Snap and Meta are getting their lunch eaten by TikTok. Google Apple Amazon are fine.
If so, what? I know they are famous for spinning up projects and killing them super quickly.
If not, what are they doing? They have 140k+ employees worldwide. Is that what is needed to maintain their core ad business without focusing on growth of any kind (ad related or not)? If not... how many engineers/managers/whatever positions could they afford to "layoff" if we were to see US recessionary pressures/consumer spending pullback?
Afaik Google has tried to get something out of the enterprise space for a good 5 years now (I'd say), ever since they launched GCP, but it's just not in their DNA to do and especially to maintain business sales.
The Google Search Appliance was a respectable business in of itself. They deprecated it as it wasn't large enough for "Google". It would have been in the ranks of peer unicorn startups given the revenue prior to being killed off.
https://workspace.google.com/products/cloud-search/
As someone else has pointed out, GSuite has seen success in the enterprise space, so their enterprise efforts aren't a total write-off. With so many students now on GSuite at their school or colleges and a generation effectively raised on Google Docs... I certainly wouldn't bet against it today.
And then they hired an Oracle veteran to head GCP. What could possibly go wrong?
https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/google-cloud-ceo-thomas-kuria...
... which is free for consumers, and also for manufacturers to license ...
>the most popular web browser in the world
... which is free ...
>runs a major cloud provider
... which is unprofitable ...
For reference, Google pays Apple a reported $14 billion a year to be the default search engine on Apple devices. It’s highly likely that Apple makes more from Google in mobile than Google makes from Android.
Chrome is just another gateway to advertising.
Google’s Play store game revenue is $48 billion a year. But if they count revenue like Apple does, they are counting the gross amount people pay net after they give developers their cut is 30% of that excluding other expenses.
Google Advertising is up "only" 15% the same period.
Assuming consistent growth rate (big BIG assumption, but Google has not reported a broken out Cloud revenue forever) then Google Cloud revenue will exceed their ads revenue in ~11 years.
And I believe that the market is there for the trend to continue, even if AWS and Azure continue taking most of the pie. In fact it's possible that ads revenue could decrease.
[1] https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20220726_alphabet_10Q.pd..., page 11.
Last quarter, ~10% of Google's revenue came from non-advertising Services and ~7% came from Google Cloud. The ~82% that comes from ads is split between Search, YouTube, and the Network.
Amazon by comparison is 83% dependent on Amazon retail. Cloud fills the remaining 17%. They're not any better diversified, by revenue.
AWS profit margin is around 30% whereas retail is probably hovering in the low to high single digits (5-8%). AWS makes profit for Amazon, and retail offers free cash flow to Amazon. Both are important and to say Amazon isn’t diversified due to revenue is simplistic.
I'm going to take a guess and say retail probably breaks even (almost by design by Amazon but not sure if it'll ever be more than a 10-20% margin business because by design they are offering traditionally expensive services like fast shipping, very lenient returns at very low cost/price to the end user) whereas advertising is probably... 80% margin?
I know there are server costs, engineers to maintain them, but if Google stopped investing in growth as far as diversifying/expanding advertising services goes engineer/developer/management wise... how lean could they run?
Could they support Google's current ad offerings with a core team of... 1000 engineers? 500? 200?
Amazon retail isn't just getting revenue from e-commerce sales. There's multiple diversified business units part of that division. For example people pay for amazon logistics, amazon warehousing, etc.
First party games. Ads. Increase first party paid app costs (final cut pro goes back to being a pro service). Developer services. All on the mac side. They also have cloud infrastructure they haven't focused on yet, but can potentially be a major source of revenue with the right hires and focus.
Given the infamous Google 5-7 stages interview process I promptly rejected the offer. IMHO It's just not worth it for an employed person to go through that hell...
After confirming that the hiring committee had said yes, and a level, the recruiter found some teams that were atrocious (either they were looking for a completely different skillset, or so far out from my stated preferences). We then did a 2nd round of interviews and did a level jump (mid Feb-2021), and found a team in mid-March. After okay-s from both sides, it took them till mid-April to come up with an offer.
My entire h1 transfer for the company I chose took less than how long google took for the last step.
I do see some paying mid-market rates and taking a month or more for their process. I bet they believe it's very hard to find software developers.
Now, I am way way way far away from being Peter Norving, but in my 15 years career, I have found companies that value my experience enough so that they treat me well during the hiring process. In my last 3 jobs (10 years) I didn't even have to do "interviews" for the places I got into. I have been spoiled...
> Among the 8 or so software job offers I've accepted in my career, I don't think I've ever had one take more than 7 calendar days from initial contact to an offer.
same for me, it's usually <10 days from onsite->offer, then about 2months for h1 transfer and notice at current job.
All the Amazon devices are likely whats being targeted for Ads. Kindles, Amazon Prime, Audible, alexa, firestick, and now that Prime has access to Thursday night football they'll get some of that ad revenue too.
TLDR: Amazon is going big on advertising.