3 ms·

From what I’ve read, this has been Google’s operating model. They will happily shut down a profitable business if it isn’t hundreds of millions of dollars worth

From what I’ve read, this has been Google’s operating model. They will happily shut down a profitable business if it isn’t hundreds of millions of dollars worth within some time-frame. It’s a shame. I wish they would just spin them off instead.

alephnerd 3y ago
> I wish they would just spin them off instead I agree. If you did so much innovation already, but it doesn't generate the margins needed, a spinoff with minority ownership would make so much more sense and gain the ability to grow. A lot of enterprise companies actually do this, but I have absolutely no idea why Google does not. Maybe some sort of antitrust paranoia? If someone from GOOG can give visibility into the strat I'd honestly love it.
- ThrowawayR2 3y ago
  This is only a partially educated guess from a worm's eye view of FAANGs but if the product is designed to run on a FAANG's internal infrastructure, relies on their their internal-only libraries and development processes, etc., it would likely be more effort and risk to undertake the engineering to transform it into a standalone spin off business than it would recoup. Not to mention that key project staff would likely rather stay with the FAANG and initiate internal transfers rather than be spun off, further complicating the process.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Maybe, but then, why not commercialize internal infrastructure into a dedicated BU or SKU like Amazon or Microsoft does?
- toast0 3y ago
  I've never been at Google, but I've been at Yahoo and Facebook... The problem with spinning off something that was designed and built as a Google project is it would take a lot of work to run it outside of Google. What I saw in Yahoo wasn't too conjoined, ads, user login, and link tracking would be effort to move, but most of say Yahoo Travel was just regular PHP with regular MySQL underneath. You'd need a new packaging/remote installation tool as well, but ok. Otoh, at FB and I gather at Google as well, everything is proprietary tools. Some of which end up sort of open sourced. But it's not like you can take a source dump and spin it up in another cloud; it would probably be a 6 - 12 month slog, and then you've lost whatever thin market you had.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Fair point, I guess I'm used to the old school Amazon mentality of modularized/decoupled architecture and spinning out internal projects.

alephnerd 3y ago

> I wish they would just spin them off instead I agree. If you did so much innovation already, but it doesn't generate the margins needed, a spinoff with minority ownership would make so much more sense and gain the ability to grow. A lot of enterprise companies actually do this, but I have absolutely no idea why Google does not. Maybe some sort of antitrust paranoia? If someone from GOOG can give visibility into the strat I'd honestly love it.

ThrowawayR2 3y ago
This is only a partially educated guess from a worm's eye view of FAANGs but if the product is designed to run on a FAANG's internal infrastructure, relies on their their internal-only libraries and development processes, etc., it would likely be more effort and risk to undertake the engineering to transform it into a standalone spin off business than it would recoup. Not to mention that key project staff would likely rather stay with the FAANG and initiate internal transfers rather than be spun off, further complicating the process.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Maybe, but then, why not commercialize internal infrastructure into a dedicated BU or SKU like Amazon or Microsoft does?
toast0 3y ago
I've never been at Google, but I've been at Yahoo and Facebook... The problem with spinning off something that was designed and built as a Google project is it would take a lot of work to run it outside of Google. What I saw in Yahoo wasn't too conjoined, ads, user login, and link tracking would be effort to move, but most of say Yahoo Travel was just regular PHP with regular MySQL underneath. You'd need a new packaging/remote installation tool as well, but ok. Otoh, at FB and I gather at Google as well, everything is proprietary tools. Some of which end up sort of open sourced. But it's not like you can take a source dump and spin it up in another cloud; it would probably be a 6 - 12 month slog, and then you've lost whatever thin market you had.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Fair point, I guess I'm used to the old school Amazon mentality of modularized/decoupled architecture and spinning out internal projects.