16 ms·

Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

216 points by ilyaeck 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
varjag 7y ago
First the Reader, now the Alphabet.
- popup21 7y ago
  It will never stop. After they axed Reader, I stopped using anything from the G. Watching them build legit software, gain users, and then dissolve those services over and over and over again had the effect of suffocating any further curiosity towards their products. Like a Skinner mouse, they literally train you not to give a shit anymore.
  - dylan604 7y ago
    >After they axed Reader, I stopped using anything from the G I never used Reader, but did anything else come along to fill the void? I ask as I am curious on the market when G kills a product. When G kills off a product, does the rest of the world just assume that if G couldn't make it work then it must not be worth doing? I know HN readers were vocal about the death of lots of G products, but HN readers are edge cases in the grand scheme.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      There are other RSS readers but RSS as a stand-alone thing that people use (where “people” was always somewhat of a niche) has largely withered in the face of social media. Much as the tech crowd likes to complain about Reader’s Denise, it was at least in part a response to RSS’s decline not the cause.
      - dylan604 7y ago
        So you're giving G credit for recognizing the world progressing before the rest of the world realizes? Or that the users just adapted to the loss of the product? Just trying to compare G killing software to Apple killing hardware. The transition away from SCSI and ADB to things like USB/FireWire/Thunderbolt, USB-A to USB-C, etc riles the masses during the transition, but ultimately it is the better decision.
        ghaff 7y ago
        To a first approximation, the "rest of the world" never knew what RSS was. Yes, Google kills random projects that have a passionate fan base. But they're mostly not products that actually have broad mainstream appeal. I'm not really giving Google "credit" for anything. It's just that a lot of people want to identify a bogeyman in RSS's demise. But that bogeyman is really the collective us. There are still plenty of RSS feeds and at least a couple of decent clients for anyone who want to use RSS today.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        RSS has not “withered”. True very few people use it, but every site still supports rss where it makes sense.
        ghaff 7y ago
        Very few people using it seems the very definition of withering. Yes, a lot of sites and blog software etc. still default to offering RSS feeds. (Which I take advantage of from time to time and it's presumably used behind the scenes for various purposes.) But that's hardly a ringing endorsement of the role of RSS in today's world.
        scarface74 7y ago
        Why do you care if other people use it as long as it is available?
        7y ago
    - popup21 7y ago
      > did anything else come along to fill the void? Yep. I'm using ol'faithful: Mozilla Thunderbird
      - wnoise 7y ago
        Doesn't satisfy "synced history across any device".
        popup21 7y ago
        Unnecessary for my use case. I batch my news consumption in a single session.
        scarface74 7y ago
        Feedly.
    - wnoise 7y ago
      https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/
    - detaro 7y ago
      inoreader is another alternative in addition to the ones already mentioned.
tyingq 7y ago
If you're having trouble reading it: https://outline.com/pGLZ6U https://outline.com/pGLZ6U
- onreact 7y ago
  Thank you! Just what I needed. Does not work on my Firefox though as block sneaky redirects.
- bitpush 7y ago
  I dont know how what you did is legal. From https://www.outline.com/dmca.html https://www.outline.com/dmca.html Notice to Users If someone else might own the copyright to it, don't submit it. Outline is for reading pages that: you own the rights to, is in the public domain, constitutes fair use, or you have consent of the copyright holder. If we find you repeatedly submitting content that does not meet the above criteria, we will block you from using our service.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - tyingq 7y ago
    We have different views on this topic. Surely Outline is capable of taking a reasonable sample of what they are serving up, and seeing that the vast majority of it violates their terms. Throwing up a disclaimer page doesn't change that. Their policy is also contradicted by the "about" blurb on the bottom of the page "Outline is a free service for reading and annotating news articles." As far as I know, most news articles have a copyright. Also, sites that want paywalls are technically capable of doing that in a way that archive.is, outline.com, etc, can't scrape them. They don't, though, because they want the best of both worlds. Want to charge for your content? Fine, do that, but you lose exposure from search engines, HN, Facebook, etc. Curious how they are going to "block me" though. I don't have an account with Outline.
dzdt 7y ago
As usual, I like Matt Levine's take. [1] Page and Brin ran Alphabet as a highly funded system of moonshot programs with near-infinite runway to make profits, which is unusual or unique. Basically it only worked that way because Page and Brin were idealistic visionary gazillionaires who were bored of thinking about the somewhat dirty business of selling targetted ads. With a more standard corporate governance under a common CEO with the google ad business, the expectation is a more standard corporate focus on making profits from its ventures in some defined timeline. But read Levine's version; it has detail and humor and insight I can't convey in a summary! [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphabet-is-google-again https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...
- mantap 7y ago
  That seems way more idealistic somehow. More likely, with a more standard corporate governance Google will begin to rot from within. Apple certainly made more profits under Cook than Jobs, but innovation has slowed to a crawl and he has failed to diversify Apple away from having one product (instead he just added a bunch of accessory products and services). The last thing Google needs is to double down on ads, it takes 2 minutes to block them.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    It takes us two minutes to block ads. Everyone on this site is a tiny minority who finds this sort of thing easy. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
    - vrc 7y ago
      It's shockingly high. Most western countries see an average of 26% - 40% ad block rates (by pageview) across the web. Some sites skewing to an older, less tech savvy audience, see between 8% and 15%, while tech heavy sites can go as high as 92% of pageviews being ad blocked. It's actually crazy that adblock rates in developing countries like India and Indonesia can actually be much higher on average because of UC Browser adoption and high mobile web consumption. They don't care about ads and privacy though -- just saving money on their data plans from not downloading ads. Source: I was briefly a product lead for a large tech company's anti-adblocking efforts and worked with publishers and others globally to measure these rates.
melling 7y ago
Google’s attempt to be a modern day Bell Labs was the one thing that set them apart. Make a lot of money in advertising and spend some of it to invent the future. Without the second part, the entire company changes. We need another company to take the mantle: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation-and-the-bell-labs-miracle.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation...
- drawkbox 7y ago
  Looks like the product/engineering/creative focused time of Google is giving way to the metric/marketing/MBA/McKinsey people for a fully pedal to the metal push into their Ballmer phase. When will technology/product/engineering/creative companies learn that the value creation is more important than the value extraction? With value creation there is always the ability to value extract. With value extraction the focus, and little research and development or innovative value creation, eventually it stagnates and sputters. The product before the sales/marketing is key. A product of value can always be sold or marketed. You can't sell/market your way to a product. As a developer, and investor, in Google this concerns me the move away from Alphabet, moonshots and research and development. The open mode is needed just like the closed mode [1]. The open mode is where value is realized, the closed mode is where it is produced [1]. Value is created in a state of play or creativity, this is usually the first thing to go in these phase changes at a company. This happens at every company that creates immense value, eventually the research and development is hard to quantify the value so they cut and cut like Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, eventually it is just a stump and all the grace and built up value is tapped. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
  - LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
    I wish there was some paper that would quantify the dangers of this take over down into hard numbers, so that they could be used in the never ending internal civil wars of value creation vs value-usage. In a ironic way though, this life-cycle reflects what we humans go through though. We have a fragile phase, where we must find our place, develop new things, risk it all, then we settle in, apply the learned things to our conquered niche and set to full cruise mode, to produce turtles eggs, to repeat the cycle. So if a society wants to propell the exploration onwards, there are two ways. Eternal youth, as in never growing fully up, always replace aging elements with new rebelious and clueless young elements. The other, is acclerate the aging &reproduction period. For example allow for Managers, who can proof that there company is stagnant- has a stranglehold on a market, to split a sub-department from the main company (including IP) and thus accelerate the new turtle baby phase.
jfoster 7y ago
Any investor in Alphabet for the long term would hope this isn't the case. It also doesn't make sense at a time when some of their moonshots are looking as though they could pay off. (Eg. Waymo) That said, it makes sense from the Page/Brin perspective, perhaps. It's a lot more difficult to 10x a company that's already worth $Y billion. Perhaps better to start the ventures separately in a way that is more exciting to investors.
- petra 7y ago
  The problem is funding: let's say funding a self-driving project takes $5B-$10B and 15 years, until it starts to become a real, scalable business. And that's probably optimistic. Who will fund that ? I wonder if Google was too ambitious. Maybe if they focused all the effort on making trucks that could only ride the highway safely, in limited conditions, they would have had a working business by now.
  - xyzzyz 7y ago
    Softbank has dumped $10B in WeWork, a glorified office rental company. If you think there are no investors willing to put $10B in self driving cars, you might still be living in 2005.
    - petra 7y ago
      Wow man, $10B into wework ? That's really fucked up. And you're right, about self driving cars and that i'm still living in 2005 :)
- MarkMc 7y ago
  I've been a Google shareholder for more than 10 years, and I would love it if Alphabet spun off Waymo so I could dump my Waymo stock. My view is that the market undervalues Google and overvalues Waymo but unfortunately Mr Page and Mr Brin force me to invest in both.
  - repsilat 7y ago
buboard 7y ago
sounds like a good time for a "traitorous 8" group from google's vast AI teams to jump out of advertising and start monetizing their plans.
tim333 7y ago
>Placing the head of Google, which contributes more than 99% of Alphabet’s sales, at the helm of it could call into question the entire purpose of Alphabet I think this gives a false impression of the value of the non Google bits of Alphabet Currently the market cap of Alphabet is $924bn and "Waymo is worth about $105 billion" (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-27/waymo-valuation-slashed-on-autonomous-vehicle-tech-delays https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-27/waymo-val...) which would make that 11% of the valuation and probably other bits of other bets are worth something too.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- endorphone 7y ago
  The market cap of Waymo is $0 because it has no market cap. [edit: note that the parent comment originally spoke to the `market cap' of Waymo before an edit, giving context to this reply] An analyst independently made up a number, likely to justify an outsized Google target number. There have been rumors that Google will seek outside investments in Waymo that might legitimize some valuation, but they haven't. And for now Waymo's revenue is estimated to be $5M. While Google's revenue is about $160,000M. So I don't think they're giving a false impression of anything. Google has been pouring enormous sums of Adword cash into Waymo and it's still a stuttering business ten years later.
  - drawkbox 7y ago
    Waymo is in the value creation phase, business/marketing/analysts may not value it as much but there is a goldmine under it. Waymo may not be a revenue behemoth currently but there is immense value there not only to self-driving but to maps improvement and more. I am not a fan of software patents but they have surpassed Toyota in patents [1] and there are hundreds of patents from Waymo [2]. Everyday in Arizona Waymo vehicles you see them on every block. The value extractors may not like not being able to extract value yet, but the product, research and value creation is very high and contributes today to improving Google product offerings outside of Waymo such as Maps [3]. Waymo has waymo value than is being extracted because it is still emerging from the product value creation nebula that business/marketing/analysts can't see and don't value as much as product/engineering/creative people. [1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-trends/Google-s-Waymo-unseats-Toyota-as-automated-driving-patent-king https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-trends/Google-s-Wa... [2] https://patents.justia.com/assignee/waymo-llc https://patents.justia.com/assignee/waymo-llc [3] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-09/waymo-mapping-los-angeles-driverless-taxis https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-09/waymo-mapp...
irrational 7y ago
The fact that you linked to an amp version of the page, instead of the real link, is deeply disturbing to me. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphabet-is-google-again https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...
- tssva 7y ago
  And I was very appreciative of the AMP version being posted. It made for a much better mobile viewing experience than the typical non-AMP experience from Bloomberg.
  - smt88 7y ago
    A forced redesign, in this case motivated by AMP, is what gave you that better mobile experience. It is not something inherent to AMP, and in other ways AMP is incredibly harmful. Most mobile browsers now have "reading mode" anyway.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      The selling point of AMP is that it's a mobile-friendly web component framework. If someone uses AMP for their website, and as a result you get a better mobile experience, it's hard to see how that's not inherent to AMP.
      - MereInterest 7y ago
        I turn on the faucet and fill a glass of water. Taking a drink from the glass, I feel less thirsty. If someone turns on a faucet, and as a result feels less thirsty, then that that thirst-removal must be inherent to turning on a faucet, right? This is obviously silly, but follows the same reasoning that you have stated. Drinking water reduces thirst, not running water from a faucet. Redesigning a website to be less bloated results in a better mobile experience, not designing around AMP. It is possible to redesign a website without using AMP. Causation does not imply necessity.
stevespang 7y ago
PAYWALL.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
If they had assigned a new CEO for Google it could of not looked this way. However this looks bad especially when you hear "We the People" talk about how some of these tech giants need to be broken up. This is not going to help them. I wonder who the next Bell will be.[0] [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
- basch 7y ago
  why is it assumed they wont appoint a new Google CEO in the next 6 months to a year?
  - tyingq 7y ago
    If I were Sundar Pichai, I'd probably view being the Alphabet Chief, and not the Google Chief, as a downgrade from just being the Google Chief. That was fine for Larry and Sergey with their founder's stock and deliberate desire to be somewhat disconnected. I don't think Sundar has either of those.
    - giancarlostoro 7y ago
      Unless the purpose is to just steer Alphabet into a new direction. But yeah I had not thought of that to be honest.
    - basch 7y ago
      IF his forte is operations, more Ballmer and Cook to a visionary, it makes sense. Put a new visionary in charge of Google, and start focusing on turning the other bets into self sustaining companies. Maybe split google up a bit too, make CGP its own bet. You could even make the case for Youtube, Nest/Pixel, Doubleclick, maybe Android. Refocus google on being an information sorting and calling tool, whether that be search, shopping, maps, gmail, photos. Google could benefit a bit from the Bezos API memo AND a bit from the Jobsesque "singular vision not kitchen sink of requested features" refinement. Paring google down and giving sects more singular visions, while encouraging cohesiveness might need a Bain Capital type chopman, but after that is said and done, Alphabet Chief should be more important than Google Chief. Pichai's job should be demarcing responsibility and org chart, giving focus.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
m23khan 7y ago
I wonder if Google’s project Sidewalk Labs in Toronto would be affected as well.
crazygringo 7y ago
It has always seemed strange to me that Google become part of Alphabet, instead of vice-versa. It seems like a much more honest approach would always have been for Google to be one company... for Alphabet to be a separate one... and for, say, Google to own 33% of Alphabet, for Larry and Sergei personally to own another 33%, and outside investors to own the rest and be the ones principally determining its own, separate valuation.
- jorblumesea 7y ago
  Given that Alphabet was basically Larry and Seigei's personal pet projects and the goal was for Google to fund these projects, it's easier to funnel money up instead of out.
  - puranjay 7y ago
    Wasn't YouTube a separate entity under Alphabet, and not a part of Google? That alone would be a $100B company
    - skinnymuch 7y ago
      It would be. But it doesn’t make money. Someone has to pay for it still.
      - crazygringo 7y ago
        Do you have a source for that? All I can find is that, as of 2019, nobody knows [1]. (Unfortunately I can't read the full paywalled content.) Also, it might not be profitable but could still be break-even. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/ok-google-hows-youtube-doing-11556896078 https://www.wsj.com/articles/ok-google-hows-youtube-doing-11...
        skinnymuch 7y ago
        Nope no source. I’ve tried looking as well. I assume since it costs so much in infrastructure that Google lends for free to YouTube, and that they have never been able to announce nice numbers for YouTube, ever, that it likely doesn’t make a profit or break even. Especially after accounting for all the freebies Google provides YouTube.
sunstone 7y ago
Alternatively it could be seen as retreating from the Larry and Sergey experiment.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/zBtGp http://archive.is/zBtGp
sys_64738 7y ago
Google is simply an ad company with a search engine that monetizes all your data. They exist to serve ads. The rest is window dressing.
summerlight 7y ago
Larry and Sergey still holds more than 51% of voting stocks. IMO, this is the only thing that matters unless they delegate all the decisions to Sundar. Although I expect "other bets" to be forced to evolve into more realistic businesses but no radical structural changes. And another thing to consider is that a significant portion of Alphabet's value already comes from potential growth of "other bets" (e.g. Waymo). The major driver of digital ads' growth has been cannibalization of traditional media ads budget. This is no way sustainable over the next decade so the growth will be eventually saturated. Unless Google can find another strong driver (Maybe Cloud?), it's pretty natural to keep investing "other bets".
- notatoad 7y ago
  >unless they delegate all the decisions to Sundar. My understanding from the rumour mill is that's essentially what's been happening for a while now.
partingshots 7y ago
This is why without a technological background or acumen, you’ll never be able to find the investments that succeed based on innovation. Because there’s no financials to analyze, the companies that succeed this way basically go from making nothing / losing money for many years before all of a sudden becoming exponentially profitable. The signal doesn’t exist on the financial side, which is why so many people in Wall Street often fail so badly when valuing hard technology companies. It’s why a company like Waymo will in 10 years be valued more than the entirety of Google, yet many in finance won’t even have an inkling of this in the present day. Also, by the way, this is why I believe the venture capital industry in Silicon Valley was able to uniquely succeed in the beginning due to a heavy concentration in extremely technical investors compared to the rest of the United States and the world in general (i.e. the VC capital of the world is in Silicon Valley and not New York for a reason).
HSO 7y ago
That Google pretty much remains a one-trick pony after billions of dollars thrown against the wall speaks volumes about the glorification of "success" (or misattribution thereof) and the value of all the hagiographies in its wake.
- abvdasker 7y ago
  I wouldn't call Google a one-trick pony. They've created a bunch of wildly successful products -- Search, Maps, Android, Chrome -- that help feed their ad business. What should be scary if you're at the top of the company is that Google has not had a home-run product in a very long time. It's a strong signal that wherever made Google special in the past is gone (though that doesn't mean it couldn't come back).

216 points by ilyaeck 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

varjag 7y ago

First the Reader, now the Alphabet.

popup21 7y ago
It will never stop. After they axed Reader, I stopped using anything from the G. Watching them build legit software, gain users, and then dissolve those services over and over and over again had the effect of suffocating any further curiosity towards their products. Like a Skinner mouse, they literally train you not to give a shit anymore.
- dylan604 7y ago
  >After they axed Reader, I stopped using anything from the G I never used Reader, but did anything else come along to fill the void? I ask as I am curious on the market when G kills a product. When G kills off a product, does the rest of the world just assume that if G couldn't make it work then it must not be worth doing? I know HN readers were vocal about the death of lots of G products, but HN readers are edge cases in the grand scheme.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    There are other RSS readers but RSS as a stand-alone thing that people use (where “people” was always somewhat of a niche) has largely withered in the face of social media. Much as the tech crowd likes to complain about Reader’s Denise, it was at least in part a response to RSS’s decline not the cause.
    - dylan604 7y ago
      So you're giving G credit for recognizing the world progressing before the rest of the world realizes? Or that the users just adapted to the loss of the product? Just trying to compare G killing software to Apple killing hardware. The transition away from SCSI and ADB to things like USB/FireWire/Thunderbolt, USB-A to USB-C, etc riles the masses during the transition, but ultimately it is the better decision.
      - ghaff 7y ago
        To a first approximation, the "rest of the world" never knew what RSS was. Yes, Google kills random projects that have a passionate fan base. But they're mostly not products that actually have broad mainstream appeal. I'm not really giving Google "credit" for anything. It's just that a lot of people want to identify a bogeyman in RSS's demise. But that bogeyman is really the collective us. There are still plenty of RSS feeds and at least a couple of decent clients for anyone who want to use RSS today.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      RSS has not “withered”. True very few people use it, but every site still supports rss where it makes sense.
      - ghaff 7y ago
        Very few people using it seems the very definition of withering. Yes, a lot of sites and blog software etc. still default to offering RSS feeds. (Which I take advantage of from time to time and it's presumably used behind the scenes for various purposes.) But that's hardly a ringing endorsement of the role of RSS in today's world.
        scarface74 7y ago
        Why do you care if other people use it as long as it is available?
        7y ago
  - popup21 7y ago
    > did anything else come along to fill the void? Yep. I'm using ol'faithful: Mozilla Thunderbird
    - wnoise 7y ago
      Doesn't satisfy "synced history across any device".
      - popup21 7y ago
        Unnecessary for my use case. I batch my news consumption in a single session.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        Feedly.
  - wnoise 7y ago
    https://theoldreader.com/ https://theoldreader.com/
  - detaro 7y ago
    inoreader is another alternative in addition to the ones already mentioned.

tyingq 7y ago

If you're having trouble reading it: https://outline.com/pGLZ6U https://outline.com/pGLZ6U

onreact 7y ago
Thank you! Just what I needed. Does not work on my Firefox though as block sneaky redirects.
bitpush 7y ago
I dont know how what you did is legal. From https://www.outline.com/dmca.html https://www.outline.com/dmca.html Notice to Users If someone else might own the copyright to it, don't submit it. Outline is for reading pages that: you own the rights to, is in the public domain, constitutes fair use, or you have consent of the copyright holder. If we find you repeatedly submitting content that does not meet the above criteria, we will block you from using our service.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- tyingq 7y ago
  We have different views on this topic. Surely Outline is capable of taking a reasonable sample of what they are serving up, and seeing that the vast majority of it violates their terms. Throwing up a disclaimer page doesn't change that. Their policy is also contradicted by the "about" blurb on the bottom of the page "Outline is a free service for reading and annotating news articles." As far as I know, most news articles have a copyright. Also, sites that want paywalls are technically capable of doing that in a way that archive.is, outline.com, etc, can't scrape them. They don't, though, because they want the best of both worlds. Want to charge for your content? Fine, do that, but you lose exposure from search engines, HN, Facebook, etc. Curious how they are going to "block me" though. I don't have an account with Outline.

dzdt 7y ago

As usual, I like Matt Levine's take. [1] Page and Brin ran Alphabet as a highly funded system of moonshot programs with near-infinite runway to make profits, which is unusual or unique. Basically it only worked that way because Page and Brin were idealistic visionary gazillionaires who were bored of thinking about the somewhat dirty business of selling targetted ads. With a more standard corporate governance under a common CEO with the google ad business, the expectation is a more standard corporate focus on making profits from its ventures in some defined timeline. But read Levine's version; it has detail and humor and insight I can't convey in a summary! [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphabet-is-google-again https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...

mantap 7y ago
That seems way more idealistic somehow. More likely, with a more standard corporate governance Google will begin to rot from within. Apple certainly made more profits under Cook than Jobs, but innovation has slowed to a crawl and he has failed to diversify Apple away from having one product (instead he just added a bunch of accessory products and services). The last thing Google needs is to double down on ads, it takes 2 minutes to block them.
- ben_w 7y ago
  It takes us two minutes to block ads. Everyone on this site is a tiny minority who finds this sort of thing easy. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
  - vrc 7y ago
    It's shockingly high. Most western countries see an average of 26% - 40% ad block rates (by pageview) across the web. Some sites skewing to an older, less tech savvy audience, see between 8% and 15%, while tech heavy sites can go as high as 92% of pageviews being ad blocked. It's actually crazy that adblock rates in developing countries like India and Indonesia can actually be much higher on average because of UC Browser adoption and high mobile web consumption. They don't care about ads and privacy though -- just saving money on their data plans from not downloading ads. Source: I was briefly a product lead for a large tech company's anti-adblocking efforts and worked with publishers and others globally to measure these rates.

melling 7y ago

Google’s attempt to be a modern day Bell Labs was the one thing that set them apart. Make a lot of money in advertising and spend some of it to invent the future. Without the second part, the entire company changes. We need another company to take the mantle: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation-and-the-bell-labs-miracle.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation...

drawkbox 7y ago
Looks like the product/engineering/creative focused time of Google is giving way to the metric/marketing/MBA/McKinsey people for a fully pedal to the metal push into their Ballmer phase. When will technology/product/engineering/creative companies learn that the value creation is more important than the value extraction? With value creation there is always the ability to value extract. With value extraction the focus, and little research and development or innovative value creation, eventually it stagnates and sputters. The product before the sales/marketing is key. A product of value can always be sold or marketed. You can't sell/market your way to a product. As a developer, and investor, in Google this concerns me the move away from Alphabet, moonshots and research and development. The open mode is needed just like the closed mode [1]. The open mode is where value is realized, the closed mode is where it is produced [1]. Value is created in a state of play or creativity, this is usually the first thing to go in these phase changes at a company. This happens at every company that creates immense value, eventually the research and development is hard to quantify the value so they cut and cut like Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, eventually it is just a stump and all the grace and built up value is tapped. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g
- LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
  I wish there was some paper that would quantify the dangers of this take over down into hard numbers, so that they could be used in the never ending internal civil wars of value creation vs value-usage. In a ironic way though, this life-cycle reflects what we humans go through though. We have a fragile phase, where we must find our place, develop new things, risk it all, then we settle in, apply the learned things to our conquered niche and set to full cruise mode, to produce turtles eggs, to repeat the cycle. So if a society wants to propell the exploration onwards, there are two ways. Eternal youth, as in never growing fully up, always replace aging elements with new rebelious and clueless young elements. The other, is acclerate the aging &reproduction period. For example allow for Managers, who can proof that there company is stagnant- has a stranglehold on a market, to split a sub-department from the main company (including IP) and thus accelerate the new turtle baby phase.

jfoster 7y ago

Any investor in Alphabet for the long term would hope this isn't the case. It also doesn't make sense at a time when some of their moonshots are looking as though they could pay off. (Eg. Waymo) That said, it makes sense from the Page/Brin perspective, perhaps. It's a lot more difficult to 10x a company that's already worth $Y billion. Perhaps better to start the ventures separately in a way that is more exciting to investors.

petra 7y ago
The problem is funding: let's say funding a self-driving project takes $5B-$10B and 15 years, until it starts to become a real, scalable business. And that's probably optimistic. Who will fund that ? I wonder if Google was too ambitious. Maybe if they focused all the effort on making trucks that could only ride the highway safely, in limited conditions, they would have had a working business by now.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  Softbank has dumped $10B in WeWork, a glorified office rental company. If you think there are no investors willing to put $10B in self driving cars, you might still be living in 2005.
  - petra 7y ago
    Wow man, $10B into wework ? That's really fucked up. And you're right, about self driving cars and that i'm still living in 2005 :)
MarkMc 7y ago
I've been a Google shareholder for more than 10 years, and I would love it if Alphabet spun off Waymo so I could dump my Waymo stock. My view is that the market undervalues Google and overvalues Waymo but unfortunately Mr Page and Mr Brin force me to invest in both.
- repsilat 7y ago

buboard 7y ago

sounds like a good time for a "traitorous 8" group from google's vast AI teams to jump out of advertising and start monetizing their plans.

tim333 7y ago

>Placing the head of Google, which contributes more than 99% of Alphabet’s sales, at the helm of it could call into question the entire purpose of Alphabet I think this gives a false impression of the value of the non Google bits of Alphabet Currently the market cap of Alphabet is $924bn and "Waymo is worth about $105 billion" (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-27/waymo-valuation-slashed-on-autonomous-vehicle-tech-delays https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-27/waymo-val...) which would make that 11% of the valuation and probably other bits of other bets are worth something too.

deleted 7y ago
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endorphone 7y ago
The market cap of Waymo is $0 because it has no market cap. [edit: note that the parent comment originally spoke to the `market cap' of Waymo before an edit, giving context to this reply] An analyst independently made up a number, likely to justify an outsized Google target number. There have been rumors that Google will seek outside investments in Waymo that might legitimize some valuation, but they haven't. And for now Waymo's revenue is estimated to be $5M. While Google's revenue is about $160,000M. So I don't think they're giving a false impression of anything. Google has been pouring enormous sums of Adword cash into Waymo and it's still a stuttering business ten years later.
- drawkbox 7y ago
  Waymo is in the value creation phase, business/marketing/analysts may not value it as much but there is a goldmine under it. Waymo may not be a revenue behemoth currently but there is immense value there not only to self-driving but to maps improvement and more. I am not a fan of software patents but they have surpassed Toyota in patents [1] and there are hundreds of patents from Waymo [2]. Everyday in Arizona Waymo vehicles you see them on every block. The value extractors may not like not being able to extract value yet, but the product, research and value creation is very high and contributes today to improving Google product offerings outside of Waymo such as Maps [3]. Waymo has waymo value than is being extracted because it is still emerging from the product value creation nebula that business/marketing/analysts can't see and don't value as much as product/engineering/creative people. [1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-trends/Google-s-Waymo-unseats-Toyota-as-automated-driving-patent-king https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-trends/Google-s-Wa... [2] https://patents.justia.com/assignee/waymo-llc https://patents.justia.com/assignee/waymo-llc [3] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-09/waymo-mapping-los-angeles-driverless-taxis https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-09/waymo-mapp...

irrational 7y ago

The fact that you linked to an amp version of the page, instead of the real link, is deeply disturbing to me. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphabet-is-google-again https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...

tssva 7y ago
And I was very appreciative of the AMP version being posted. It made for a much better mobile viewing experience than the typical non-AMP experience from Bloomberg.
- smt88 7y ago
  A forced redesign, in this case motivated by AMP, is what gave you that better mobile experience. It is not something inherent to AMP, and in other ways AMP is incredibly harmful. Most mobile browsers now have "reading mode" anyway.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    The selling point of AMP is that it's a mobile-friendly web component framework. If someone uses AMP for their website, and as a result you get a better mobile experience, it's hard to see how that's not inherent to AMP.
    - MereInterest 7y ago
      I turn on the faucet and fill a glass of water. Taking a drink from the glass, I feel less thirsty. If someone turns on a faucet, and as a result feels less thirsty, then that that thirst-removal must be inherent to turning on a faucet, right? This is obviously silly, but follows the same reasoning that you have stated. Drinking water reduces thirst, not running water from a faucet. Redesigning a website to be less bloated results in a better mobile experience, not designing around AMP. It is possible to redesign a website without using AMP. Causation does not imply necessity.

stevespang 7y ago

PAYWALL.

giancarlostoro 7y ago

If they had assigned a new CEO for Google it could of not looked this way. However this looks bad especially when you hear "We the People" talk about how some of these tech giants need to be broken up. This is not going to help them. I wonder who the next Bell will be.[0] [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

basch 7y ago
why is it assumed they wont appoint a new Google CEO in the next 6 months to a year?
- tyingq 7y ago
  If I were Sundar Pichai, I'd probably view being the Alphabet Chief, and not the Google Chief, as a downgrade from just being the Google Chief. That was fine for Larry and Sergey with their founder's stock and deliberate desire to be somewhat disconnected. I don't think Sundar has either of those.
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    Unless the purpose is to just steer Alphabet into a new direction. But yeah I had not thought of that to be honest.
  - basch 7y ago
    IF his forte is operations, more Ballmer and Cook to a visionary, it makes sense. Put a new visionary in charge of Google, and start focusing on turning the other bets into self sustaining companies. Maybe split google up a bit too, make CGP its own bet. You could even make the case for Youtube, Nest/Pixel, Doubleclick, maybe Android. Refocus google on being an information sorting and calling tool, whether that be search, shopping, maps, gmail, photos. Google could benefit a bit from the Bezos API memo AND a bit from the Jobsesque "singular vision not kitchen sink of requested features" refinement. Paring google down and giving sects more singular visions, while encouraging cohesiveness might need a Bain Capital type chopman, but after that is said and done, Alphabet Chief should be more important than Google Chief. Pichai's job should be demarcing responsibility and org chart, giving focus.

deleted 7y ago

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m23khan 7y ago

I wonder if Google’s project Sidewalk Labs in Toronto would be affected as well.

crazygringo 7y ago

It has always seemed strange to me that Google become part of Alphabet, instead of vice-versa. It seems like a much more honest approach would always have been for Google to be one company... for Alphabet to be a separate one... and for, say, Google to own 33% of Alphabet, for Larry and Sergei personally to own another 33%, and outside investors to own the rest and be the ones principally determining its own, separate valuation.

jorblumesea 7y ago
Given that Alphabet was basically Larry and Seigei's personal pet projects and the goal was for Google to fund these projects, it's easier to funnel money up instead of out.
- puranjay 7y ago
  Wasn't YouTube a separate entity under Alphabet, and not a part of Google? That alone would be a $100B company
  - skinnymuch 7y ago
    It would be. But it doesn’t make money. Someone has to pay for it still.
    - crazygringo 7y ago
      Do you have a source for that? All I can find is that, as of 2019, nobody knows [1]. (Unfortunately I can't read the full paywalled content.) Also, it might not be profitable but could still be break-even. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/ok-google-hows-youtube-doing-11556896078 https://www.wsj.com/articles/ok-google-hows-youtube-doing-11...
      - skinnymuch 7y ago
        Nope no source. I’ve tried looking as well. I assume since it costs so much in infrastructure that Google lends for free to YouTube, and that they have never been able to announce nice numbers for YouTube, ever, that it likely doesn’t make a profit or break even. Especially after accounting for all the freebies Google provides YouTube.

sunstone 7y ago

Alternatively it could be seen as retreating from the Larry and Sergey experiment.

deleted 7y ago

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neonate 7y ago

http://archive.is/zBtGp http://archive.is/zBtGp

sys_64738 7y ago

Google is simply an ad company with a search engine that monetizes all your data. They exist to serve ads. The rest is window dressing.

summerlight 7y ago

Larry and Sergey still holds more than 51% of voting stocks. IMO, this is the only thing that matters unless they delegate all the decisions to Sundar. Although I expect "other bets" to be forced to evolve into more realistic businesses but no radical structural changes. And another thing to consider is that a significant portion of Alphabet's value already comes from potential growth of "other bets" (e.g. Waymo). The major driver of digital ads' growth has been cannibalization of traditional media ads budget. This is no way sustainable over the next decade so the growth will be eventually saturated. Unless Google can find another strong driver (Maybe Cloud?), it's pretty natural to keep investing "other bets".

notatoad 7y ago
>unless they delegate all the decisions to Sundar. My understanding from the rumour mill is that's essentially what's been happening for a while now.

partingshots 7y ago

This is why without a technological background or acumen, you’ll never be able to find the investments that succeed based on innovation. Because there’s no financials to analyze, the companies that succeed this way basically go from making nothing / losing money for many years before all of a sudden becoming exponentially profitable. The signal doesn’t exist on the financial side, which is why so many people in Wall Street often fail so badly when valuing hard technology companies. It’s why a company like Waymo will in 10 years be valued more than the entirety of Google, yet many in finance won’t even have an inkling of this in the present day. Also, by the way, this is why I believe the venture capital industry in Silicon Valley was able to uniquely succeed in the beginning due to a heavy concentration in extremely technical investors compared to the rest of the United States and the world in general (i.e. the VC capital of the world is in Silicon Valley and not New York for a reason).

HSO 7y ago

That Google pretty much remains a one-trick pony after billions of dollars thrown against the wall speaks volumes about the glorification of "success" (or misattribution thereof) and the value of all the hagiographies in its wake.

abvdasker 7y ago
I wouldn't call Google a one-trick pony. They've created a bunch of wildly successful products -- Search, Maps, Android, Chrome -- that help feed their ad business. What should be scary if you're at the top of the company is that Google has not had a home-run product in a very long time. It's a strong signal that wherever made Google special in the past is gone (though that doesn't mean it couldn't come back).