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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

The simpler explanation is that Google mismanages its pay-per-use consumer-facing products. Consider Google One and YouTube Premium are also overpriced, and everyone tells them so.

It's obviously a mistake to charge more than Uber or Lyft, it's crazy obvious, like mind meltingly obvious. Sometimes it's just the obvious thing. Google's problem is that its management is so bad, it doesn't understand: just because something happens (paying more for rides) doesn't mean it makes sense. After all taxis are more expensive sometimes, and people pay for them, and where's the article that litigates all the dumb reasons people give for doing that?

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"One of the most valuable companies on the planet is mismanaging its products"

see the issue with that assertion?

Yeah… on the other hand I don’t let the stock market do all my thinking for me. As an aside, I thought /r/superstonk was a parody subreddit.

Google mismanages an enormous number of things. Users, Customers, Products, Teams, Talent. You can observe this in your interactions with Google/Alphabet and in ex-googler post-mortems.

They are amazingly valuable as a stock, as a business and as a collection of talent. That doesn’t entirely excuse failures of vision and leadership, let alone pricing.

Edit: That said, I am inclined to believe that Alphabet pricing likely better reflects reality. The others have some bad habits.

Swinging back around again, the notion of “failures of vision” still on my mind.

Talk about overloaded. The two framings I was thinking of was first from an engineering & design perspective, but also second from an alignment perspective.

Some people recoil in horror when they look upon what Elon has done, but what a multinational corporation - one that has become engrained in daily life - can do when aligned to anything but the dollar is astonishing. Ironically it’s not something money can buy.

They do poorly when you isolate some product, but if you look at their execution relative to their scale and number of employees, its exceptional. You have to see thats its all relative, google is a good big company.

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