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Google has Search and Ads, which generate vastly more money than they need to operate. Google Search is one of the Great Inventions in human history, so I think
by BurningFrog 3y ago
Google has Search and Ads, which generate vastly more money than they need to operate. Google Search is one of the Great Inventions in human history, so I think the money is well deserved.
But this creates an environment where the natural empire building among managers isn't tempered by the need for their units to produce revenue covering their costs. So the organization tends to grow to where it consumes all the billions raining from the sky.
Disclaimer: Just a loose thought from a cynical ex Googler.
- yterdy 3y agoGoogle could give it to schools with no heat or AC and outdated textbooks. Or help solve homelessness. Or fund fixing the country's bridges. "Sorry we really don't have the funds for more heads or ridiculous raises we're busy not being evil."
- _Algernon_ 3y agoGoogle is a public company. The money either goes to shareholders or to employing people. There is no conceivable world in which this money would have gone to any of those causes.
- naet 3y agoThere's a conceivable world where we restructure incentives around our current form of capitalism and tax codes to encourage extra money going into humanitarian causes, instead of being spent on arbitrary capital maneuvers like stock buybacks. Conceivable, but we probably won't get there anytime soon.
- fsargent 3y agoIt’s very simple, that’s what the government should fund. That’s what our tax should pay for. If you really want to manifesto, then just read about land value taxes, don’t tax anything except what we want to disincentivize and land, which doesn’t distort the market. But this is entirely off-topic for this thread.
- johnsonjo 3y agoIt sounds to me like you're explaining Tax Deductions through Charity which is already a thing.
- hobofan 3y agoI know that you probably meant to express that Google is the opposite to a public (= governmental) entity, but "private company" is not the term to express that. Google is a public company (= listed on the stock market for anyone to buy and sell), so the opposite of a private(ly owned) company.
- _Algernon_ 3y agoProbably mixed up private entity and public company. Fixed.
- losteric 3y agoFor-profit companies do philanthropy all the time. There is no requirement to divert money to shareholders (further, Google's not payingany dividends right now)
- brainwad 3y agoGoogle does stock buybacks instead. The last yearly buyback authorisation was for $70b, so the "yield" is around 4-5%. It's very much in the blue-chip, return-cash-to-investors phase of its corporate life.
- wizofaus 3y agoWell there's certainly a conceivable one, and it's one probably many would agree would be much nicer one to live in. But accepted, not a realistic one any time soon.
- ttymck 3y agoNo conceivable world you say?
- _Algernon_ 3y agoThat is indeed what I say
- bloppe 3y agoGoogle has a large charitable arm called google.org, but your point is mostly correct, although the money they pay to employees (and to the government in the form of payroll taxes) isn't being destroyed. It's just cycling around the economy, and many employees donate decent amounts of their paychecks to charity (Google does 1:1 matching and encourages this)
- nojvek 3y agoCEO would get outsed if the shareholders feel he’s not acting in the best interest to make returns. Capitalism is a best that needs insatiable ever growing revenue and profits.
- baruz 3y agoVote-holding shareholders in a two-class share company, ie, Schmidt, Brin, or Page. Pichai just has to avoid annoying Sergey and Larry, really.
- edanm 3y agoThat's not true. Google makes money for stockholders, and they do whatever they want with that money. Some of them also certainly give money to charity, etc. I don't know if we prefer a world in which Google itself made these kinds of contributions and not the people who own Google.
- BurningFrog 3y ago> Or help solve homelessness Google has tried building housing in Mountain View, but they can't permits easier than anyone else.
- johnsonjo 3y agoThere are 500k homeless people in the US alone [0]. Let's compare that to Google's net income (money gained after all expenses including taxes, etc.) for a quarter (quarter is 3 months with $70m on a good quarter and $30m on a bad one [1]). If we were to give every cent of Google's earnings to each homeless person in the USA then each homeless person could get a $46 pay check ((net_income_per_quarter / homeless_population) / 3 [2]) per month from Google on a good quarter and a $20 paycheck per month on a bad quarter [3]. But, you have to ask yourself what this sort of wild and crazy idea would cost to Google's bottom line. I'm no expert on that, but I assume it would not be good. This is just some simple back of the napkin math, but it shows how simply infeasible solving homelessness or poverty is even for a company as big as Google. This is why I usually believe solving homelessness can not be achieved by money alone, and just the scale of the problem makes it so intractable. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Sta... [1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/financials https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/financials [2]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2870000000+%2F+500000%29+%2F+3 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2870000000+%2F+500000%... [3]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2830000000+%2F+500000%29+%2F+3 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2830000000+%2F+500000%...
- sk5t 3y agoGoogle’s quarterly net income is in the $10 to $20Bn range. Take another whack at that math?
- johnsonjo 3y agoOkay I was wrong about that I was also wrong about the quarterly part the numbers were not per quarter but per year. Again back of the napkin and I’m glad to have people point out the flaws in my argument.
- BurningFrog 3y agoHomelessness is mainly caused by the physical reality of there being too few homes for the number of people. The good way to change that is to add more housing (let's ignore the option of removing people). Giving homeless people money doesn't end the physical reality at all. It can make some homeless people able to afford housing, but an equal number of housed people will replace them as homeless.
- epicureanideal 3y ago> Google Search is one of the Great Inventions in human history I don't know about that...
- hennell 3y agoCompared to the alternatives at the time (and really now) it absolutely is. Without decent search the web is a mess, it's just mountains of information with no logic or organisation and the best content and information is nothing if you can't locate it. These days their search is starting to turn. Too many sponsored results, no way to avoid the AI takeover or copycat sites. In short the search doesn't actually find you the best results. But still it's hard to avoid it. There's no better way to find what you are looking for wherever it is on the web.
- BurningFrog 3y agoPeople too young to know life before Google can probably not comprehend how deeply uninformed we were before Larry & Sergey made knowledge searchable.
- cookie_monsta 3y agoI feel about the same amount of uninformed as I was pre- Google, maybe more so being that there are now whole categories of information that I know are pointless trying to memorise. What's really changed for me is that now we don't have conversations that peter out because nobody has access to basic facts, i.e. whose population is greater, France or Germany. Now we just look it up, end the argument and move on. Of course this was possible with other search engines. Google's utility comes conflated with the rise of the smart phone and mobile internet, all of which happened around the same time. Everybody having access to the answer to every question in their pocket is the real game changer.
- baq 3y agoWe who remember altavista and having to ask librarians for information do know. Google search specifically transformed society in a way comparable with railroads. Impossible became easy. Days of planning turned into minutes or seconds of googling. It really changed the world.
- EricMausler 3y agoIsn't that a good thing? It promotes creating jobs and sharing some of the wealth
- dazzlefruit 3y agoImagine what could be done with that infinite money if Google had a real incentive to build more useful things.
- EricMausler 3y agoWould being tighter with their budgets and reducing headcount give them more incentive to build more useful things? They built the useful thing already. It prints money. Let them house and feed a bunch of people as employees. Idk maybe I'm missing something
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gmadsen 3y agoNo? the purpose of a job is to create value.
- EricMausler 3y agoEh. The purpose of a job is to do the job. Creating value feels more like the purpose of the business. Google is creating value, and I dont see the problem with them creating a bunch of easy jobs for people as a means of distributing that value
- jokethrowaway 3y agoIt's worse for everyone else (plus it's mentally terrible for the soulless drones taking paychecks). If Google didn't waste money they could offer more value to society. It's like the government redistributing your money to bullshit initiatives
- epolanski 3y agoCalling Google Search one of history's great inventions is beyond delusional starting from the fact that Google didn't invent website indexing and searching if anything it had better algos and was less disrupted by the various waves of SEO spammers that killed the likes of Yahoo or Lycos or Altavista, etc.