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It all comes down to Apple being a very focused company. They know their customers, what they want and they have a much better business model. Steve Jobs once e

It all comes down to Apple being a very focused company. They know their customers, what they want and they have a much better business model. Steve Jobs once explained it by saying they say no to a lots of things even to those who seem on paper great ideas. All that to stay focus. On the other hand, Google is all over the places, they are very distracted and confident that they will always be the indisputable kind in ads and search so they didn’t invest much in generating other long term major revenue streams. Their incentives for promotions is all wrong and has led to tons of products being launched just for the sake of some manager aspirations and empowered, bored engineers who wanted to work on yet another green field project. They missed the boat on the cloud, and unless they turn the ship very quickly they are gonna leave a big chunk of search and ads to Microsoft. I’d argue they should also review their hiring strategy that have intoxicated the whole industry and clearly hasn’t led to better results.

jimbokun 4y ago
Which is interesting because the whole purpose of setting up Alphabet was to diversity revenue streams. But I don't think any of those efforts have generated significant revenue relative to their core business.
- azinman2 4y ago
  Waymo has the most promise and I think has always been seen that way.
- eitally 4y ago
  Verily is a $1b+ business now.
sanderjd 4y ago
> On the other hand, Google is all over the places, they are very distracted and confident that they will always be the indisputable kind in ads and search so they didn’t invest much in generating other long term major revenue streams. I think this is a very muddled analysis. You seem to be saying that the lack of focus is caused by the perception of a permanent easy revenue stream. But I think the causation is actually the reverse of that. The lack of focus is more like a breadth first search for additional sustainable revenue streams undertaken because they know the golden goose can't lay eggs forever. And similarly backwards: it is Apple who has the luxury of focus because high-end consumer computing hardware is a stable revenue stream with very little risk of drying up over a very long time horizon.
- cinericius 4y ago
  > You seem to be saying that the lack of focus is caused by the perception of a permanent easy revenue stream. But I think the causation is actually the reverse of that. The lack of focus is more like a breadth first search for additional sustainable revenue streams undertaken because they know the golden goose can't lay eggs forever. I think the difference is urgency. They probably do know that the golden eggs will stop coming at some point, but they don't believe it'll happen for a long while. Perhaps as a consequence of this, they very rarely commit to projects in a life-or-death way. At this point it's a HN trope to state this, but I do believe the reputational damage done by this lack of commitment to any of its fledgling projects is doing massive harm to Google's ability to find new revenue streams.
  - sanderjd 4y ago
    Again, this analysis is exactly backwards. The reason they axe flailing projects quickly is that they know they need to find a small number of promising new revenue streams to focus on. What HN wants them to do - commit to small projects indefinitely - would be exactly the lack of focus and urgency being criticized! I think what people are saying is something like "Google needs to focus on a small number of new successful large revenue sources". Which, yes, of course! But they don't know what those are, and none of the backseat drivers do either.
    - Patrol8394 4y ago
      What about AI/ML, Cloud, Workspace ? (+ of course ads and search). Why didn't they launch something like ChatGPT? Even if it was half baked, they should have made more noise and marketing PR on what's cooking ... instead they let OpenAI and Microsoft take the stage. Cloud? They basically invented the cloud! They were running in the cloud when the rest of the world was still copying files to production .. and yet they left that to AWS and Azure ... Don't get me wrong, I loved Google, I had much respect for them, and that's why I am so disappointed! They doubled down on monetizing on user data, search and ads, and completely neglected other areas they could have dominated hands down.
ewarrenG 4y ago
Your statement that Google is "all over the place" is at odds with what you say later "they didn’t invest much in generating other long term major revenue streams." Maybe the investments weren't successful or didn't pan out, but that is not to say they didn't invest.
flappyeagle 4y ago
At almost every place I've ever worked, there were about 10-20% of employees who were unproductive. Sometimes it's because they were bad hires, or they were just working on projects that added no value. I was at a series B startup that did 15% layoffs during the first pandemic wave. The result: we moved faster, code quality went up, morale increased over time. Some layoffs are driven by necessity, and some are opportunistic ways for companies to retool and mass-fire low performers. This applies at higher levels of abstractions too. When google did their layoffs, multiple entire unprofitable teams and business units were eliminated. It doesn't matter if "they could pay for it". They had an opportune excuse to remove some ugly looking lines from the balance sheet all at once and they took it. It's impractical for them to try to differentiate high and low individual performers at that scale. No matter how talented you are, you were contributing to a loss-making part of the company. Apple seems to have been better at not having useless teams and divisions. Tim Cook is a disciplined guy, so I'm not surprised.
- Mechanical9 4y ago
  This is assuming that layoffs affect the correct group of people, in which case the obvious question is why couldn't those people be informed earlier and been given a choice to find a different position or to improve their performance? At Google specifically, many high performers were laid off without explanation. When entire programs were cut, many general-purpose programmers were lost simply due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time rather than having the wrong skills or having low performance. Given that the evaluation of who to cut is made by outside groups, in a short period of time, without appeal, it seems more likely that layoffs in these cases are less about cutting low performers and more about getting rid of people the company is mismanaging, or people that the company is overpaying. Without changing that mismanagement, the result won't be a better environment. The message to employees is rough also: "don't trust our performance evaluations".
  - flappyeagle 4y ago
    It's not "don't trust out performance evaluations". The point of perf evals is rarely to fire people, it's primary use is to manage expectations of promotion. > This is assuming that layoffs affect the correct group of people Layoffs often don't target the right group of people when it comes to perf. There's error in human judgement abound. But it's 100% accurate when it comes to which business units are bringing in revenue, or costing a lot. > why couldn't those people be informed earlier and been given a choice to find a different position or to improve their performance Human attention is a scarce resource. Executives will tolerate inefficiency during up markets because it's more valuable to try to capture growth vs become efficient. When there's no growth to be had, then they turn their attention towards cutting costs. > it seems more likely that layoffs in these cases are less about cutting low performers and more about getting rid of people the company is mismanaging, or people that the company is overpaying The larger a company gets, the more these are effectively the same thing. Money in, value out. Too much money, too little value, you're just changing two sides of a ratio.
eitally 4y ago
I think Google was all over the place until roughly covid, but for the past few years the mission has solidly crystallized. Ads (dragging Search along), Youtube, "Platforms & Ecosystems" (Android, Assistant, Play & Chrome), Hardware (Nest, Fitbit, Pixel), Cloud. That's not really a very broad or convoluted set of priorities at the top level. The problem is the culture. Google is an exceptionally poorly managed company as a rule I claim this is by design from the beginning: as an engineering meritocracy, the technically best ideas won (over time) and employees voted with their feet. That doesn't scale. I'd argue that it began to fail pretty dramatically around the time Diane Greene took over Cloud and Prabhakar moved over (you could probably also argue that those org changes were lagging indicators, and the real start to the "problems" began when Ruth was hired) to run Ads/Search. As the board became increasingly business focused, the lack of solid management or even strategic leadership became more problematic. What's rule #1 of B2B? Being responsive to your customers' needs and acting predictably. The lack of top-to-bottom management combined with the legacy meritocratic culture have not lent themselves to the same sort of command-and-control hierarchy you see at places like Apple & Microsoft, both of which have been almost entirely market driven for decades. If you look at this[1] org chart cartoon from about ten years ago, you see what things looked like then. You had the Cult of Jobs at Apple, where a singular leader compartmentalized the entire company. You see the Sales & Marketing driven Microsoft, where Ballmer created stupid internal coopetition, and you see the insane messes at FB & Google. I suggest these are no longer accurate representations. As all of these big tech businesses have matured, everyone is converging on Amazon's & Oracle's command & control model, which is the traditional strategy for managing large organizations. It has been easier for some to get there (MSFT, for example, just had to remove the "guns" from their org chart), but at places like Google & Facebook there are fundamental changes that are required for the corporations to run efficiently that are also orthogonal to the founders' principles of how things should work, and (in my opinion) what you've been seeing in the past few quarters are "light" attempts at dealing with that. For Google it was the "cut off your nose to spite your face" 12k layoff. For FB it was a more existential staff cut but also the more recent notice to middle management that many of them are expected to become ICs again, to remove redundant layers. I don't think it's in Google's current culture to "turn the ship quickly". Frankly, under the circumstances, I think the only way to legitimately force this would be to divorce Ads from the rest of the business (or even just make it its own Bet). Anything else will likely fail, slowly, and feel like death by a thousand cuts for the rank & file and like pushing a string uphill to the leadership. [1] https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-amazon-apple-facebook-microsoft/ https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-amazon...

jimbokun 4y ago

Which is interesting because the whole purpose of setting up Alphabet was to diversity revenue streams. But I don't think any of those efforts have generated significant revenue relative to their core business.

azinman2 4y ago
Waymo has the most promise and I think has always been seen that way.
eitally 4y ago
Verily is a $1b+ business now.

sanderjd 4y ago

> On the other hand, Google is all over the places, they are very distracted and confident that they will always be the indisputable kind in ads and search so they didn’t invest much in generating other long term major revenue streams. I think this is a very muddled analysis. You seem to be saying that the lack of focus is caused by the perception of a permanent easy revenue stream. But I think the causation is actually the reverse of that. The lack of focus is more like a breadth first search for additional sustainable revenue streams undertaken because they know the golden goose can't lay eggs forever. And similarly backwards: it is Apple who has the luxury of focus because high-end consumer computing hardware is a stable revenue stream with very little risk of drying up over a very long time horizon.

cinericius 4y ago
> You seem to be saying that the lack of focus is caused by the perception of a permanent easy revenue stream. But I think the causation is actually the reverse of that. The lack of focus is more like a breadth first search for additional sustainable revenue streams undertaken because they know the golden goose can't lay eggs forever. I think the difference is urgency. They probably do know that the golden eggs will stop coming at some point, but they don't believe it'll happen for a long while. Perhaps as a consequence of this, they very rarely commit to projects in a life-or-death way. At this point it's a HN trope to state this, but I do believe the reputational damage done by this lack of commitment to any of its fledgling projects is doing massive harm to Google's ability to find new revenue streams.
- sanderjd 4y ago
  Again, this analysis is exactly backwards. The reason they axe flailing projects quickly is that they know they need to find a small number of promising new revenue streams to focus on. What HN wants them to do - commit to small projects indefinitely - would be exactly the lack of focus and urgency being criticized! I think what people are saying is something like "Google needs to focus on a small number of new successful large revenue sources". Which, yes, of course! But they don't know what those are, and none of the backseat drivers do either.
  - Patrol8394 4y ago
    What about AI/ML, Cloud, Workspace ? (+ of course ads and search). Why didn't they launch something like ChatGPT? Even if it was half baked, they should have made more noise and marketing PR on what's cooking ... instead they let OpenAI and Microsoft take the stage. Cloud? They basically invented the cloud! They were running in the cloud when the rest of the world was still copying files to production .. and yet they left that to AWS and Azure ... Don't get me wrong, I loved Google, I had much respect for them, and that's why I am so disappointed! They doubled down on monetizing on user data, search and ads, and completely neglected other areas they could have dominated hands down.

ewarrenG 4y ago

Your statement that Google is "all over the place" is at odds with what you say later "they didn’t invest much in generating other long term major revenue streams." Maybe the investments weren't successful or didn't pan out, but that is not to say they didn't invest.

flappyeagle 4y ago

At almost every place I've ever worked, there were about 10-20% of employees who were unproductive. Sometimes it's because they were bad hires, or they were just working on projects that added no value. I was at a series B startup that did 15% layoffs during the first pandemic wave. The result: we moved faster, code quality went up, morale increased over time. Some layoffs are driven by necessity, and some are opportunistic ways for companies to retool and mass-fire low performers. This applies at higher levels of abstractions too. When google did their layoffs, multiple entire unprofitable teams and business units were eliminated. It doesn't matter if "they could pay for it". They had an opportune excuse to remove some ugly looking lines from the balance sheet all at once and they took it. It's impractical for them to try to differentiate high and low individual performers at that scale. No matter how talented you are, you were contributing to a loss-making part of the company. Apple seems to have been better at not having useless teams and divisions. Tim Cook is a disciplined guy, so I'm not surprised.

Mechanical9 4y ago
This is assuming that layoffs affect the correct group of people, in which case the obvious question is why couldn't those people be informed earlier and been given a choice to find a different position or to improve their performance? At Google specifically, many high performers were laid off without explanation. When entire programs were cut, many general-purpose programmers were lost simply due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time rather than having the wrong skills or having low performance. Given that the evaluation of who to cut is made by outside groups, in a short period of time, without appeal, it seems more likely that layoffs in these cases are less about cutting low performers and more about getting rid of people the company is mismanaging, or people that the company is overpaying. Without changing that mismanagement, the result won't be a better environment. The message to employees is rough also: "don't trust our performance evaluations".
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  It's not "don't trust out performance evaluations". The point of perf evals is rarely to fire people, it's primary use is to manage expectations of promotion. > This is assuming that layoffs affect the correct group of people Layoffs often don't target the right group of people when it comes to perf. There's error in human judgement abound. But it's 100% accurate when it comes to which business units are bringing in revenue, or costing a lot. > why couldn't those people be informed earlier and been given a choice to find a different position or to improve their performance Human attention is a scarce resource. Executives will tolerate inefficiency during up markets because it's more valuable to try to capture growth vs become efficient. When there's no growth to be had, then they turn their attention towards cutting costs. > it seems more likely that layoffs in these cases are less about cutting low performers and more about getting rid of people the company is mismanaging, or people that the company is overpaying The larger a company gets, the more these are effectively the same thing. Money in, value out. Too much money, too little value, you're just changing two sides of a ratio.

eitally 4y ago

I think Google was all over the place until roughly covid, but for the past few years the mission has solidly crystallized. Ads (dragging Search along), Youtube, "Platforms & Ecosystems" (Android, Assistant, Play & Chrome), Hardware (Nest, Fitbit, Pixel), Cloud. That's not really a very broad or convoluted set of priorities at the top level. The problem is the culture. Google is an exceptionally poorly managed company as a rule I claim this is by design from the beginning: as an engineering meritocracy, the technically best ideas won (over time) and employees voted with their feet. That doesn't scale. I'd argue that it began to fail pretty dramatically around the time Diane Greene took over Cloud and Prabhakar moved over (you could probably also argue that those org changes were lagging indicators, and the real start to the "problems" began when Ruth was hired) to run Ads/Search. As the board became increasingly business focused, the lack of solid management or even strategic leadership became more problematic. What's rule #1 of B2B? Being responsive to your customers' needs and acting predictably. The lack of top-to-bottom management combined with the legacy meritocratic culture have not lent themselves to the same sort of command-and-control hierarchy you see at places like Apple & Microsoft, both of which have been almost entirely market driven for decades. If you look at this[1] org chart cartoon from about ten years ago, you see what things looked like then. You had the Cult of Jobs at Apple, where a singular leader compartmentalized the entire company. You see the Sales & Marketing driven Microsoft, where Ballmer created stupid internal coopetition, and you see the insane messes at FB & Google. I suggest these are no longer accurate representations. As all of these big tech businesses have matured, everyone is converging on Amazon's & Oracle's command & control model, which is the traditional strategy for managing large organizations. It has been easier for some to get there (MSFT, for example, just had to remove the "guns" from their org chart), but at places like Google & Facebook there are fundamental changes that are required for the corporations to run efficiently that are also orthogonal to the founders' principles of how things should work, and (in my opinion) what you've been seeing in the past few quarters are "light" attempts at dealing with that. For Google it was the "cut off your nose to spite your face" 12k layoff. For FB it was a more existential staff cut but also the more recent notice to middle management that many of them are expected to become ICs again, to remove redundant layers. I don't think it's in Google's current culture to "turn the ship quickly". Frankly, under the circumstances, I think the only way to legitimately force this would be to divorce Ads from the rest of the business (or even just make it its own Bet). Anything else will likely fail, slowly, and feel like death by a thousand cuts for the rank & file and like pushing a string uphill to the leadership. [1] https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-amazon-apple-facebook-microsoft/ https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-amazon...