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In a way this seems like an admission of the failure of the "Alphabet" thing. The idea behind that originally was that all of these other projects were going to
by endorphone 7y ago
In a way this seems like an admission of the failure of the "Alphabet" thing. The idea behind that originally was that all of these other projects were going to become so significant that it wouldn't make sense to have them or their management coupled with Google.
But a half-decade later, it's still 99.9% Google, so just double-up the Google guy to lead both tiers. Same as it ever was.
- dannypgh 7y agoI don't think it was mostly motivated by management separation, as much as it was desire to break out revenue and expenses by unit. And this is unchanged.
- koheripbal 7y agoYou can do that even within a company. You certainly dont need separate share classes.
- dannypgh 7y agoYou're conflating a lot of things here. GOOG class A versus C (GOOG vs GOOGL) dates to a 2014 restructuring of ownership, whereas the Alphabet reorg was in 2015. Can you break out revenue in a single company? Sure. But you can also easily do it with the structure Alphabet adopted. And, this structure also lends itself to easier valuations of entire units, useful if acquisition of a unit is something being considered.
- dickeytk 7y agoI think Waymo still has a solid shot
- celeritascelery 7y agoHow much money is waymo making?
- rreichman 7y agopeople asked the same thing about facebook in 2008
- anonytrary 7y agoFacebook in 2008 had a singularity of users, so people were more comfortable with the answer.
- celeritascelery 7y agoFacebook was started by one college kid 4 years prior. Waymo has had the resources of one of the largest companies in the world for the last 10 years.
- Ragib_Zaman 7y agoAnd their core goal of truly autonomous vehicles is a technical challenge that at this point seems like it will take at least several years more than what they originally thought 3 years ago. Their situation is not similar to FB in 2008 at all.
- chrischen 7y agoEven if they overcome this the bigger question is whether the market opportunity is worth the R&D costs, and whether or not bulky self driving vehicles are the best and most lucrative solution to mass transit.
- kendallpark 7y agoSpeaking of market opportunity, are there SDVs being tested in outside of California and Arizona? The rest of the US gets its fair share of rain, snow, and ice. Even if the Bay Area can manage self-driving cars, when would we expect a rollout in places like Minneapolis or Boston?
- 7y ago
- anonytrary 7y agoEven if your observation is correct, it's not a bad thing. A failed experiment is hardly a failure. I doubt the legal border between Alphabet and Google won't prove useful in the future.
- numbsafari 7y agoRemoving the “firewall” between Google and Google Health will prove to have been a big mistake. They should have stayed separate under Alphabet.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- headmelted 7y agoYup. Congress is already whispering about the Ascension deal and how it affects the Fitbit buyout with regards to them intervening.
- partingshots 7y agoWhat “Ascension deal” are you talking about? Also, do you have a source for what you’re saying?
- headmelted 7y agohttps://theconversation.com/the-tricky-ethics-of-googles-project-nightingale-an-effort-to-learn-from-millions-of-health-records-127219 https://theconversation.com/the-tricky-ethics-of-googles-pro...
- davidwihl 7y agokeeping it as separate entities meant that useful data could not be shared. Under one org, more data can be safely shared while respecting user privacy.
- zaarn 7y agoExcept Google doesn't respect privacy.
- linza 7y agoI doubt think this is accurate. Google might not respect the desire for an open internet without ads and no single large player. But i believe they fully respect their users privacy, comply with most of the law around privacy already, and have the strong desire to fully comply with it in the future. Maybe I'm naive that way. But painting them as not respecting privacy at all is a bit blunt and not nuanced enough.
- slowenough 7y agonot that I know anything but it seems like the decision was complex both to create the Alphabet and now to kind of merge it under one CEO. I think some of the reasons could be they no longer see a risk of anti Monopoly regulation targeting them so they don't need to keep everything so divided. they genuinely want to give Sundar a go. They need a process to gradually fade out The original founders, but also importantly ensure those founders isolate their risk from any future missteps the companies take, and vice versa. maybe the two co-founders were simply getting in the way.
- taneq 7y agoWhat do you mean, "failure"? Google hasn't been hit with an antitrust lawsuit which makes it an unmitigated success!
- Mikeb85 7y agoIt's not an admission of failure. Two businessmen created one of the most successful, influencial businesses ever and are passing the torch. They're rich AF and probably want to retire.
- fjrufjfjfu 7y agoI don't know man. Doesn't that sound a little bit suspicious? If you were to create Google why would you just peace out? Look at Bill Gates. He still wants to do things but the google founders are all MIA. How do guys like that just lose all ambition and disappear?
- kelnos 7y agoIf I had created Google I would have peaced out looooong ago. Sure, I wouldn't disappear completely, but I'd work on low-stress things where I have a lot of free time and don't have so much responsibility under me.
- alexis_fr 7y ago> low-stress things where I have a lot of free time and don’t have so much res... Or children ;) John Lennon famously quit music for 5 years to raise his second child, after failing his first marriage.
- kelnos 7y agoChildren... low-stress things... hmm, you seem to have different tastes than I do ;)
- mac_was 7y agoCreate Google first and we will all see :-)
- kelnos 7y agoI'm looking at early retirement in the next year or two. I'm certainly not anywhere near as financially successful as Brin or Page or Pichai, and I doubt I've put in as much stressful work as they have, but I've done ok for myself, and I'm looking forward to doing literally anything I want with my time, without having to answer to anyone, whether it's a boss, investors, or board of directors. I guess only time will tell how much I like this arrangement, but I'm pretty optimistic about it, and am tired of hearing the usual "oh but you'll be bored and want to work again" tropes. There's a lot more to life than work...
- hdhgzwhegh 7y agoAlphabet was always mostly just a shell game for manipulating headlines about failing or political projects away from Google.
- sidcool 7y agoAnyone who thinks Google is a failure should reconsider. They have had their share of bad decisions, but nothing has yet challenged their dominance. They keep spreading to other areas of tech. They may not dominate the AlphaBets, but they sure attract attention and investment.
- mhartl 7y agoMy read is that the parent commenter isn’t saying that Google is a failure, but rather that the “Alphabet” branding was a failure.
- jacquesm 7y agoI don't know any other company that people love to hate. A large number of those will flee Google in droves when/if a viable alternative presents itself. Their lock-in on email and dominance in search may be enough of a moat to last forever but if your users (paying and free) hate you then you are on borrowed time.
- sverhagen 7y agoFacebook too. I hate both with a similar passion. But I'm in tech and thanks to HN I have a vague idea how the sausage is made. Do regular users share our dislike of these companies? If not, which is what I suspect, this fleeing will be mostly nonexistent.
- SuoDuanDao 7y agoI think generally, people do hate both, though neither as much as Twitter. Personally I feel most strongly about Google, because I really believed the marketing back in the day. Took me a long time to get disillusioned, and when I did I felt all the worse for having been a supporter for so long.
- magduf 7y agoWhy would anyone hate Twitter? I mean, I don't care for it either, but it doesn't really affect me because I simply don't use it. I don't have an account, and really don't pay attention to it, except for all the "tweets" from Trump in the news. Facebook is different. It's pretty hard to avoid using Facebook without being an outcast in a way, if all your friends and family are on there and they use it to communicate, schedule events, etc. There's also Facebook Marketplace which seems to have taken over for Craigslist for selling stuff locally. I'm one of those people who has an account there, but never actually posts anything, but I keep it because I have a few people who insist on using it to communicate; I've met lots of people like this. Twitter just isn't like this at all. I think it's dumb, but it's easy to ignore.
- raverbashing 7y agoSundar seems to be turning into Google's Ballmer, for better and for worse. The lack of direction, apart from the bigger projects is noticeable.
- thetruthseeker1 7y agoHow? Apples and Oranges comparison
- thu2111 7y agoLack of any obvious vision or ideas: a safe pair of hands. The similarities are there, and not just Sundar/Ballmer but Sundar/Ballmer/Cook. It seems visionary CEOs like to appoint non-visionary successors. Someone who won't make big changes to their baby.
- nostrademons 7y agohttps://a16z.com/2010/12/16/ones-and-twos/ https://a16z.com/2010/12/16/ones-and-twos/ This is often inherent in the organizational structure of big companies. To the extent that there are visionaries in a big company, they're usually not anywhere on the executive team, or even anywhere that the CEO comes in direct contact with. If they were, they'd clash with the CEO's vision, which first of all would be confusing and inefficient for the organization and second is a power contest the CEO would win. So if the board wants to appoint a visionary from within, they usually need to reach several levels down in the org hierarchy, to someone who's run an innovative division semi-independently but been protected from overall company politics. If they elevate this person to CEO, everyone above them in the org chart will quit, as they've now been passed over for the top job.
- thu2111 7y agoGreat link, thanks. I think you and a16z must be exactly right about it.
- londons_explore 7y agoThe original reason was that smart people like career progression. Money alone isn't enough to keep them - they want something good on their business cards. Otherwise some will leave to become CEO of another company. By making a group of companies, you can have many CEO's, more directors, more VP's, etc. and therefore keep hold of more smart people who are after external recognition more than money.
- tomp 7y agoYou could easily do that by having sub-companies of Google instead of sub-companies of Alphabet.
- mrec 7y agoCareerist people like career progression. I think that's largely orthogonal to smarts or lack thereof. I doubt Einstein cared very much what was on his business card. Patrick Bateman certainly did.
- mstade 7y agoIn the case of the latter the shade and quality of the paper might've been even more important than what's printed on it. ;o)
- HelloMcFly 7y agoI doubt Einstein cared what was on his business card, but I'm sure he cared very much about being in the right career position to do the work that interested him, and to have the ability to influence his work and others.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> The idea behind that originally was that all of these other projects were going to become so significant that it wouldn't make sense to have them or their management coupled with Google. No, the idea was that they were high risk speculative efforts and that it didn't make sense to have their branding mixed up with Google, which is a stable, established industry leader.
- koheripbal 7y agoThat's a semantic distinction. All major corporations have highly speculative projects that they aren't certain will succeed. With (relatively) minor investments most don't form an umbrella corporation to distinguish them. In this case, I dont see anything else coming out of non-Google alphabet of meaningful significance, and this org change kind of highlights that. In my personal opinion, the Google founders probably still DO have some radical plans, but I bet with the increased scrutiny in Congress and abroad they are thinking the Google vrand is more of a liability than an asset.
- auiya 7y ago> I dont see anything else coming out of non-Google alphabet of meaningful significance YouTube. But in general I agree with you.
- derp_dee_derp 7y agoYouTube was pre alphabet, was a purchased acquisition under the Google umbrella, and didn't "come out of non-google alphabet"
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jbms 7y agoYouTube is part of the Google division of Alphabet as it makes money primarily from advertising.
- hordeallergy 7y ago
- C14L 7y ago> still 99.9% Google Maybe they should just rename the whole thing to "AdWords" then...
- golemotron 7y agoThe reason reason is that antitrust is coming. Larry and Sergey are stepping out of the fire.
- snarf21 7y agoI don't think it was a failure at all. It was a hedge against slowing ad revenue growth. They didn't want the billions they spend on moonshots dirtying the books of the ad business. This was specifically to keep the stock price moving up and up. I think they should find someone new to be CEO of Alphabet so they can focus on the non ad business companies.
- surewhynat 7y agoPlus they got to change the name that appears in investment portfolios, and take the opportunity to appear at the top, since they are almost always alphabetically ordered, and at the very least they would be appear above Amazon since l comes before m, and also above Apple.
- tyre 7y ago> The idea behind that originally was that all of these other projects were going to become so significant that it wouldn't make sense to have them or their management coupled with Google. This isn't entirely true. A major consideration was fear of anti-trust litigation. If all of these are the same company/orgs/departments, then you could reasonably say that this "search company" is far too powerful. If there's a search company and a youtube company and a self-driving car company (etc.) then you can make a (specious) argument that you're not vertically and horizontally a monopoly.
- dhimes 7y agoThis was my understanding as well.
- hinkley 7y agoI'm of mixed emotions here. I am both cautious enough of Google that I've started avoiding using some of their products, and still have an opinion on how they should organize themselves that has very little to do with those feelings. I was sort of hoping Alphabet would be a spot they could stick all of the projects that aren't going to make a billion a year. I think it still makes sense to maintain projects that 'only' clear $20+ million a year in another division. That would cover a lot of projects that are getting cancelled and causing them serious PR problems (like accusations of being a group of spoiled man-children who can't be relied upon to stick with anything for longer than four years). Basically there's a lot of space to make money and products that they won't touch, and I don't think it has anything to do with Wall Street. It's just an artificial limitation they've imposed upon themselves.