2020 Q4 Alphabet Earnings Release [pdf]
abc.xyz
abc.xyz
Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google. All of them beat even the most optimistic estimates.
Will have to dig into whether the cost of being Apple's default search engine has risen. Generally speaking it should $10 / user / year. Apple just reported another 200M increase in Active Devices. There should be some hint, or may be it will have to wait until next contract negotiation.
Though it is quite scary how these companies are so big and yet growing so fast, a lot of this is because of usurping new markets, like Apple did with Airpods. I just hope this doesn't suffocate smaller players in due time.
Not to mention the ad proliferation on YouTube.
Don't forget to subtract the ones in China.
But then again... apple maps.
Edit: as for your actual question: possibly. In my opinion the quality difference between Google & Apple Maps is greater than Google vs Bing search.
Is it? I find the amount of censorship and manipulation in Google's results since last yeast has really affected its performance on my end.
It's just alarming when you can search for something in Google and not find it, then type the same query in Bing or DDG, and you get the desired result immediately. And I do mean absolutely benign searches like news articles and published research.
Google does not censor real news articles. Nor legit research AFAICT. A quick Bing and DDG search along with browsing of the Wikipedia article on this topic[1] yielded nothing major.
If you want to "research" on how Sandy Hook school shooting was a false flag, that California wildfires were set by Jewish space lasers, or other the QAnon conspiracies, yeah Google sucks. But if you are doing actual research for work or school, neither DDG nor Bing come close. I used DDG heavily when I was in China, and it was garbage for work.
After living China, I am well aware how horrible censorship is to democracy. But you know what's worse? How Facebook's algorithms have radicalized our country. Most members of my family (our country for that matter) get their news from Facebook, much if it is the most extreme garage to keep engagement numbers high, not good journalism based on facts.
I'm fairly certain page rank demotes this garbage because it’s poor quality, not as a service to our society. But as long as Facebook/OANN continue to profit off of tearing our society apart, it's probably a good thing. Of course, teaching critical thinking in school would negate this problem, but that’s a too much to ask from a culture that puts more value in sports than education.
Compare the results for ‘fake moon landing’ on Google and bing. The results are pretty stark.
Which I don't get, they probably could afford to have even a completely separate backend for quoted strings and store way more data than DDG.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
Search Engine Placement has literally Zero. It is pure 100% raw profit.
Apple reported net income of 57.41 billion U.S. dollars in its 2020 fiscal year.
It would be if Apple made a search engine. Media will spin this as a Search Engine that values your privacy from Apple. It is the best thing ever etc. Given Apple's consumer branding, as long as it isn't so bad people will use it.
The problem is I dont see that happening. $10B of pure profits is a large amount of money doesn't matter how you slice and dice it.
Making a half decent search engine is still very hard. They are happy to squeeze Google, making less information available to Google in the name of privacy, all while eating away all the profitable Smartphone market shares.
That is one reason I dont quite like current Apple. It reeks of hypocrisy. Stop attacking Google as evil, painting themselves as Saint, all while happily receiving Billions of dollars. But current media seems to like this idea, and it fit well with the current US political spectrum.
Because Apple makes most of its money from device sales, they have less of an incentive to snoop on their users. Their business model is just better aligned with something that users are actually starting to value now: privacy.
Even more astounding is that they're growing earnings even faster.
Simply unheard of for margins to expand at this point in a company's lifecycle.
Net income $40B for the year through 12/31/2020.
The growth in revenue at 20% is impressive given these players are already so massive.
One big takeaway, AWS is CRUSHING GCP on the financial side. There is basically a 50%?? delta here? Ie, AWS is +28% margin, GCP -30% margin? Still GCP is growing briskly though much smaller.
In short, AWS could do a lot more to compete on price if they wanted.
Maybe. GCP can be subsidised by Google, but AWS is the breadwinner for Amazon.
Or, Google is investing more to compete? AWS is financially stable now because of its investments in initial years. GCP revenue growth does seem promising.
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Incredible that Google has been able to sustain almost 20% revenue growth for so long - much longer than most people expected. For the past 6 or 7 years people have been predicting that Google's growth would soon slow because:
(a) The number of ads on a search result page had reached saturation point
(b) The percentage of people using the internet in rich countries had reached saturation point
Although real, these effects have proved to be outweighed by other, less limited factors of growth; in particular Google's ability improve the quality of match between advertiser and user. Even now I think there is significant room for Google to improve this matching - eg. when I put an iPad Pro in my online shopping basket at apple.com but don't buy it, why don't I then see iPad ads on YouTube? When I give Tesla $1,000 to reserve but not buy a Model 3, why don't I then see Model 3 ads reading The New York Times? Apple and Tesla are leaving money on the table, and when they wake up Google will make even more money
(I do want the music library, so I've been a subscriber for a very long time.)
Other video services have clearer value to me in the content they provide so I pay for them. I suspect I'm not alone in this.
I still have some channels that I regularly consume plus travel and cooking/baking videos that I watch a lot so it made sense for me to pay for it.
Just pay for the content. You aren’t forced to watch those ads.
I’ll happily encourage them to do that.
The replacement in YouTube Music premium* does not come with the bonus of no ads on youtube videos, which I think is some straight crap. I had forgot they existed, damn near.
*Unless there is another tier of subscription I haven't noticed.
Time to look into adblocker for my phone.
Now that's weird.
And don't forget they are paying a huge sum to the content creators as well - it is a delicate balance.
Also, content creators do it because brand deals are generally a big chunk of change.
As a user, I don't care how or why the ads appear - they're ads regardless.
EDIT: https://vancedapp.com/
They offer a paid service, exactly what people on HN wanted. You are stealing from creators here.
You are stealing from creators here
I don't feel the need to pay 10$/month to watch LinusTechTips which is itself 20 minutes long advertisements for PC parts, sponsored by their respective manufacturers.
Many acquisitions and Other Bets do end up on GCP after migrating from AWS/Azure, though.
(Plus external services need stronger tenant isolation which Google internal services don't deliver)
GCP lost $5.6 billion on $13 billion in revenue. It’s growing a bit faster but not much considering the small base. The “we’re losing a ton of money because we’re growing” argument smells like the sort of thing unprofitable startups without a viable business model say. It looks really off when you’re competition is also growing super fast and is very profitable.
There's also a strategic aspect of clipping the wings of AWS by providing a BATNA in the big deal negotiations. With Amazon significantly cutting into Google's advertising market share, it needs another front to put pressure on its strongest competitor. If Google can prevent $10B in Amazon profits by burning $5B of its own money, that's arguably a win.
Google launched cloud compute in 2013 and arguably didn't take it seriously until the last few years. Growing nearly 50% is a great result, even if they're still a distant 3rd.
I think GCP is in a decent position with momentum today, but it's definitely playing catch-up after a near decade of missteps and fucking around.
yep, AWS spent 30B and got 45B, Google spent 18B and got 13B, that is 2X+ difference in bang-for-buck. And that is without full effect of Graviton2,3, etc. which provides like 1.5x leap in perf/price and perf/energy. With Google loosing that much money one can wonder whether the bean counters there would even risk investment in their own ARM platform and without it the GCP would lose to AWS completely.
It is pretty rare for a company to successfully move down the stack as the margins are typically lower there. The GCP numbers illustrate the case very well.
It's likely that the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was the largest company of all time in both inflation-adjusted terms (estimates made in 2017 put it between $7.9 and $8.2 trillion dollars) and in terms of % share of world domestic product.