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.
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.
Time will tell if that's a good strategy.