Who are goofing off building blimps and flying on their private jets. They seem to have little interest in Google.
This is good if you're a founder. This massive chink in Google's armor could prove fatal. It's a tremendous opportunity that rarely presents itself.
They have a single biggest golden goose, and if it dies, they'll be in more dire straits than Intel.
Disrupt Google. They're so very vulnerable.
That said (and IANAL), at least the couple suits I'm familiar with in this area have to do with minority shareholders arguing some decision was made to benefit majority owners at the expense of minority shareholders. It's much, much more difficult to just argue "bad decision making" if all shareholders are affected equally.
Yes, that's precisely why those who hold controlling voting power can get away with pretty much anything.
The founders are not stupid. They are not giving away Google's source codes or company assets in proccesses that are 100% detrimental to the company's net value. Whatever consequences there will be due to some Wallstreet suits fuming at their annual investment return having 1% fewer growth YoY is going to have a very hard time building an actual case for a lawsuit. Should anything come close to materializing in a lawsuit, the legal teams will certainly relay that to Sergey and Larry so that they could respond accordingly.
I wonder whether this would end up being a case study in MBA classes....
What happened to Google is what happens to all fat monopolists: they had the luxury of losing focus because their monopoly was so profitable. I do really feel that Google (among others) is finally seeing the type of existential risk much better AI is to Google's ad business. While I'm definitely not of the opinion that "ChatGPT is a Google killer", it's not that hard to see that a company whose velocity in this space is currently much faster that Google's could eventually overtake Google's bread-and-butter search business in 5-10 years.
Google's market cap is $1.2T and their TTM net income was ~$65B.
I agree that slowly sliding the "% of ads our customers see"-slider to the right over the last couple of years until it becomes unbearable isn't really _that_ innovative but still yields a ton of profit.
The cost of 31 massage therapists is a rounding error compared to salaries for senior engineers, of which there are tens of thousands employed.
Indeed, the general argument is that Google's ads machine is so profitable that they can run the business horribly inefficiently because they don't know where to put all that cash.
> Google is so badly managed (e.g. Stadia failure recently) that I am surprised that investors tolerated their insane cash burning for so long.
That is, I (and I think most others) interpreted that as Google was essentially lighting a big pile of their cash on fire due to poor management, not that they were unprofitable. That would be very different, for example, than a statement like "Most of these new car companies are burning cash at an unsustainable rate."
The first link I got was: https://wire19.com/amazon-microsoft-and-google-cloud-infrast... which shows AWS as 3+x GCP and Microsoft ~2x GCP.
Edit to add: it looks like Alphabet reports GSuite as part of Google Cloud as well.
But the employees tasked by Google to produce a cloud-based streaming gaming service, successfully shipped a cloud-based streaming gaming service. That's good management, not bad.
Edit: ooph, I can see where this is going but people have replied so I should leave it up. FWIW: the term "management" in this context is generally interpreted strictly, and not just a shorthand for "every decision made by an executive". The complaints people have with Stadia are better termed "marketing" (building the wrong product or canceling it too soon) or "sales" (failing to get enough games on the product). "Management" (the application of corporate resources to achieve results) did their job.
And in particular, in the context of layoffs ("management" by definition) it seems like the usage above was ambiguous enough to demand a correction. Stadia being mismarketed simply isn't relevant to the employment status of massage therapists.
Engineering did their job, well. Leadership and product did not.
This has been the trend at Google during Sundar and Ruth's tenure: a company led by engineers became a company led by product management and finance.
And it shows. Google's made a crushing number of business decisions that flew in the face of good engineering principles, and undermined the company's excellence.
One is talking about market strategy and perseverance. The other is talking about technical leadership.
You could have made the same insightful (inciteful) post by just commenting on how good technical leadership was.
I was shocked the other day when a solid respectable chip designer said Alpha was a failure because DEC went out of business.