What evidence is there that Google would be able to out compete nvidia on AI hardware?
I don’t think they will exist in 10 years.
Their search products have actually gotten worse with AI. Google Images running just off basic image recognition (as in is this the same image) and the context of where they found it was far superior at identifying what an image is than ML Google Image.
The OG version could identify a frame from a movie and provide higher res versions. The ML version goes “errr looks like a woman on a street, here are random photos of unrelated women on unrelated streets with maybe a similar color scheme” close to useless why would anyone want that. Yandex Image search blows it out of the water simply by being Google Image Search from a decade ago
The overall theme is that product is no longer the focus, but rather navel-gazing - that’s to say, their internal world no longer aligns with the external world, and that is a fundamentally dangerous place for a business.
Businesses fail. google will likely still exist, but alphabet, I don’t see a future for - just a gradual withering followed by a collapse and disintegration into myriad properties in a fire sale. They are brittle, overburdened by unity of disparity, culturally adrift, and they aren’t taking risks any more. Inertia will keep it all going for a while, but not forever.
Sure, I may be wrong, but I do put my money where my mouth is, and I am right more often than not.
I see a lot of hate for alphabet on HN. It seems very emotional. I think people feel personally betrayed by thier bad behaviours because they were 'supposed to be better'.
The thing is, there are a lot of companies you can hate. Exon, mcdonalds, blackrock, even Microsoft, there are people who are very mad at these companies.
That's not an argument that the company is doomed. If you are really putting your money where your mouth is (what shorting google?) Then I hope you have a better reasoning as to why they will fail not just eventually but this year.
None of the companies you list are likely to collapse soon, as they remain focussed on their various missions, and have a unity of purpose. Out of all of them, I think Microsoft is the most likely to fail, as they are likely to be blindsided when the user-focussed desktop OS era ends. Their diversification efforts have been a mixed bag, and without windows, they are far, far less significant.
What I do look at is sentiment analysis - what other people feel and think about businesses, as that drives the market.
No, I don’t short, as just buying equities which are beginning significant growth is just as effective and doesn’t drive demise - I held goog for nearly 20 years, and sold off late ‘21, as I think they’ve peaked, and anything from here on is speculative froth.
You’ll note I keep saying “I think”, rather than making statements of fact - because this is purely what I think - I am not a Sybil.
You seem to have missed this:
>> They are brittle, overburdened by unity of disparity, culturally adrift, and they aren’t taking risks any more.
That might have been a reasonable assessment back in Balmer’s era. But what you saying has already happened years ago…
They have mostly reinvented themselves since then. Enterprise/office isn’t going anywhere. Xbox if fine too. And there is a lot of growth in their cloud/etc. business.
IMHO out of Google, Amazon & Facebook, Microsoft seems to be the least dysfunctional and and general best positioned one to be successful in the future.
My perception is that Google split into a number of focussed business units when they became Alphabet, with the Google component being execution focussed and the more speculative stuff spun out into other group companies like deepmind, waymo, etc. That's why the Google unit stopped doing nice incubator projects that we were all excited about.
From what I've seen, this cash cow execution business unit has been fairly effective - in particular they've done a good job of entering the cloud market space producing a differentiated product that is penetrating their target customers. They have not been able to compete with Microsofts excelent and deeply embedded IT sales capability, so they've done well to go after people with big problems that other vendors more civillian offerings are not so great for. They are currently the first choice platform for AI training for instance.
I'd contrast this to Facebook who seem to be trying to become a deep tech VR hardware vendor in the same business unit as their cash cow entertainemet and advertising business which has confused investors and probably distracted their focus.
We can see that Google has innovated. For instance, a lot of Tela's stock price is based on the idea that they are going to run autonomous taxis, and instead of owning cars we will just hail a Tesla when we need one. Telsa does not run autonomous taxis, but you can ride a Google Waymo taxi today in Pheonix, and they are running autonmous trucks which is a big industry Tesla aren't even attempting yet. They are doing a lot in medicine and medical devices. This seems a lot more diversified and innovative than other companies - it's just not as visible to the HN community as an RSS reader or some other internet thing we care about.
We can also say that... on the AI thing, I think it's very early days. Microsoft have a shakey looking deal with the first mover, but Alphabet and Facebook have the advantage of actually using AI extensively in their real buisnesses and may be able to deliver product market fit better. Time will tell.
On the stocks front, I agree with your overall thesis - I think it's harder for these conglomerates to grow than a new company just because they are already giants in their niche and even adding a new niche generates less growth in percentage terms than for a smaller company starting from a lower number. I just wouldn't actually bet against google as much as I would some of the others.
We can both give the money to a mutually trusted third party now.
gmail is a freebie! the core product is how they index your messages to create an anonymous profile that they will then offer on reverse bid to advertisers when you do a search or visits an AdWords site.
Do you just have more email now?
E.g. what’s possible with embedding where the query terms are matched with similar messages that mean the same thing.