Google Alphabet reviewing every project after $6B decline in profits
theregister.com
theregister.com
Chromecast - better than all the alternatives but they could have gone that extra distance to make a whole Google TV apparatus and didn't.
Pixel phones - when they had all the critical mass they fumbled and released an entire line of very mediocre hardware
Pixel laptop - one of the best laptops made, ever, but they didn't commit and it was a one-off...
Hangouts - could have been the messaging app for everything... Instead they split it into two and now FB Messenger is the messaging app everyone uses (outside the US anyway).
GCP - again, they had a chance to become what Azure is or bigger but just seemed rather uncommitted to it...
Stadia - if they had committed it could have been huge because it absolutely does work very well. The concept of it working with Chromecast was good so again, they could have again, just made the TV box, bundle a controller and it's a console for everything... But nope, cancelled right as gaming Chromebooks are coming onto the market...
It sucks because many Google products are absolutely best in class but there's this eerie feeling that even those could disappear. Google probably has the best engineering in the world but also probably the worst product managers and business people in the world it seems...
Product requires commitment and continuity which Google has proven to be really, really poor at historically. Likely because it has the wrong culture for it, is likely organized with the wrong incentive structures in place, and has thus far been wildly successful in spite of it.
I think GCP would have bigger, but Azure is a different beast. Azure is based on Fortune500 sales. What GCP could have been is the de factor Serverless and Platform-as-a-Service for hobbyists, as App Engine was a pioneer in the space. App Engine actually preceded GCP. It could have subsumed the likes of Heroku, Twilio and various other APIs-as-a-service, and even logs / monitoring tools such as Datadog, which are billion dollar businesses in their own right.
It was a super cool tech demo and then they just stopped working on it. I guess it depends on what you consider "Alternatives" but it doesn't hold a candle to the Apple TV, Fire TV, or even a Roku stick IMHO. A remote is key to any TV-based device and no, a phone is not a valid remote (at least as the "only" remote). Watching my friends rave about the Chromecast and watching them have to pull out their phones to pause/play/etc is just mind boggling to me.
Agree about the remote. But the thing that's much better about Chromecast is that discovery on your phone is much quicker than with a remote and the fact you can simply cast any video on the internet that uses the protocol without any apps.
If they made it a box more like Apple TV then they'd capture both people.
Paging google product
[0] https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_google_tv?hl=...
First of all, let's look at the "truly great" things Google has done -- search, ads, Android, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Apps/GSuite/Workspace, and so on. 100% commitment, 100% great.
You say Google is "rather uncommitted" to GCP, which is hilarious if you'd look at the billions they've sunk into it. They committed to competing with AWS and by god they're spending the money to do it, and they're almost at profitability after more than 10 years of staying the course. If that's not commitment, then I literally don't know what is.
The rest of what you're listing is just that it's very hard to achieve profitable product-market fit, even if you're Google. Hardware like Pixel is hard to turn into a series of reliable successes, consumers just didn't sign up for Stadia in the numbers needed, Hangouts is a complicated story but Google certainly keeps trying with messaging, and FB Messenger's popularity was not even remotely a result of Hangouts splitting.
And just checking -- you think the 4th largest company in the world has the worst business people in the world...? No amount of genius engineering is going to get you there without an awful lot of genius business and product people too...
Basically all these have just been coasting on network effects since the mid oughts.
It's just slightly disappointing because Google stuff works better than any other computing items I've ever used. Everything connects to the cloud and just works in a way MS' and Apple's cloud offerings don't. And they should be competing with Apple and MS but instead they're mostly selling ads...
To put that in perspective, Oracle a Fortune 50 company, with a market cap of 200 Billion, has Annual Revenue is $44 Billion.
GCP on it's own can easily be a Fortune 50 company
Reminds me of this unlikely verse, also applies to corporations: Romans 5:4
Serves 'em right.
The other 50% is that it was a huge lost opportunity. Google Cloud has monster servers that can take a large number of GPUs, such a system could stream a complex world to 30+ users simultaneously. If you wanted to make something like the fictional Sword Art Online (just not deadly) that's the way to do it.
Some people would say that games should be driven by story or gameplay, not technology. I don't disagree. But some great game developers have been technology first, such as Id games. Google is not going to win in terms of story, but they can win in technology and they should have given it a try. Even if game didn't work out the IP could have been licensed to somebody who could make the story work. But no, Stadia was ultimately meaningless.
You don't think that they're already on that path?
That happens when you've got people who admit or have admitted to doing two hours of work a day before leaving early.
It might stick around - I'm merely speculating what low adoption / non long term strategy products they have. I think that one is a long term play for Fuschia.
I imagine they won't kill things like Fuschia either, but let's just agree that there's a lot of middling projects or vapourware that they have at the moment. The wall of killed Google projects shall grow again.
> We are reviewing projects at all scales... And this will be an ongoing thing. It is something we'll continue doing going into 2023 as well
These just sound like regular annual planning
Seriously, has a single Google project outside the Gsuite had any success ever?
Everything since then has been the slow crumbling of their "Kool-Aid"/branding about their company. Finally being a public company chasing quarterly earnings will peel the last remnants of idealism off their carefully constructed image.
One of the most illustrative things for me is Google Talks back in that day, some of the people invited and subjects would be unthinkable for today's Google.
I wished I could have been a Googler in that period, kind of my dream job if I had any.
1. Google ads. The vast majority of their products are funnels into ads, but ads are the business. Android, for example, is simply a channel for the ad business. Alternatively, Google could have chosen to sell Android to manufacturers the way MS does Windows. That way it could have become an independently profitable business, but they deliberately chose to not develop it as a business but make it a channel for the ad business.
2. GSuite.
None of which have ever (or will ever) generate any meaningful revenue for Google beyond their ability to funnel people into ads. They are an ad company, and nothing more.
It's also extremely reductive to just boil everything down into 'ads'.
Like for example, if Bing somehow over took Google's search, YT would still be making money. That's an important part of the company.
You are aware how YT makes money, right?
The point is though, that if Search Ads stop making money, why would YT ads also stop making money?
You're speaking as if society is going to stop having Ads altogether.
The same argument applied to e.g. Apple would be like "Apple makes all it's money through HARDWARE, since iPhone and Mac and wearables are all HARDWARE, they only have 1 revenue stream". Which is unsophisticated and kinda dumb
One is a BUSINESS MODEL, the other is a product category. You are confusing the two.
It seems unsophisticated because it is unsophisticated. Take away the ads model and you don't have a business. It's that simple.
I am not against the ads model, because it's business at the end of the day. But to think it's anything more than that is kinda dumb too. All products need to make money. That's how employees get paid 200-500k salaries.
You might not like it, but Google functions as a whole, not individual products. No CEO is going to look at YouTube and think of it as a separate business. It may be able to function as one, but he/she is always thinking how it can help the other products under the company.
You seem to have this fascination with Google products. I would argue you are not business-minded at all. Would you consider yourself a Google fan boy?
On a last note, I would appreciate it if you argue on the merits of the argument instead of calling other people kinda dumb. It's doesn't convince me one bit about your logic and shows the limit of your reasoning skills. The cap locks also don't help. It's immature.