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Wow. Jeff and Sanjay both departing. Truly end of a golden era. There is an entire cohort of work-optional very senior engineers for whom one of the last reaso
by gandalfgeek 2mo ago
Wow. Jeff and Sanjay both departing. Truly end of a golden era.
There is an entire cohort of work-optional very senior engineers for whom one of the last reasons for hanging on was "at least Jeff and Sanjay are around".
- oblio 2mo agoGoogle will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years.
- impulser_ 2mo agoPeople have been saying that for over a decade now, and their business is still going.
- jrflo 2mo agoTheir entire business is predicated on search dominance, which is now on much shakier footing. Agreed that those comments were ridiculous pre-ChatGPT, but now they have a genuine challenger.
- paperwallet 2mo agoI disagree A model serves a different purpose from a web crawler. I'd prefer to be able to find source material over steering a model I have no control over while managing hallucinated outputs without the ability to fact check. Just because it sourced some materials using RAG doesn't make its outputs valid, accurate, or factual.
- brokencode 2mo agoThat’s over half of their business, but they do have some diversification with YouTube, Play Store, and cloud services. Some of their newer efforts like Waymo and AI hosting for Apple could turn into large businesses to make up for any lost search revenue. They also have significant costs to maintain their search revenue, such as $20B a year to Apple alone to make Google the default search engine in Safari. If search becomes less lucrative, they would presumably pay less for such deals. So yeah, definitely a time of disruption for Google and they need to keep moving fast on many fronts, but they are still well positioned in multiple markets to be successful.
- phatskat 2mo ago> AI hosting for Apple Curious to see how long that lasts - YouTube and Google Maps were fairly mainstay apps for iPhones for a while, and eventually Apple cut the Maps cord to do their own thing. I don’t know if that’s from an existential concern of “we need to eventually move Maps in-house”, but given the Google of it all I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is already at least planning on how to do the same with AI once the bulk of the usage evens out i.e. let someone else worry about it now while also getting a read on what rolling their own would feasibly require.
- brokencode 2mo agoThat’s tough to say. So far, Apple has been very reluctant to invest in the massive infrastructure you need to run large AI models. But if they are successful in making on-device models that work well, then you don’t really need as much cloud infrastructure.
- baron816 2mo agoThis take only makes sense if you don’t know what people use Google search for. If you’re looking for your local Ford dealership, or to book a Carnival cruise, or need a disability lawyer, or to refinance your credit card debt, you’re searching for an ad. You’re not using Chat-GPT for that. You’re asking Chat-GPT about a research project. It’s stealing away all the hard to monetize searches and leaving the incredibly lucrative searches. Your narrative depressed Google’s stock price for years, and bears finally gave up since they kept coming out with huge earnings beats.
- quietbritishjim 2mo agoPeople 100% are asking ChatGPT for all those things.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 2mo agoSomeone deleted a reply to this comment “And where does ChatGPT get the data for those answers?” they wrote and I think the question is important: LLM chatbots can crawl the web just as well as Google.
- suncemoje 2mo agoHuh? But only if you give it a tool it can use - which brings you back to Google (or Bing)
- toomuchtodo 2mo agoAnyone can leverage common crawl and/or run their own crawler, to do so isn’t novel. https://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/
- suncemoje 2mo ago
- ai-x 2mo agoSearch is now only 50% of the revenue. But sure keep the myth going.
- suncemoje 2mo agoCloud business is making big dollar I suppose
- root_axis 2mo ago> which is now on much shakier footing Is it though? As far as I can tell they continue to maintain total domination of web search, and LLMs do not replace search engines, they work on top of them.
- bborud 2mo agoAnd yet, their search engine is enshittified beyond all belief.
- panarky 2mo agoIf by "shakier footing" you mean accelerating growth in query volume, ad impressions, revenue and earnings, I'll take it.
- lazide 2mo agoused to be. Cloud, Waymo, and some other bets have been paying off.
- optimalsolver 2mo agoSo is IBM.
- Eldt 2mo agoIsn't IBM still going?
- ghaff 2mo agoIBM had something of a downward blip last quarter, partly because of mainframe cycles. But it's actually done generally well the past few years and pays a pretty good dividend. $10B in net income for 2025 isn't shabby.
- xnx 2mo agoLLMs rewriting legacy code in newer languages is going to have an impact.
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- reaperducer 2mo agoPeople have been saying that for over a decade now, and their business is still going. So is IBM. There was a pretty interesting article in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks back about how IBM is flying under the radar, and doing well by not taking the hype bait. It noted that 70% of all credit card transactions on the planet go through an IBM system.
- nightshift1 2mo agoIt ought to be extremely easy now to use LLMs to transpile cobol and do the necessary reverse engineering to migrate off mainframes and aix servers. I think IBM will lose many customers.
- reaperducer 2mo agoIt ought to be extremely easy now to use LLMs to transpile cobol and do the necessary reverse engineering to migrate off mainframes and aix servers. I think IBM will lose many customers. The problem is that those COBOL systems have to be absolutely provably correct, for both financial and regulatory reasons. LLMs can't do that. They're designed to be variable. You can't vibe code a bank transaction system. "Close enough" isn't good enough in some fields. A minor glitch in a video game may result in screen artifacts. A minor glitch in a banking system can crash the economy.
- jimjimjim 2mo agoYep, if AI could do it so could out-sourcing it to India. AI is great for "almost" but not great at "exact"
- dghlsakjg 2mo agoIt’s also a solved problem combined with a risk averse industry. COBOL on mainframes has worked reliably for decades. On the scale of what a bank will spend on operations the mainframe doesn’t really cost much. Banks are sort of the canonical example of “no one ever got fired for buying ibm”.
- 2mo ago
- fragmede 2mo agoI dunno about going strong. $1,000 in Microsoft stock in 1990 would have made you a multi-millionaire today. $1,000 in IBM stock in 1990 would make you a ten-thousandaire today.
- PunchyHamster 2mo agoIBM's business is still going so I dunno what your point is
- michaelt 2mo agoIBM is also still going, believe it or not. 260k employees, 200 billion market cap, $67 billion revenue. I'm not sure what they do these days - it's about 20 years since I used an IBM Thinkpad to connect to an IBM pSeries.
- mcast 2mo agoIt’s a trustworthy name for enterprises. Many executives are old enough that IBM was the Google of their time when they started their careers.
- ac29 2mo agoNot so much hardware these days, about half of IBM's revenue comes from software (Red Hat related stuff alone probably brings in a ton), and about 20% comes from consulting
- swat535 2mo ago> Google will be considered "the new IBM" in 20 years. They have plenty of great tech for consumers right now: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android,.. You can perhaps argue that search might suffer because of AI but they've done a great job scaling horizontally into many verticals. I don't think Google is going anywhere.
- thefourthchime 2mo agoThe newest of those are 20 years old. Let’s be honest. Google was amazing back then, now they’re just an ad-business flailing around in other side quests.
- CountHackulus 2mo agoGmail is going to be Google's System/390 mainframes.
- dweekly 2mo agoGCP/Vertex, Firebase, Spanner, Waymo, Gemini + Nano Banana, Google Photos, TPUs, Pixel, Assistant, Google Fi, Taara...
- dghlsakjg 2mo agoMost of those are also at least a decade old, and some of them are acquisitions.
- kthinckley 2mo agoEvery single one of these hemorrhages money from their ad business
- svachalek 2mo agoIt's a lot of stuff, but with the possible exception of Waymo and the TPU, isn't this all going down in history under "also ran"?
- outside1234 2mo ago
- utopcell 2mo agoWho knows what will happen in 20 years. Right now, it's not the case.
- karmasimida 2mo agoLiterally, I am ... I don't know what to say
- ignoramous 2mo ago[flagged]
- dghlsakjg 2mo agoMaybe they enjoyed working with those people and don’t care about the status. It wasn’t so much snarky as just bluntly rude.
- ignoramous 2mo agoMy intention was to point out (for the sake of self-awareness) that there could something more to it, not that there indeed is.
- MattCruikshank 2mo agoDid Jeff and Sanjay pair write their resignation letter? Wow.
- rhipitr 2mo agoIsn’t alphabet an investor in their new endeavor?
- la6479 2mo agoThis just shows that the "great minds" of AI in these companies are not able to come up with anything that radically differentiates their AI than the others. Wether it is gemini or openAI or grok - meh they all are similar and at this point one can interchange one with the other , excep that Google sits right at the edge with almost every browser search query hitting the google search engine AKA Gemini on the backend and one can switch easily into chat mode right from the search page. I dare say that the google CEO has done his job and set up the cash printing machine but from the AI masterminds in Google, not a groundbreaking progress has been made.