5 ms·

Someone described Google's foray into driverless cars, robots etc as the emergence of Google as a conglomerate. Those projects are just too many steps away fro

by dotBen 13y ago

Someone described Google's foray into driverless cars, robots etc as the emergence of Google as a conglomerate. Those projects are just too many steps away from advertising revenue to claim they're all part of a common vision. The same is true for Amazon, Microsoft, etc as examples of successful technology conglomerates. With similar capital available to it, Facebook needs to stop thinking "one trick pony" as a social network and start thinking conglomerate too. Investing in drone technology is a good start for them.

kevando 13y ago
Unlike those other companies, Facebook has a clear vision: Connect the world. If you listen to Mark Zuckerberg talk about that vision, you see that facebook.com is just a part of the over arching goal. It's really cool to see such conviction. Rather: Google, Amazon, Microsoft - those companies just print money and have the luxury to think 10 steps ahead. Granted some of the most brilliant minds work for them, so their view of 10 steps ahead is often spot on and extremely innovative (gmail, aws, IE). jk jk on IE. Honestly, I am not sure what Microsoft has done lately..
- raldi 13y ago
  Age of Empires was pretty good.
  - kevando 13y ago
    PRETTY good? One time on multi-player I was decimated to a single peon and buried my way into a nook in the forest and rebuilt a mighty army and was ultimately defeated. Damnit, I was depressed after that one..
    - meddlepal 13y ago
      The Black Forest survivalist strategy. Also good was carving a back entrance into your enemies base.
      - kevando 13y ago
        goddamn siege onagers...
      - willvarfar 13y ago
        I used to build long palisades of wood; the AI would do some path-finding, and discover the gap in the fence around the back of my base. It would then send a steady stream of units to attack me, but they'd walk in single file along the wall towards the gap...
- amaks 13y ago
  Google's (official) mission "is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" (https://www.google.com/about/company/ https://www.google.com/about/company/). Microsoft's is "to create a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most." (http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar13/shareholder-letter/index.html http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar13/shareholder-l...). How's Facebook different having a mission statement?
  - kevando 13y ago
    It's different in the sense their decisions that lead to becoming a'conglomerate' adhere to their mission. 3bn for Nest doesn't really help organize the world's data.
    - amaks 13y ago
      Unless you view Nest as the source of data (which many believe it is)
  - coldtea 13y ago
    I guess he means in that Facebook focuses on that, and Google and MS do all kinds of incompatible shit.
  - bertil 13y ago
    > How's Facebook different having a mission statement? Every public intervention from Mark, every decision (admittedly from my undocumented point of view) is explicitly tied to that decision. I can’t remember when any of the Google triumvirate justified anything, ads or docs with their mission statement. Even negative decisions: Facebook justified not making cellphone hardware with their statement, because an OS would be more sensical -- a convoluted distinction to most, and one they might as well regret and tip-toe around when they start building antennas in Africa, but… no one would fail to see on that is directly in line with Zuckerberg’s initial idealism of “ending the conflict between Isreal and Palestinians by making them shares their stories”. No one is saying they are markedly different from the inside, but Google founders, especially with Glass, comes off as Borg operators with “God vision” (cf. the first description of a screen showing live queries on a global map on Wired, 15 years ago); Mark is still that (annoying) teenager just out of the Peace Corps who own nothing, and wants everyone to get alone.
- morganherlocker 13y ago
  > jk jk on IE. Honestly, I am not sure what Microsoft has done lately.. .Net/C# is pretty dominant on the east coast. I see far more .Net shops than Java anyway. This leads me to believe that server licensing and Azure might be even bigger profit centers in the future. It is not consumer driven, but finance, insurance, HR, accounting, etc. are serious markets with deep pockets. .Net displaced many systems that were 40+ years old (COBOL, RPG/AS400, etc.), so I am doubtful that there are many contenders that could swoop in and steal the market anytime soon.
- trhway 13y ago
  >Facebook has a clear vision: Connect the world to Facebook platform.
  - bertil 13y ago
    They tried making that platform more open, hired coders close to the Open Social Web to develop tools to allow you to export all your information, etc. They hit a lot of snag: negative opinion like yours challenging their sincerity, lack of significant adoption, more general ethical dilemmas on having your interactions recorded by a third-party media: who ‘owns’ what (owning being a terrible metaphor for right to access, right to erase and the absence of sensical editing). I agree their importance and idealism should have put their goal much higher, but I believe (as in: that’s my PhD conclusion) that they are going for the most successful and fastest approach of connecting as many people as humanly possible first on a coherent platform, and will open it once the impact and feasibility of that is the greatest.
- shittyanalogy 13y ago
  "Connect the world" isn't exactly a clear goal.
nrao123 13y ago
I think you are referring to the observations of John Gapper, Michael Mace & Ben Evans... --- John Gapper @ FT: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e57abef0-cd0c-11e2-90e8-00144feab7de.html#axzz2uy4dmnOW http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e57abef0-cd0c-11e2-90e8-00144... "The best comparison for Google seems to me not Microsoft in the 1980s but General Electric in the late 19th century – the age of electrification. Like GE, Google is a multifaceted industrial enterprise riding a wave of technology with an uncanny ability not only to invent far-reaching products but also to produce them commercially. --- Michael Mace: http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.in/2014/01/google-conglomerate-after-nest-no.html http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.in/2014/01/google-conglome... The idea behind the “Internet of Things” is that network connectivity is moving into almost everything. If that’s Google’s investment thesis, it could rationalize an investment in almost any industry. Appliances? Absolutely. Shipping and logistics? You bet. Phosphate mining? OK, maybe not that. But any category of products that have electronics in them is fair game, as are any services that rely on data management. That’s going to be most of the economy. If that’s the case, we’ll need to evaluate Google’s strengths and weaknesses differently. We should worry less about the overall grand plan, and more about the management structure of its businesses, the skills of its general managers, and the efficiency of the support staff behind them. In other words, will Google be more like GE or like HP? --- Ben Evans: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/2/19/ways-of-thinking-about-google http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/2/19/ways-of-thinkin... Hence, one could argue that Nest or self-driving cars (and the next big hardware move that Google does) are not really about understanding 'information' in any sense, and certainly not about advertising, but about finding ways to deploy being very good at machine learning and, say, connected systems, just as GE's business is to be very good at making big complicated precision-engineered pieces of capital equipment.
mbesto 13y ago
> Those projects are just too many steps away from advertising revenue to claim they're all part of a common vision. But are they? Driverless cars means more people on the internet and more people on the internet means more searching.

by dotBen 13y ago

kevando 13y ago

Unlike those other companies, Facebook has a clear vision: Connect the world. If you listen to Mark Zuckerberg talk about that vision, you see that facebook.com is just a part of the over arching goal. It's really cool to see such conviction. Rather: Google, Amazon, Microsoft - those companies just print money and have the luxury to think 10 steps ahead. Granted some of the most brilliant minds work for them, so their view of 10 steps ahead is often spot on and extremely innovative (gmail, aws, IE). jk jk on IE. Honestly, I am not sure what Microsoft has done lately..

raldi 13y ago
Age of Empires was pretty good.
- kevando 13y ago
  PRETTY good? One time on multi-player I was decimated to a single peon and buried my way into a nook in the forest and rebuilt a mighty army and was ultimately defeated. Damnit, I was depressed after that one..
  - meddlepal 13y ago
    The Black Forest survivalist strategy. Also good was carving a back entrance into your enemies base.
    - kevando 13y ago
      goddamn siege onagers...
    - willvarfar 13y ago
      I used to build long palisades of wood; the AI would do some path-finding, and discover the gap in the fence around the back of my base. It would then send a steady stream of units to attack me, but they'd walk in single file along the wall towards the gap...
amaks 13y ago
Google's (official) mission "is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful" (https://www.google.com/about/company/ https://www.google.com/about/company/). Microsoft's is "to create a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most." (http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar13/shareholder-letter/index.html http://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar13/shareholder-l...). How's Facebook different having a mission statement?
- kevando 13y ago
  It's different in the sense their decisions that lead to becoming a'conglomerate' adhere to their mission. 3bn for Nest doesn't really help organize the world's data.
  - amaks 13y ago
    Unless you view Nest as the source of data (which many believe it is)
- coldtea 13y ago
  I guess he means in that Facebook focuses on that, and Google and MS do all kinds of incompatible shit.
- bertil 13y ago
  > How's Facebook different having a mission statement? Every public intervention from Mark, every decision (admittedly from my undocumented point of view) is explicitly tied to that decision. I can’t remember when any of the Google triumvirate justified anything, ads or docs with their mission statement. Even negative decisions: Facebook justified not making cellphone hardware with their statement, because an OS would be more sensical -- a convoluted distinction to most, and one they might as well regret and tip-toe around when they start building antennas in Africa, but… no one would fail to see on that is directly in line with Zuckerberg’s initial idealism of “ending the conflict between Isreal and Palestinians by making them shares their stories”. No one is saying they are markedly different from the inside, but Google founders, especially with Glass, comes off as Borg operators with “God vision” (cf. the first description of a screen showing live queries on a global map on Wired, 15 years ago); Mark is still that (annoying) teenager just out of the Peace Corps who own nothing, and wants everyone to get alone.
morganherlocker 13y ago
> jk jk on IE. Honestly, I am not sure what Microsoft has done lately.. .Net/C# is pretty dominant on the east coast. I see far more .Net shops than Java anyway. This leads me to believe that server licensing and Azure might be even bigger profit centers in the future. It is not consumer driven, but finance, insurance, HR, accounting, etc. are serious markets with deep pockets. .Net displaced many systems that were 40+ years old (COBOL, RPG/AS400, etc.), so I am doubtful that there are many contenders that could swoop in and steal the market anytime soon.
trhway 13y ago
>Facebook has a clear vision: Connect the world to Facebook platform.
- bertil 13y ago
  They tried making that platform more open, hired coders close to the Open Social Web to develop tools to allow you to export all your information, etc. They hit a lot of snag: negative opinion like yours challenging their sincerity, lack of significant adoption, more general ethical dilemmas on having your interactions recorded by a third-party media: who ‘owns’ what (owning being a terrible metaphor for right to access, right to erase and the absence of sensical editing). I agree their importance and idealism should have put their goal much higher, but I believe (as in: that’s my PhD conclusion) that they are going for the most successful and fastest approach of connecting as many people as humanly possible first on a coherent platform, and will open it once the impact and feasibility of that is the greatest.
shittyanalogy 13y ago
"Connect the world" isn't exactly a clear goal.

nrao123 13y ago

I think you are referring to the observations of John Gapper, Michael Mace & Ben Evans... --- John Gapper @ FT: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e57abef0-cd0c-11e2-90e8-00144feab7de.html#axzz2uy4dmnOW http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e57abef0-cd0c-11e2-90e8-00144... "The best comparison for Google seems to me not Microsoft in the 1980s but General Electric in the late 19th century – the age of electrification. Like GE, Google is a multifaceted industrial enterprise riding a wave of technology with an uncanny ability not only to invent far-reaching products but also to produce them commercially. --- Michael Mace: http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.in/2014/01/google-conglomerate-after-nest-no.html http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.in/2014/01/google-conglome... The idea behind the “Internet of Things” is that network connectivity is moving into almost everything. If that’s Google’s investment thesis, it could rationalize an investment in almost any industry. Appliances? Absolutely. Shipping and logistics? You bet. Phosphate mining? OK, maybe not that. But any category of products that have electronics in them is fair game, as are any services that rely on data management. That’s going to be most of the economy. If that’s the case, we’ll need to evaluate Google’s strengths and weaknesses differently. We should worry less about the overall grand plan, and more about the management structure of its businesses, the skills of its general managers, and the efficiency of the support staff behind them. In other words, will Google be more like GE or like HP? --- Ben Evans: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/2/19/ways-of-thinking-about-google http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/2/19/ways-of-thinkin... Hence, one could argue that Nest or self-driving cars (and the next big hardware move that Google does) are not really about understanding 'information' in any sense, and certainly not about advertising, but about finding ways to deploy being very good at machine learning and, say, connected systems, just as GE's business is to be very good at making big complicated precision-engineered pieces of capital equipment.

mbesto 13y ago

> Those projects are just too many steps away from advertising revenue to claim they're all part of a common vision. But are they? Driverless cars means more people on the internet and more people on the internet means more searching.