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Comment by bitcuration | Hacker News Reader

The truth is, other than search engine advertising, google doesn't know how to make money.

Close, but not quite. The only thing Google knows how to do is make dirt-cheap large-scale computers and hire people. Then they let the people do whatever they want with the giant cloud, because the marginal cost is nothing.

So, the reason that gchat etc keep appearing and disappearing is because there never was a plan for it in the first place. One or a few engineers just threw it together at some point and there it was. Nobody truly owned it, it wasn't strategic. The churn is just a superficial symptom of the bottom-up product management style.

There are tons of Google products and features that were thrown together by individuals or pairs of people over a weekend and then subsequently got launched to the public. That this is possible is pretty neat, but that the products might not be durable is a downside.

> There are tons of Google products and features that were thrown together by individuals or pairs of people over a weekend and then subsequently got launched to the public.

Do you have concrete examples?

I can think of two right of the top of my head, that were monograph side projects that got launched: Google Keep, and the comment system of Google Docs, which you can think of as maybe another chat system or social network.

Remember Orkut?

‘ because the marginal cost is nothing.’ Who pays the utility bills?

Once the machine is running and the CPUs are in C0 the marginal cost of scheduling some less-important thread into the otherwise-idle cycles between active bursts of your main service threads is literally zero. Even if you have to wake a core from C1 to run the random thread, the marginal cost is still very close to zero.

Even an idle computer consumes power. How could it be literally zero? As it could have been shut off otherwise.

You can't shut it off because your core business product needs to run 50ms from now.

The core business product that must share a CPU with a third party and can’t be moved? Is there any real world example of that?

Nobody mentioned a "can't be moved" constraint.

Lots of businesses have multiple services/virtual servers running on a single host. Also VPS, shared hosting, seedboxes. Google/Amazon are experts at it.

It's not just Search, YouTube has very good earnings too. But yes, almost all ads, at really fucking good margins.

They did not build YouTube by their knowledge, they acquired competition company. They had Google videos back at that time.

Pretty much all innovation large companies do is through acquisition. It’s much faster and risk-free than doing it yourself, from scratch.

They came up with Google Glass and Google Wave by themselves :)

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