Alphabet announces fourth quarter and fiscal year 2019 results [pdf]
abc.xyz
abc.xyz
Lol at getting downvoted. They missed on revenue and down -5% after hours. This is a fact, not an opinion.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-google-finally-disclos...
"Revenue-recognition rules that were approved in 2014 and went into effect at the end of 2017 call on companies to report financial results to their investors in the same manner that they are reported to the main decision-maker at the company, typically the chief executive. Basically, if a CEO sees numbers for a large segment of the company, the company should be reporting that segment’s results to investors.
As the revenue-recognition rules were being put in place by companies in 2017 ahead of the deadline, the Securities and Exchange Commission entered into communication with Alphabet specifically to discern why it was not providing revenue numbers for its segments, mentioning YouTube, Google Cloud and some other businesses, such as hardware. Google responded by saying that its chief decision-maker, Alphabet CEO Larry Page, did not see results parsed to that level, though Google CEO Sundar Pichai did."
What are they doing now that is "joining the evil" which they weren't doing before? Is your point about the fact that people's perception has changed? People these days just take free online services for granted and no longer want to put up with ads, but if it were all to go away, the majority of people would see it as a strict negative.
back then, they had lots of cool products, and they also served ads. now they have ads and lots of products the siphon data from users to feed the ads business.
I say this as someone worked there for a decade and saw lots of "NSA - not search or ads" t-shirts.
Any evidence of that? Enterprise GSuite is not supposedly used, but consumer Gmail not feeding into ads would be surprising to me. Android feeds location and contacts data.
maybe you're using a different version of maps than I am, but I just downloaded it and the first page is chock full of ads, it begs me to turn on search history so it can show me "more relevant results".
it's also full of dark-patterns like if I click "commute" in the settings, there's no back "<" like there is in most views, but there's a nice blue "turn on" and a grayed out "no thanks".
hell, when you finally disable the account linkage (another dark pattern hiding that option), the main window is still 25% (+) ads.
1. One big reason that Google became so popular is they clearly delineated ads in the top bar and siderail, but the vast majority of search results were 'natural' search. Google even touted it back in the day: https://www.google.com/about/honestresults/ . TBH I'm surprised that page is still up.
2. For many of my searches ads now take up the ENTIRE front page of content, especially on mobile. It's virtually impossible for any business to survive by SEO alone, because Google has ensured that virtually all "commercial terms" get a ton of ads first. Paying "the Google tax" means business need to buy ads on their own name lest another business bid more and rank higher.
3. In the early days, Google was much less reliant on their "surveillance capitalism" because they already had a great signal to show you ads: what you searched for. Of course, the way capitalism works is it demands they squeeze every additional dollar where possible, so keeping track of everything you do allows them to make more money.
4. One small example, enough has been said regarding AMP and its negative impact on the web and small publishers on HN many times over, so no need to add more here IMO.
Privacy debacles like Buzz also played the part, as had this push for Google+, when they had tried to force everyone to use it.
Also, their grip on the Android OS is stronger, then Microsoft's grip over Windows ever was, and they abuse it, freezing AOSP and developing only proprietary features that lock developers into Google's services. Plus to that, they are now dominant in web browser market, with only Firefox being our last bastion against the browser monoculture. They have defeated the dragon and had become the dragon themselves. It's hilarious that the Boogeyman of the 00s, Microsoft, is now seen in a way more positive light than our former champion of the free and open web.
And yeah, the advertising had ballooned to insane levels.
Nothing. To me Google has always been the same. It is just people believed in the "Do No Evil", when everyone has a different definition of Evil. So Google didn't change much, people's opinion did.
"Most Evil are created by those who think themselves as so Righteous." -Me
FY 2019: 8.9bn
FY 2018: 5.8bn
FY 2017: 4.0bn
https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-q1-2020-earnings-reven...
Office is included in “Productivity and Business Processes” not Cloud.
Azure is in "Intelligent Cloud" which had revenue of $11.9 Bn in FY20-Q2.
See slide 4, 7, 8 and 10 here: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4319939-microsoft-corporati...
[0] - https://seekingalpha.com/article/4319939-microsoft-corporati...
https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-detail... https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019Q4_alphabet_earnings...
Even though AWS is 'purer' relative to GCP's and Azure's percentages of productivity revenues in their numbers, I don't think we can extrapolate much more than that from the numbers anyways.
edit :- that fall under the $5.3 bn number for Other revenue. Its termed as youtube non advertising revenue.
They didn't specify how much they off of YouTube Premium, but at $120/year they'd need 125 million subscribers to match ads revenue.
( Sorry dont have the time to read through it right now )
I subscribed to Premium quite early. They were showing me an IKEA bed ad multiple times a day, over a number of days. 3-4 different ads, but always the same product. The end result being that I will sleep on the ground before I ever purchase a Nordli bed.
Is this due to some demographic algorithm or something else?
OTOH, friend watching YouTube on tv is used to seeing ads. That’s their base. So it’s not as bad.
If all ad blockers stopped working right now forever. You would likely adapt and be more or less fine with (albeit more annoyed) in due time. Not like your friends relish the ads either.
And the fact that ad caused you to purchase something (doesn't matter if it wasn't the bed itself) is a huge win for Google's Youtube advertising strategy. The net result is still causing you to part with money.
And yes, Google getting me to subscribe to YouTube Premium is obviously a win for Google. However, if the most attractive thing about your Product A is that it's "not Product B", that doesn't really build the kind of long-term relationship with your customer that you'd like.
The end result being me currently evaluating whether I need the YouTube Apps at all.
I gladly pay for content in exchange to avoid ads if I can. I'm fine with ad-blocking "morally" when there is no other option, but I'm not OK with blocking ads on services that offer a reasonable price to avoid ads.
Of course, if you don't want to use youtube, by all means, you don't need to pay for it. But I wouldn't view the "pay or see ads" business model as some gross thing to avoid.
That's a good argument! I admit that I fully support the free + ads business model.
Thinking a bit more about this, I believe what irked me about the YouTube experience is (1) that I was repeatedly (ad nauseam) shown the very same ads, and (2) that the frequency was continuously increased to the point where the free+ads version was no longer watchable.
I already expressed what how I feel about (1), and (2) just feels like the wrong kind of pressure, because it impairs the product.
Here are two alternatives to (2) that I would have considered more effective: (A) mark a channel as "favorite" and watch those videos with zero ads, and (B) watch the first 100 videos a month with zero ads.
In both of those cases, I can see someone meeting me half-way. In its current form, it's just increasing and increasing the level on nagware.
Unless the presumption is 100 videos with ads each month will lead to more overall ad video views. Or people turning off ad blockers or whatever people use. I find both hard to believe.
Whatever Ikea is spending on ads is apparently doing their jobs
And the saying that there is "no such thing as bad publicity" only works in certain cases.
Everyone?
searching on some SSO topic i had opened a tab with Okta too, and that opened floodgates - for the month after that i had to listen for those 5 seconds of Okta ads before each and every song on Youtube. I dare you to imagine how much it cost Okta (and thus produced profit for GOOG) given that we're talking about Identity Management in enterprise software and potential cost of the leads there.
If the Alphabet model made sense, I'd expect to see a company starting to clearly take off after 5 years. The data shows the opposite.
Time will tell if that's a good strategy.
I wish we can have more thoughtful discussion, instead of Twitter style self aggrandizing comments.
Back when I was at Google, X (which many Other Bets came from) had a goal of all their projects having meaningful impact in 10 years. They've been working on Wing and Waymo for close to 10 years now. Those projects are not yet meaningfully impacting many people.
As an armchair CEO, I have doubts about the compensation (more salary / less equity vs startups) and funding (fewer choices funding sources for the companies, weird incentives for the investors vs VC funds) model for "Other Bets". Based off of that and the lack of results, I think they should force the Other Bets to stand on their own vs handing them more cash to burn.
They have not deployed their tech at scale, when competitors (Tesla) has widely deployed worse technology.
Even if they deploy their tech widely, it isn't clear it will generate significant revenue/profit. It might not be that expensive (think less than 1B) to build a good enough self driving car in 10 years. That'd create competition and drive down prices.
Someone else might figure out how to capture the value of self driving cars too. Maybe the profitable parts of self driving cars are the "apps" you can build once self driving cars are cheap.
I wouldn't invest in Waymo at 100B until they have a real business with real revenue and a real moat to protect that business.
It’s estimated that Google sold between 10-12 million Pixels last year (https://www.zdnet.com/article/pixel-3-by-the-numbers-googles...)
It’s estimated that Apple sold four times as many in one quarter (https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2019-11-2...)
And Samsung sold twice as many as Apple.
Oh no, quite far from it. More like 50-60% Max. For the past few years Apple sold around 200M iPhone per year, Samsung on average sold around 300M per year.
But your point still stand, Google Pixel shipment isn't making much difference on the market.
But, fair enough 3rd calendar quarter is Apple’s lowest quarter for iPhone sales - before the new ones are shipped.
I’ll prob geek out and look this up later. I’d be interested in the difference of products in their categories between the major tech companies:
Google: Pixel, Nest, Google Home, Chrome stick
Microsoft: Xbox, Surface tablets/laptops, upcoming Surface phone
Amazon: Ring doorbell, Ring’s other stuff, Alexa Echo/Dot, all the other Alexa devices, Fire tablets, Fire stick
Facebook: Portal, Oculus
Just to throw Apple in here outside their core: HomePod, ?
I’m sure I’m missing some things. Perhaps a company or two as well. Anyone know of anything else or something I wrote down wrong?
There’s also differences between market share and profitability/losses. Apple makes money with [almost] all hardware. While I think Alexa devices don’t make a profit though seem pretty dominant.
Compare that to Apple’s product mix.
https://sixcolors.com/images/content/2020/financials-2020-1-...
If you go more fine grained on wearables, it’s estimated that Apple Watch and headphones taken individually or both larger than the iPod ever was.
Q4 2018 (1.3bn)
Q4 2019 (2.0bn)
Yikes
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-bets-fact...
It’s approximately a quarter of their Net Income though.