Hacker News Reader

Comment by roydivision | Hacker News Reader

Google develop products for three reasons : a) To maintain (and hopefully increase) ad revenue, their cash cow. b) To attempt to diversify from this single source of income. Except this will never happen, nothing will ever come close to the income ads generate for them. They know this, but they have to look like they’re trying, both internally and externally. c) To create a false sense with the masses that they are a cutting edge technology company, to maintain the Google brand and thus keep people using Search. This includes things like Google Glass, silly natural language toys, self driving cars, etc. None of these things are even intended for mass production / consumption. Google IO is merely a showcase for these technology throw-aways, nothing more.

View on HN

I see in a different way, my take from comments read in the past here about Google employees, is that they build new products to get promoted, when they get promoted they jump to another project and then soon you will see the product in the graveyard[0].

[0] https://killedbygoogle.com

I’d suggest they care less about new products diversifying income and more about new products making them look diversified and less like a monopoly. That is the logic behind changing their name to “Alphabet”, distract from their utter dominance in search. Their only real fear and existential threat is from the govt doing an antitrust on them and forcing a breakup, hence it’s worth a few billion every year to keep that wolf from the door.

This is a great point, I agree. I’d add, if they are serious, Google need also to fear disruption from an as yet unknown source. This has killed many a dominant company, and by its nature difficult to predict and safeguard against.

I agree that disruption is the other major threat, which they also pour billions into via acquisitions and VC activities. My guess though is that the possibility of govt action is what really scares them, and most of the tech elite. You can tell when Google realised this by noting that they went from spending almost nothing on lobbying to spending quite a lot (coinciding roughly with their transition from “don’t be evil” to “c’mon, man, be real “)

It’s not that long ago that Microsoft was facing the very real possibility of antitrust, so it’s very much something leaders of tech companies have a duty (to shareholders) to defend against.

What bothers me about Waymo is how they pretend to compete with Tesla, saying their self-driving tech is better etc... Ok but what even is your product?? I had to look that up, and supposedly there are self-driving taxis somewhere in the US that they're controlling that you can sign up to _beta test_. I don't even recall seeing any in the two cities of operation, SF and Phoenix. Only see Waymo training cars being driven by humans around Mountain View. Like 15% of any given Google employee parking lot is filled with Teslas.

And are those Teslas self-driving?

> b) To attempt to diversify from this single source of income. Except this will never happen, nothing will ever come close to the income ads generate for them. They know this, but they have to look like they’re trying, both internally and externally.

I’ve heard a lot of people repeat this, and I don’t think I understand where it’s coming from.

Advertising is just a revenue model, it’s not something a company necessarily needs to diversify. This seems to me like saying Walmart is in a precarious position because all their revenue comes from sales.

It’s the product offering that needs diversification. Walmart can’t only sell coconuts.

The ad revenue is coming from pretty diversified sources: search, video/tv, maps, email, calendar, web browser, mobile …

My point is that all their eggs are in one basket, in an industry that is particularly prone to disruption. Additionally, as others have since commented, they are also at risk of regulation. So if they want to protect themselves they need to diversify, find other revenue streams.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com