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Comment by xmprt | Hacker News Reader

They're still investing heavily into YouTube Premium (no longer Red) now so I don't see them getting rid of it anytime soon.

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It’s Google. The level of investment isn’t correlated to the propensity for cancellation.

Remember the most expensive ever Google product? Plus?

Right...

Or do you mean glass?

What? I'm pretty sure Cloud, Geo, and Search have more total investment than Plus.

Pretty sure self-driving will be the biggest loss, theyll make money from it and have relevance but itll be way less than they put into it so early

Do you know how much money Google has ever invested in Waymo ever?

I tried to search for a number, but couldn't come up with much. Obviously, this number would be very important in judging whether self-driving will be a loss for them.

> Google had spent $1.1 billion on the project [1]

The wikipedia also mentions Waymo raising ~2B and ~3b rounds that IIRC Google participated in as well. I'm surprised its so low honestly.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo

Thanks. I should have thought to check on Wikipedia!

If you are willing to wait and just judge by eventually realised revenue, Waymo might still turn out to be a loss. But if you judge by current valuations (which reflect informed investors best guess of future revenue streams), then even after a recent major decrease we still have 30 billions USD.

That looks pretty decent for an investment of 1.1B + ~3B total.

It's also still too early in the google ADHD cycle to kill it. Probably just reaching mid life at this point.

Nah, YouTube Premium makes sense. It's basically TY without ads. Why would that be too hard to maintain?

You hit the nail on its head. Google usually discontinues products which have high maintenance cost so even if it turns out that YT Premium makes less money than people watching ads (and I highly doubt the average person watches more than $10 worth of ads in a month), they'll still keep it.

Not really, for example Reader had really low maintenance costs. In fact at some point it was maintained by some of its former developers in their 20% time with no official head count.

I think it is a side effect of what keeps google from turning into IBM. Ossification is a perennial problem for large corporations especially traditional growth companies. They make their few big things then iterate on them. The "ADHD" shown by google, while it is annoying to users to have a perfectly serviceable piece of software discontinued unceremoniously, probably keeps the internal structure from becoming rigid and failing to adapt. I think they are probably slightly too far over on the side of kill stuff and move on but I'm not a multibillion dollar company.

Having zero headcount is the death knell for a project about to be cancelled. It only had low maintenance costs because the team was disbanded, presumably because it wasn't worth paying to maintain.

The story behind reader is more complicated than that.

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