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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, w

by 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.
    - _Understated_ 7y ago
      I'd love to hear more about your experiences in this field... we don't hear much fron the inside (as it were!)
      - vrc 7y ago
        Officially: https://www.blog.google/topics/ads/helping-publishers-recover-lost-revenue-ad-blocking/ https://www.blog.google/topics/ads/helping-publishers-recove... Beyond that, even though I've been out of the game for a few years, I have to be careful what I say. But I've been planning on writing something soon.
        moneywoes 7y ago
        What are you doing these days
  - gogopuppygogo 7y ago
    We are starting to put tools like Pi Hole in our homes. Someday soon we will put AdGuard in as the DNS provider for our parents and other relatives. The same way Firefox and Google Chrome got adopted. Advertising has gone from an annoyance to a potential serious threat to our well being from an increasingly surveillance oriented ecosystem. Pi Hole blocks anywhere from 35 - 50% of all requests in my home. That's an astounding number of requests for an apartment with two residents.
- abalone 7y ago
  > innovation has slowed to a crawl This is so typical of Apple criticism. They did do well with the iPhone and Mac that now any new innovations seem boring in comparison. It’s wrong. The Apple Watch came out under Cook. That is more than an “accessory.” It’s a new platform, new OS variant, etc. It’s dominating smart watches. The AirPods are pretty innovative in terms of the fine grained details that have made them super successful. Latest OS builds included evidence of stereoscopic glasses in the pipeline. Remember Apple isn’t always the first with stuff, even smartphones. Their innovations are more around key details and hardware/software integration that makes the whole system work like magic.
  - surfmike 7y ago
    And just wait for AR.
  - ftvy 7y ago
    They've been slacking in development, both software and hardware. Look at the MacBook keyboard problem, or all of the security exploits like pressing Enter numerously to escalate to root privileges. You don't get these kinds of problems when you aren't trying to mass produce cyclical consumption.
    - zepto 7y ago
      They are better on security than anyone else, so if this is ‘slacking’ it has to be contrasted with abject failure elsewhere.
  - wh1t3n01s3 7y ago
    All these products were previously imaginedand started by SJ. Cook is a marketer not a visionary or inventor of any sort.
    - edmundsauto 7y ago
      That's not an accurate depiction of Tim Cook - a man who is a very capable supply chain guy and general businessman. My personal opinion? Steve Jobs was the marketer -- his skill was getting other people with hard skills to buy into his general vision. (Recall the "reality distortion field" he possessed.)
- jacquesm 7y ago
  > Google will begin to rot from within Continue, not begin.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Since Tim has taken charge, they’ve become much more diversified. The watch and the AirPod business is larger and will probably be longer lasting than the iPod business, the iPad is much more than a big iPhone, and they are in services. Compare this chart to Google’s https://sixcolors.com/images/content/2019/financials-2019-7-4-1.png https://sixcolors.com/images/content/2019/financials-2019-7-... The iPhone was a once in a lifetime thing. Even in 2007 there were 1 billion phones a year being sold (Apple said they wanted to capture 1% of the market by selling 10 million in its first year). By definition, what electronic market can be much larger than one that has a 80%+ penetration?
  - smacktoward 7y ago
    I made another chart back in 2016 to show how over a decade the iPhone became such a truly once-in-a-lifetime product: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/apple-net-sales.png https://jasonlefkowitz.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/apple-... (As an illustration for this post: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/10/why-apple-doesnt-care-about-professional-mac-users-anymore/ https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/10/why-apple-doesnt-care-abo...) By 2009 Apple's iPhone business was larger than its personal computer business. By 2011 it was larger than all of Apple's other businesses put together. By 2015 it was several times larger than all of Apple's other businesses put together. Which is why, even though I'm not the world's biggest Apple fan, it always amuses me to hear people complain that Tim Cook hasn't pulled another iPhone out of his hat. The iPhone was the kind of hit that only comes along every two or three decades. I'm struggling to think of anyone who's produced two hits on that scale.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Also look at Apple’s product and revenue mix since 2007. They have consistently been able to change it as technology changed. If you look at Google’s revenue and profit mix, it looks the same as it did in 2007 - advertising. Microsoft and Apple have been able to pivot. Even while the Mac is only 10% of Apple’s revenue, even it has grown slowly throughout the years. Another note from your article - Apple sold $23 Billion dollars worth of Macs in 2016. Between 2010 - 2016. Google has only made $31 billion in revenue on Android (https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generated-31-billion-revenue-google-oracle https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...).
- riffraff 7y ago
  > he has failed to diversify Apple away from having one produc isn't Apple+ the largest diversification Apple has had in a long time?
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  I disagree on the criticism of Apple, since they do try to innovate, but I think you are spot on on Google embracing a conservative business culture centered on selling attention. Directly to advertisers and indirectly through content creators, so they have multiple channels at least. Not an Apple fan at all, but if I could pick an employer, Apple actually is on a track to become more favorable. Still, their locked down environments aren't really interesting if you don't care about monetizing software directly.
- ksec 7y ago
  >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). Apple has definitely slowed down quite a bit under Cook. But that is comparing from Apple's best to Current Apple. iOS 13 and macOS quality has definitely slipped. Along with the extremely long denial and no reaction pattern of Mac, Mac Pro and MacBook Pro Keyboard problems. But they are still Innovating like hell on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPod. Getting a decent iPhone out every year, which also happens to be the best selling Smartphone around the world is no small task. Services is also growing, although I am still not too fond of the idea of Apple TV, Arcade and News. Those so call "bunch of accessory and services" would have been a Fortune 2000 company on its own, and likely to be Fortune 500 soon if not already.
Animats 7y ago
Non-AMP page:[1] Alphabet's problem is simply that they mostly failed. Robots - fail. ISPs (Fiber, Loon) - fail. Self-driving cars - in test, but a long way from profits. Android predates Alphabet and is really part of the ad system. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphabet-is-google-again https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...
ngold 7y ago
"There is a bit of a walking-away-from-Omelas element to this—you get to think about driverless cars and human immortality because in some dingy basement ad metrics are being tortured—and it was a lot easier to forget the, uh, all the internet stuff in 2015 than it is in 2019." One of the best and most tragic short fiction stories ever written. It is scary how accurate the metaphor is.
- RomanBob 7y ago
  Are you referring to walking away from omelas? I don't see why people think that story is in anyway interesting or tragic. It's non-sensical, when reality isn't so. It's only deep if you have never read an account of a war or read history or basically know anything about how anything works outside of your suburb.
  - ramzyo 7y ago
    It would be more helpful to focus your comment on seeking to understand why the OP connects with the story than to put them down and imply that they've never read an account of war, history, or how things work outside of their own suburb.
hammock 7y ago
>the expectation is a more standard corporate focus on making profits from its ventures in some defined timeline. That's a reasonable prediction. It's the way Sundar started running Google anyway (demanding profits of the non-ads products or killing them).

by dzdt 7y ago

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.
  - _Understated_ 7y ago
    I'd love to hear more about your experiences in this field... we don't hear much fron the inside (as it were!)
    - vrc 7y ago
      Officially: https://www.blog.google/topics/ads/helping-publishers-recover-lost-revenue-ad-blocking/ https://www.blog.google/topics/ads/helping-publishers-recove... Beyond that, even though I've been out of the game for a few years, I have to be careful what I say. But I've been planning on writing something soon.
      - moneywoes 7y ago
        What are you doing these days
- gogopuppygogo 7y ago
  We are starting to put tools like Pi Hole in our homes. Someday soon we will put AdGuard in as the DNS provider for our parents and other relatives. The same way Firefox and Google Chrome got adopted. Advertising has gone from an annoyance to a potential serious threat to our well being from an increasingly surveillance oriented ecosystem. Pi Hole blocks anywhere from 35 - 50% of all requests in my home. That's an astounding number of requests for an apartment with two residents.
abalone 7y ago
> innovation has slowed to a crawl This is so typical of Apple criticism. They did do well with the iPhone and Mac that now any new innovations seem boring in comparison. It’s wrong. The Apple Watch came out under Cook. That is more than an “accessory.” It’s a new platform, new OS variant, etc. It’s dominating smart watches. The AirPods are pretty innovative in terms of the fine grained details that have made them super successful. Latest OS builds included evidence of stereoscopic glasses in the pipeline. Remember Apple isn’t always the first with stuff, even smartphones. Their innovations are more around key details and hardware/software integration that makes the whole system work like magic.
- surfmike 7y ago
  And just wait for AR.
- ftvy 7y ago
  They've been slacking in development, both software and hardware. Look at the MacBook keyboard problem, or all of the security exploits like pressing Enter numerously to escalate to root privileges. You don't get these kinds of problems when you aren't trying to mass produce cyclical consumption.
  - zepto 7y ago
    They are better on security than anyone else, so if this is ‘slacking’ it has to be contrasted with abject failure elsewhere.
- wh1t3n01s3 7y ago
  All these products were previously imaginedand started by SJ. Cook is a marketer not a visionary or inventor of any sort.
  - edmundsauto 7y ago
    That's not an accurate depiction of Tim Cook - a man who is a very capable supply chain guy and general businessman. My personal opinion? Steve Jobs was the marketer -- his skill was getting other people with hard skills to buy into his general vision. (Recall the "reality distortion field" he possessed.)
jacquesm 7y ago
> Google will begin to rot from within Continue, not begin.
scarface74 7y ago
Since Tim has taken charge, they’ve become much more diversified. The watch and the AirPod business is larger and will probably be longer lasting than the iPod business, the iPad is much more than a big iPhone, and they are in services. Compare this chart to Google’s https://sixcolors.com/images/content/2019/financials-2019-7-4-1.png https://sixcolors.com/images/content/2019/financials-2019-7-... The iPhone was a once in a lifetime thing. Even in 2007 there were 1 billion phones a year being sold (Apple said they wanted to capture 1% of the market by selling 10 million in its first year). By definition, what electronic market can be much larger than one that has a 80%+ penetration?
- smacktoward 7y ago
  I made another chart back in 2016 to show how over a decade the iPhone became such a truly once-in-a-lifetime product: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/apple-net-sales.png https://jasonlefkowitz.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/apple-... (As an illustration for this post: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/10/why-apple-doesnt-care-about-professional-mac-users-anymore/ https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/10/why-apple-doesnt-care-abo...) By 2009 Apple's iPhone business was larger than its personal computer business. By 2011 it was larger than all of Apple's other businesses put together. By 2015 it was several times larger than all of Apple's other businesses put together. Which is why, even though I'm not the world's biggest Apple fan, it always amuses me to hear people complain that Tim Cook hasn't pulled another iPhone out of his hat. The iPhone was the kind of hit that only comes along every two or three decades. I'm struggling to think of anyone who's produced two hits on that scale.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Also look at Apple’s product and revenue mix since 2007. They have consistently been able to change it as technology changed. If you look at Google’s revenue and profit mix, it looks the same as it did in 2007 - advertising. Microsoft and Apple have been able to pivot. Even while the Mac is only 10% of Apple’s revenue, even it has grown slowly throughout the years. Another note from your article - Apple sold $23 Billion dollars worth of Macs in 2016. Between 2010 - 2016. Google has only made $31 billion in revenue on Android (https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generated-31-billion-revenue-google-oracle https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...).
riffraff 7y ago
> he has failed to diversify Apple away from having one produc isn't Apple+ the largest diversification Apple has had in a long time?
raxxorrax 7y ago
I disagree on the criticism of Apple, since they do try to innovate, but I think you are spot on on Google embracing a conservative business culture centered on selling attention. Directly to advertisers and indirectly through content creators, so they have multiple channels at least. Not an Apple fan at all, but if I could pick an employer, Apple actually is on a track to become more favorable. Still, their locked down environments aren't really interesting if you don't care about monetizing software directly.
ksec 7y ago
>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). Apple has definitely slowed down quite a bit under Cook. But that is comparing from Apple's best to Current Apple. iOS 13 and macOS quality has definitely slipped. Along with the extremely long denial and no reaction pattern of Mac, Mac Pro and MacBook Pro Keyboard problems. But they are still Innovating like hell on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPod. Getting a decent iPhone out every year, which also happens to be the best selling Smartphone around the world is no small task. Services is also growing, although I am still not too fond of the idea of Apple TV, Arcade and News. Those so call "bunch of accessory and services" would have been a Fortune 2000 company on its own, and likely to be Fortune 500 soon if not already.

Animats 7y ago

Non-AMP page:[1] Alphabet's problem is simply that they mostly failed. Robots - fail. ISPs (Fiber, Loon) - fail. Self-driving cars - in test, but a long way from profits. Android predates Alphabet and is really part of the ad system. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphabet-is-google-again https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...

ngold 7y ago

"There is a bit of a walking-away-from-Omelas element to this—you get to think about driverless cars and human immortality because in some dingy basement ad metrics are being tortured—and it was a lot easier to forget the, uh, all the internet stuff in 2015 than it is in 2019." One of the best and most tragic short fiction stories ever written. It is scary how accurate the metaphor is.

RomanBob 7y ago
Are you referring to walking away from omelas? I don't see why people think that story is in anyway interesting or tragic. It's non-sensical, when reality isn't so. It's only deep if you have never read an account of a war or read history or basically know anything about how anything works outside of your suburb.
- ramzyo 7y ago
  It would be more helpful to focus your comment on seeking to understand why the OP connects with the story than to put them down and imply that they've never read an account of war, history, or how things work outside of their own suburb.

hammock 7y ago

>the expectation is a more standard corporate focus on making profits from its ventures in some defined timeline. That's a reasonable prediction. It's the way Sundar started running Google anyway (demanding profits of the non-ads products or killing them).