Just how many failed startups can Google afford? | Hacker News Reader

Just how many failed startups can Google afford?

simplyzesty.com

7 pointsmanish_modi7 comments

While the money's pouring in at millions a minute they can afford as many as it takes to find a winner, even if being a giant corporation sabotages some of their attempts.

Exactly, a few employees + dollars to try some things out is nothing.

It hurts their brand image though. If Google's only products were Search, Android, Gmail, Adsense, Youtube, Docs, Chrome, and Maps then some new product they announced would probably have everyone assuming its going to dominate it's field and signing up to use it instantly.

Since they have had more high profile failures than high profile launches in the last 5-ish years, that leads to people not really trusting that any new product launch is going to be a winner. People having a "wait and see" mentality works fine for certain products (gmail, maps, news, etc would both be fine in that area) but it really kills anything that have social aspects (or economy of scale type products) like Buzz, Wave, Places, etc. These things just have significantly lower value if your IRL social network isn't using the product.

Even they can't predict all winners. So the alternative is stagnation.

Successful roll-out of self-driving cars ought to pay for one or two. Even if they gave away the software, they could probably make billions per year from licensing content like maps and streetviews or the patent portfolio. Or license the software for a few bucks or a few hundred bucks per car. At $100 per car that would be on the order of $10B. And think of all that ad revenue from commuters who dont have to watch the road.

I think a bit part of it is really talent acquisition. Sure the technology in these startups is awesome, but from Google's perspective what they're really buying are the people who made it in the first place.

If I were speaking for Google, I would reply: If all of our experiments succeeded, it would mean we are too conservative in what experiments we conduct.

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