Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dekhn | Hacker News Reader

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Are you suggesting that Google fire all the engineers who work on Cloud? That would... be a very interesting business decision, likely closing any door for them working with enterprise in the future.

Here's a few more realistic changes that Alphabet could make: - shut down X - shut down Verily - sell calico or shut it down if no buyers - sell Fiber or shut it down if no buyers - shut down Intrinsic, Wing, and all the other X spinoffs - make Cloud be its own Alphabet company with Kurian as an actual CEO

That would show Wall Street that GOogle is really serious about not wasting money on crazy ideas. That would boost the price (along with reducing costs) giving them some runway. I think it would be a shame if Waymo was shut down but it has a long, long way to being highly profitable.

It looks like Alphabet wants to sell Verily or spin it out of the Alphabet family entirely (after decoupling Verily's infrastructure from Google's) but nobody wants to buy it.

I was suggesting that they fire all the engineers that work on things that don't make money. It was only last quarter that Cloud actually made a profit. That said, I think you make a reasonable restructuring case; Now you just have to figure out how to get leadership to buy in and execute on that plan. In my experience two things work against that.

1) If it isn't their idea that don't believe it will do any good and could not possibly be the "right" thing to do.

2) If they don't have a job after it happens, they will work behind the scenes to sabotage attempts to make it happen.

You can work around those, but you need "existential risk" level energy to create that sort of change in a company.

But Google seems to be doing decently well compared to blekko and Watson?

That it is, but a more apt comparison would be Duck Duck Go which was a contemporary of Blekko and definitely out performed relative to Blekko's success. DDG still going strong and even buying TV ads, so yeah.

That said, how Blekko and Watson ended up squandering good technology in search of something else is also an interesting learning experience/tale.

I agree with everything you are saying, but the stock price is up 6x over the last 10 years and revenue is still growing 13% a year so nobody at google is going to listen to any of this.

Basically ad dollars have continued to transition from old media to digital media over the last decade+ and that mass migration has created enough revenue to cover up all of Google's core problems.

The reality is that this firehose of money is what allowed those core problems to grow & fester. That and the practice of using TVCs for as much as possible, to the point where nearly every process that's documented is outsourced, and often no one inside really understands how things work anymore.

Here here! Google needs to trim the fat, desperately! They need to eliminate all of their non revenue generating departments, ban all internal discussion forums and such that aren't laser focused on the job at hand. Cut 30-40% of all engineers, and get rid of the free food and other benefits. Install vending machines and charge for meals at their cafeterias, run them like any other business and make a profit. Get rid of free employee health benefits, make the employees pay for them. And for god sake get rid of that ridiculous swimming pool! Anything that isn't directly in the service of delivering value for shareholders needs to be done away with, starting with those hair-brained cash burning crazy X projects.

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