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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Or a lot less profitable.

“From now on, the [gross margin] of search is going to drop forever,” Nadella said in an interview with the Financial Times.

“There is such margin in search, which for us is incremental. For Google it’s not, they have to defend it all,” he added, referring to the competition against Google as “asymmetric”.

https://www.ft.com/content/2d48d982-80b2-49f3-8a83-f5afef98e...

https://archive.is/4JOW1

It's 50% of Google's revenue, and they'll suffer immensely if this goes away.

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I'm curious what the 50% figure includes?

Because my understanding is that about 60% of Google's total revenue is search ads, and if you include network ads (which would be relevant since they are at risk from AI as well) then it is more like 70%.

Adsense revenue from different websites will drop because it will be summarized and cost per query will go up. This AI push will backfire

The buggy wip maker couldn't have stopped Ford

A strangely mixed metaphor, and incorrect, the buggy manufacturer did well enough... for a while at least.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studebaker

Not a mixed metaphor, it’s a standard phrase.

Note buggy WHIP makers, not buggy makers.

It is mixed because it is comparing two different class of items

whips to cars does not really compare. Cars to buggies would compare or perhaps whips to steering wheels.

No, it's not mixed. It's related to the saying about the people who get rich off a gold rush being the ones who sell shovels. In the buggy-whip case, it's about a company not understanding the market changing entirely to make them obsolete. The transportation market moved to cars, and so nobody needs a buggy whip.

Watch the movie “other people’s money” for the original reference

The original reference is probably Levitt's "Marketing Myopia" (https://books.google.com/books?id=Zn4foOUm3AoC). Levitt uses it to illustrate that companies should focus on customers rather than products.

Well OPM came out in 1991 so I doubt it.

https://youtu.be/62kxPyNZF3Q

Note the imprint, "Harvard business review classics." What I linked to is a 2008 republication of a book from 1975. The buggy-whip analogy also appears in a journal article of the same name by the same author in 1960. More info here: https://hbr.org/2016/08/a-refresher-on-marketing-myopia

Thanks for the detail and I should have dug deeper

Because they invested in the new up and coming thing and transferred the knowledge that applied.

There is a good visualization of Googles income statement here

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/xjbpfo/oc_...

looks you are about right

I'm surprised that a court-proven antitrust violator Microsoft would speak so openly about abusing it's dominant position in a different business to finance dumping a different product at low price to destroy a competitor.

I was surprised as well for the same reason.. but then I thought about how Google has directly attacked Office, Windows, and Windows Mobile in a pretty similar way.

Like google was being a saint to Microsoft with Chrome and their web properties on Windows Phone.

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