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I think it's change in leadership. Sergei and Larry seemed to enjoy supporting wild ideas and were happy to put money up for ideas that would very likely never
by dktp 5y ago
I think it's change in leadership.
Sergei and Larry seemed to enjoy supporting wild ideas and were happy to put money up for ideas that would very likely never be profitable. They had their run with these bets, none of them particularly worked out and they stepped away (as running the ad business is far less fun than coming up with a breakthrough search algorithm when they started).
Sundar and Ruth are just closer to what you would expect from a normal publicly traded company leadership (a lot like other 2nd+ generation big-tech CEOs). Focus on revenue, profit and cutting loss-making bets. Clearly very good at focusing on profitability, but at the expense of crazy bets, which I very much used to appreciate about Google
- FredPret 5y agoThey got MBA'ed
- akmittal 5y agoThankfully not Ballmered
- DanHulton 5y agoThose crazy bets are also a big part of why nobody trusts Google to long-term support a service any more. They came up with a lot of wild and cool stuff that is now in the graveyard, since there was no real way to run them at anything approaching the profit levels of their core products.
- randomsilence 5y agoJust why do they care about the profit margins? Alphabet has several companies that are not as profitable as Google. If the low margins destroy morale within Google, then they could have transferred all of their experiments to another company that is situated where wages are low and people are eager to work for it. With some luck, some of their bets would have turned into winners.