you're thirsty.
in theory, yes, you're correct. but the reality is that turning on the tap is usually an important step to having a drink of water.
464 requests and 12MB of garbage for an AMP hosted article.
The actual Bloomberg page was 5.3Mbytes and took 30 seconds to load completely: https://imgur.com/a/zBaOzeD
If 3X improvement in loading time and data transfer is not much of a help, I don't know what it is.
USERS like AMP because it is an actual improvement of the UX. The industry complaining over AMP is like the music industry going after the MP3 in the early 2000s.
If you need an ad blocker to make amp load quickly that defeats the purpose of amp, because the ad blocker makes the original site load quickly without the inherent google bullshittery.
The crazy loading times are actually not that important as long as the site is usable quickly.
Fight AMP as hard as you like, start a Kickstarter for anti-AMP explaining to the public the evils of AMP but when my search results return an AMP site and non-AMP site I am clicking the AMP.
Web tech people can revolt all they want or they can actually find a way to display a few kb of text and image quickly. You can be the music industry trying to protect their CD business or you can own the Napster/iTunes/Spotify and make your money from there.
Web publishing becomes garbage, AMP is fast loading garbage. The fast-loading garbage wins.
You should try outline: https://outline.com/XT5ULM
After they axed Reader, I stopped using anything from the G. Watching them build legit software, gain users, and then dissolve those services over and over and over again had the effect of suffocating any further curiosity towards their products.
Like a Skinner mouse, they literally train you not to give a shit anymore.
I never used Reader, but did anything else come along to fill the void? I ask as I am curious on the market when G kills a product. When G kills off a product, does the rest of the world just assume that if G couldn't make it work then it must not be worth doing? I know HN readers were vocal about the death of lots of G products, but HN readers are edge cases in the grand scheme.
I'm not really giving Google "credit" for anything. It's just that a lot of people want to identify a bogeyman in RSS's demise. But that bogeyman is really the collective us. There are still plenty of RSS feeds and at least a couple of decent clients for anyone who want to use RSS today.
Yep. I'm using ol'faithful: Mozilla Thunderbird