3 ms·
They are the new Microsoft but they're trying to avoid the same fate of companies like Yahoo and Microsoft; i.e viewed as stodgy old companies that aren't great
by IBM 13y ago
They are the new Microsoft but they're trying to avoid the same fate of companies like Yahoo and Microsoft; i.e viewed as stodgy old companies that aren't great places to work. The perception about Google needs to be "innovative" which is why there is lots of PR about their X Labs initiatives. But if you think about all of the high profile ones, they aren't really attractive businesses.
Driverless cars? It's technology that all the major car companies have been working on for years and is close to market. This means they aren't going to create a business of licensing that tech to them. Are they going to get into the high capex business of car manufacturing?
Google Fiber? Same story. Capex heavy business with lower margins than being an ad company. It also takes a lot of time to scale it up and roll it out to cities.
Most of these things are for PR rather than real businesses that will be successful and change Google's revenue mix from 90%+ advertising to anything else. Even in their core business, Cost Per Clicks continue to trend down. This is a deterioration in pricing power largely being driven by the shift to computing on mobile devices. Their latest quarterly results were good because they are essentially "making it up in volume", but there is a limit to how much ad inventory you can squeeze out of all your properties to keep driving aggregate clicks up without pissing off users or trashing your products.
- antonius 13y ago"Companies like Yahoo and Microsoft; i.e viewed as stodgy old companies that aren't great places to work." For what reasons is Microsoft not a great place to work? I may be biased because my brother works there full-time and a friend is interning there but both of them very much enjoy it.
- IBM 13y agoMy comment about them is how they're perceived in the industry, in reality they may be great places to work.
- MAGZine 13y agoOther than stack-ranking thing/general office politics, I don't really have a negative preception of Microsoft. Is this a supposed-perception, or an actual perception? I don't know anything about Yahoo!, but my perceptions of them are still positive. If you have an awful work environment, people will just go elsewhere. especially if you're qualified to work at either company.
- yuhong 13y agoI think they were referring to the 1990s when MS was a lot worse than the Google of today. MS did a lot of unethical attacks against competitors during that period (my favorite is the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mhurron 13y ago> perceived in the industry This would be more how their perceived by hobbiests and people who work at startups. For people who want to work at large companies or are willing to work at established companies it doesn't seem true. Personally, I've only heard negatives about working at MS from people who have been there for a while, new employees are happy and excited to be there.
- curiousDog 13y agoExactly. Microsoft is still a great place to work. If anything IBM might be a boring place to work given that they're pretty much an IT company now. And Microsoft is definitely a league above Yahoo. Still has great people and where else in the world can you choose to work on quantum computation, the kernel, distributed systems, programming languages, machine learning, search, NLP, browsers, databases, CRM, BI, Computer vision, hardware..within the same company? There's a reason Google, Facebook et al have setup offices in the Kirkland/Seattle area.
- psbp 13y agoIf rumors are correct, their emerging business model has very much to do with projects like Glass, driverless cars, and google fiber. In fact, anything that makes commercial activity more efficient using a Google designed interface is going to help them in the near future.