Google, Mighty Now, but Not Forever | Hacker News Reader

Google, Mighty Now, but Not Forever

nytimes.com

28 pointscot6mur328 comments

This article is pretty bad, based entirely on some analyst who says "Google doesn’t create immersive experiences that you get lost in", whatever that means, and some really tenuous comparisons to other companies.

The hilarious thing is that this was only written in February and this analyst's view of Microsoft's impending obsolescence is already trending in a radically opposite direction. Shows exactly why lines like

> Even Microsoft — the once unbeatable, declared monopolist of personal computing software — has struggled to stay relevant in the shift from desktop to mobile devices, even as it has continued to pump out billions in profits.

are so completely worthless as predictors of anything.

I find the comparison compelling, but if you want to criticize it, it's because Microsoft _has_ managed to diversify more than it is given credit for, so that today it has something like 15 separate $1bn+ annual revenue businesses.

But one doesn't need to diversify to be successful. Apple is working well with few products.

The comparison with Microsoft works well at the research level. Microsoft's research led to a tablet as a early as 2001, but without the proper vision, was not able to turn it into a viable product until Apple ate its lunch. Both Microsoft and Google are lacking visionaries to work towards new possibilities, rather than just new technologies.

> I find the comparison compelling, but if you want to criticize it, it's because Microsoft _has_ managed to diversify more than it is given credit for

Actually I would criticize it as anyone using a hugely successful company as a cautionary tale should have more to back themselves up than the gut instinct of two tech bloggers, because clearly it could turn around as quickly as they are claiming Google is going the other way.

If in fact instinctive feelings on which companies are hot right now are so fickle...maybe not write entire articles based entirely on them?

> "Google doesn’t create immersive experiences that you get lost in", whatever that means,

I read that as "Google doesn't create immersive experiences that you get lost in, like all of the 1999-era search engines with cluttered, spammy front pages that it completely dominated then and has no reason to emulate now."

A) 20% growth in revenue per year is not "flattening out". It's massively exponential growth. B) Google is at the cutting edge of robotics and computer vision. I'd say they are in an excellent position to cash in on the next big market.

Personally, I don't understand this obsession with making money from research. IMHO research should be primarily about exploration and discovery, never about products or money. Why can't you just invest a part of your profits for the express purpose of just doing something interesting? If along the way, that interesting idea manages to be made into a product, then sure go do that, otherwise, you just contributed something interesting to the human knowledge pool.

I guess at some level merely the existence of money minded people offends my sensibilities. :)

Because Google is a publicly traded company and has a fiduciary obligation to put its resources to use making many for its shareholders. It's apparently pretty hard to actually succeed at making a lawsuit for breach of fiduciary duty stick, but waste is one of the valid reasons for which one can bring such a suit. They can do outlandish research, but there has to at least be a glimmer of rationalization for how the thing could make them money eventually.

It seems perhaps the NY Times has it out for Google recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612129

It's Google I/O week.

These articles are just a more verbose version of "You wouldn't believe these 10 things about Google" click-bait.

They literally released these articles the day before I/O, to ride the keyword search wave from whatever is announced.

Actually I think it's just this author. He seems to just write tech articles about "sure X seems successful now, but maybe it's about to lose everything!"

On a long enough timescale, he's right every time :)

What is the biggest market in the world?

Energy and Cars...

Google is not aiming at brand advertising. They are aiming at becoming an essential company for physical cars in the future, like Apple became with phones in the past.

Lots of companies would love to "sink" growing 19 percent in profits per year as a big company.

It is of great help to have Captain obvious tell us that because the world is finite, all companies growth must stop some day, specially big ones.

Previous NY Times articles:

Ford, mighty now, but not forever. GE, mighty now, but not forever. Microsoft, mighty now, but not forever.

Upcoming NY Times articles:

Apple, mighty now, but not forever.

The New York Times: mighty now, but not forever.

Farhad Manjo using Ben Thompson analysis, what could be more impartial?

Mostly unrelated: I was surprised by how poorly drawn the accompanying android-with-a-cane illustration was. I understand that minimalism is a style unto itself, and intentionally poor drawing (as if in MS Paint) can be used to imply other things...but this just seemed amateurish, as if the NYT couldn't afford a decent illustrator.

Maybe the image was blown up larger than what's in the print version? The illustrator's style seems to look better in the smaller format.

https://www.google.com/search?q=stuart+goldenberg+illustrati...

If you look up the artist you'll note his previous illustrations are mostly crudely drawn comics. I suppose that is the charm.

Is it just me or is the central premise here: "Google is going to miss out on the future, because the future is advertising of the past" ? (e.g. old media style brand or "lifestyle" advertising)

Which is not to say that the end (headline) result isn't likely. No company dominates and continues to lead and grow in every market it plays in, ad infinitum. I just don't think a back to the future on display ads is going to be their undoing. Some feel there's a bubble in display and facebook ads happening right now anyway.

The idea that advertising will survive in a world with even weak intelligence is amusing to me. The second a user has a digital representative that can collect enough data to make informed decisions and gather data on various products and has a modicum of data on what their human actually needs advertising depts will be replaced with far more service oriented equivalents that don't try to exploit things like habit formation to get people to buy products they don't need.

You're assuming the intelligence will be independent and not owned by the advertisers.

That may happen eventually, and I'd be surprised if commodified IQ enhancement with reasoning skills wasn't available within - say - 10-15 years.

But there has to be a mainframe-like stage before then, because the first versions of the technology will be industrial (Watson++), not domestic.

Google are well placed to be big players at that stage. More speculatively, so are Amazon and Facebook.

MS are maybe half-way to thinking that far ahead. Apple don't seem to be, because they're too fixated on shiny trinkets now and not on long-term strategy. (Siri was a creditable v0.1 attempt but doesn't seem to have improved at all since release. Watch is - to be polite - not a player in this market.)

But even after that stage, how can you be sure that a commodified agent won't be acting in the interests of its creators/sellers/sponsors instead of its owner?

I would like to argue that if companies manipulate agents that people are supposed to trust deeply then they will rapidly loose customers. At an individual level I'm worried this wouldn't happen, but the massive losses the US tech sector has suffered following Snowden give me hope that we won't just roll over. At the end of the day my hope is that something akin to HIPPA (bad example I know) will be put in place to protect data that is shared/collected by a personal digital agent.

Advertising will evolve slightly -- to manipulate your AI agent's decisions, sort of like SEO today.

I have had a talk with a friend of mine about this. The current system doesn't allow a Company to be around very long if it doesn't show any growth.

This is kind of sad. I think this is where most company will start making shady decisions to improve growth.

Is this true though? Most big companies (that have been around for very long) start giving out dividends to their shareholders. This becomes a nice but relatively safe source of income that many people prefer over risky companies - that will either skyrocket or crash-n-burn.

Not one, but two anti-Google articles on NYT today? Interesting.

It is not from today, it is from February

Interesting advertizing industry trend based analysis of Google's and Facebook's financials of late and some future projections - quite informative.

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