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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

These blog posts eulogizing Google's culture death sidestep the elephant in the room; Google sells ads. Nothing else they produce makes money. Google Search didn't magically get dumber, they simply made a business decision to favor SEO-optimized junk sites, many of which run Google Ads.

There's an outdated saying that goes, "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"

If Google was hiring only the best and brightest, surely they could have come up with something in 25 years besides ads that made money and could stand on its own two feet. Instead, there is:

- Youtube (unprofitable 18 years running)

- Android (dead in the water w/o Samsung)

- Google Cloud Platform

- Google Workspace

- hundreds of smaller projects that were sunset

For all the non-Ads people lamenting the end of the good ol' days, has there been any reflection from them on the fact that all the cool projects they worked on weren't profitable at all?

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Curious on your Android would be dead without Samsung comment.

I know the US is skewed towards iOS, but Android is the #1 mobile OS, presumably due to cheap devices.

Is there a stat showing Samsung is largest manufacturer? I found this, but company market cap != number of devices obviously

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/16-biggest-smartphone-compani...

It looks like there are 20+ manufacturers in the Open Handset Alliance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Handset_Alliance

The OHA has about as much relevance as the League of Nations did in the 1930s.

Samsung makes screens, SOCs, storage and memory. They put Android into every conceivable form factor and distributed them in every country on earth at every price point. That is why Android suceeded.

Google's original Android partners were HTC and Motorola, neither of whom ever had the scale to compete with Apple. Google even acquired Motorola, but spun it off as they had no idea how to run a phone business.

There was a time when it felt like HTC made every smartphone. Of course, that was very early in the history of smartphones, and mostly because HTC phones were often not branded as such, so they were almost like the mystery manufacturer behind everything.

Would very much like even a fraction of these Google eulogies to have a retrospective on the fall of HTC.

HTC dominated the Windows Mobile 6.1 phones, which was a small market compared to Nokia and Blackberry.

As an independent OEM, they were selected by Google to build the G1, the first Android phone. But the touch smartphone market at the time was only in the millions. That's the scale HTC could handle.

When the market started exploding in 2010 onwards, HTC couldn't scale up, so Samsung, LG and Huawei took advantage.

Yeah, HTC's brief dominance as the Android OEM only lasted until 2012-2013 or so. So a four or five year run, followed by a few notable collaborations with Google, the Nexus 9 and the Pixel.

there was an article earlier this week talking about Apple overtaking Samsung for the first time that has some good numbers

https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-overtakes-samsung-t...

Who said YouTube is unprofitable? They brought in 30B last year - if they’re unprofitable it’s because of accounting magic to offset other parts of the business.

Unprofitable without ads.

Of course. That's the business model, together with Premium.

I know ads are their behemoth, but aren’t some of the other groups you listed large enough to be considered huge companies in their own right? You always hear about products getting shut down at google because they “only” make $100M a year in profit or whatever. They may not be as successful as ads, but they sure are successful.

(… at least until they get shut down for not being as successful as ads)

Yes, Youtube for example could certainly be spun off into its own company. But Google (or is it Alphabet?) has always resisted this. We do know that YT is not profitable, so I imagine they can't spin it off and charge market rates for GCP hosting.

Are they unprofitable like amazon was for a long time, where there’s a switch laying around somewhere they could choose to flip, or is it the other kind?

They hired smart people not to monetize their genius, but to tarpit it: to eliminate the small chance that one of them might work at a startup and build something that threatened Google's cash mashine.

> all the cool projects they worked on weren't profitable at all?

Not only were they not profitable they wouldn't even get funded if not for the money printer of Ads business.

Monetization aside. They have produced or augmented some of the most widely used products

Google keeps YouTube for its massive dataset to train its (unsuccessful) multi-modal language models.

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