https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...
Seriously off topic. There have been two huge threads about AMP in the last week and something like 9 of them in the last year: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Most mobile browsers now have "reading mode" anyway.
464 requests and 12MB of garbage for an AMP hosted article.
You should try outline: https://outline.com/XT5ULM
Make a lot of money in advertising and spend some of it to invent the future.
Without the second part, the entire company changes.
We need another company to take the mantle:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/innovation...
When will technology/product/engineering/creative companies learn that the value creation is more important than the value extraction? With value creation there is always the ability to value extract. With value extraction the focus, and little research and development or innovative value creation, eventually it stagnates and sputters.
The product before the sales/marketing is key. A product of value can always be sold or marketed. You can't sell/market your way to a product.
As a developer, and investor, in Google this concerns me the move away from Alphabet, moonshots and research and development. The open mode is needed just like the closed mode [1]. The open mode is where value is realized, the closed mode is where it is produced [1]. Value is created in a state of play or creativity, this is usually the first thing to go in these phase changes at a company.
This happens at every company that creates immense value, eventually the research and development is hard to quantify the value so they cut and cut like Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, eventually it is just a stump and all the grace and built up value is tapped.
When MBAs stop thinking that every penny has to be returned to investors.
So it is probably time to sort through the Alphabet ventures, pick the one or two that have a good chance, invest in those, kill the rest, and start some new ones.
https://www.bell-labs.com/about/history-bell-labs/stories-ch...
Instead of needing a big company to bring the best minds together and give them money, random people in garages can have good ideas and build proof of concepts relatively easily.
Maybe.
Page and Brin ran Alphabet as a highly funded system of moonshot programs with near-infinite runway to make profits, which is unusual or unique. Basically it only worked that way because Page and Brin were idealistic visionary gazillionaires who were bored of thinking about the somewhat dirty business of selling targetted ads. With a more standard corporate governance under a common CEO with the google ad business, the expectation is a more standard corporate focus on making profits from its ventures in some defined timeline.
But read Levine's version; it has detail and humor and insight I can't convey in a summary!
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...
This is so typical of Apple criticism. They did do well with the iPhone and Mac that now any new innovations seem boring in comparison. It’s wrong.
The Apple Watch came out under Cook. That is more than an “accessory.” It’s a new platform, new OS variant, etc. It’s dominating smart watches.
The AirPods are pretty innovative in terms of the fine grained details that have made them super successful.
Latest OS builds included evidence of stereoscopic glasses in the pipeline.
Remember Apple isn’t always the first with stuff, even smartphones. Their innovations are more around key details and hardware/software integration that makes the whole system work like magic.
Compare this chart to Google’s
https://sixcolors.com/images/content/2019/financials-2019-7-...
The iPhone was a once in a lifetime thing. Even in 2007 there were 1 billion phones a year being sold (Apple said they wanted to capture 1% of the market by selling 10 million in its first year).
By definition, what electronic market can be much larger than one that has a 80%+ penetration?
Continue, not begin.
Directly to advertisers and indirectly through content creators, so they have multiple channels at least.
Not an Apple fan at all, but if I could pick an employer, Apple actually is on a track to become more favorable. Still, their locked down environments aren't really interesting if you don't care about monetizing software directly.
Apple has definitely slowed down quite a bit under Cook. But that is comparing from Apple's best to Current Apple. iOS 13 and macOS quality has definitely slipped. Along with the extremely long denial and no reaction pattern of Mac, Mac Pro and MacBook Pro Keyboard problems. But they are still Innovating like hell on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPod. Getting a decent iPhone out every year, which also happens to be the best selling Smartphone around the world is no small task. Services is also growing, although I am still not too fond of the idea of Apple TV, Arcade and News.
Those so call "bunch of accessory and services" would have been a Fortune 2000 company on its own, and likely to be Fortune 500 soon if not already.
isn't Apple+ the largest diversification Apple has had in a long time?
One of the best and most tragic short fiction stories ever written. It is scary how accurate the metaphor is.
I don't see why people think that story is in anyway interesting or tragic. It's non-sensical, when reality isn't so. It's only deep if you have never read an account of a war or read history or basically know anything about how anything works outside of your suburb.
Alphabet's problem is simply that they mostly failed. Robots - fail. ISPs (Fiber, Loon) - fail. Self-driving cars - in test, but a long way from profits. Android predates Alphabet and is really part of the ad system.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...
That's a reasonable prediction. It's the way Sundar started running Google anyway (demanding profits of the non-ads products or killing them).
I think this gives a false impression of the value of the non Google bits of Alphabet
Currently the market cap of Alphabet is $924bn and "Waymo is worth about $105 billion" (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-27/waymo-val...) which would make that 11% of the valuation and probably other bits of other bets are worth something too.
[edit: note that the parent comment originally spoke to the `market cap' of Waymo before an edit, giving context to this reply]
An analyst independently made up a number, likely to justify an outsized Google target number. There have been rumors that Google will seek outside investments in Waymo that might legitimize some valuation, but they haven't.
And for now Waymo's revenue is estimated to be $5M. While Google's revenue is about $160,000M.
So I don't think they're giving a false impression of anything. Google has been pouring enormous sums of Adword cash into Waymo and it's still a stuttering business ten years later.
Waymo may not be a revenue behemoth currently but there is immense value there not only to self-driving but to maps improvement and more.
I am not a fan of software patents but they have surpassed Toyota in patents [1] and there are hundreds of patents from Waymo [2].
Everyday in Arizona Waymo vehicles you see them on every block.
The value extractors may not like not being able to extract value yet, but the product, research and value creation is very high and contributes today to improving Google product offerings outside of Waymo such as Maps [3].
Waymo has waymo value than is being extracted because it is still emerging from the product value creation nebula that business/marketing/analysts can't see and don't value as much as product/engineering/creative people.
[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Business-trends/Google-s-Wa...
[2] https://patents.justia.com/assignee/waymo-llc
[3] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-10-09/waymo-mapp...
Why the decision to write $160,000M vs $160B? Was it so the same as the previous $5M number? Even still, it seems unnatural to me.
That said, it makes sense from the Page/Brin perspective, perhaps. It's a lot more difficult to 10x a company that's already worth $Y billion. Perhaps better to start the ventures separately in a way that is more exciting to investors.
My view is that the market undervalues Google and overvalues Waymo but unfortunately Mr Page and Mr Brin force me to invest in both.
And that's probably optimistic.
Who will fund that ?
I wonder if Google was too ambitious. Maybe if they focused all the effort on making trucks that could only ride the highway safely, in limited conditions, they would have had a working business by now.
Does not work on my Firefox though as block sneaky redirects.
From https://www.outline.com/dmca.html
Notice to Users If someone else might own the copyright to it, don't submit it. Outline is for reading pages that:
you own the rights to, is in the public domain, constitutes fair use, or you have consent of the copyright holder.
If we find you repeatedly submitting content that does not meet the above criteria, we will block you from using our service.
Also, sites that want paywalls are technically capable of doing that in a way that archive.is, outline.com, etc, can't scrape them. They don't, though, because they want the best of both worlds. Want to charge for your content? Fine, do that, but you lose exposure from search engines, HN, Facebook, etc.
Curious how they are going to "block me" though. I don't have an account with Outline.
It seems like a much more honest approach would always have been for Google to be one company... for Alphabet to be a separate one... and for, say, Google to own 33% of Alphabet, for Larry and Sergei personally to own another 33%, and outside investors to own the rest and be the ones principally determining its own, separate valuation.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
After they axed Reader, I stopped using anything from the G. Watching them build legit software, gain users, and then dissolve those services over and over and over again had the effect of suffocating any further curiosity towards their products.
Like a Skinner mouse, they literally train you not to give a shit anymore.
I never used Reader, but did anything else come along to fill the void? I ask as I am curious on the market when G kills a product. When G kills off a product, does the rest of the world just assume that if G couldn't make it work then it must not be worth doing? I know HN readers were vocal about the death of lots of G products, but HN readers are edge cases in the grand scheme.
And another thing to consider is that a significant portion of Alphabet's value already comes from potential growth of "other bets" (e.g. Waymo). The major driver of digital ads' growth has been cannibalization of traditional media ads budget. This is no way sustainable over the next decade so the growth will be eventually saturated. Unless Google can find another strong driver (Maybe Cloud?), it's pretty natural to keep investing "other bets".
My understanding from the rumour mill is that's essentially what's been happening for a while now.
What should be scary if you're at the top of the company is that Google has not had a home-run product in a very long time. It's a strong signal that wherever made Google special in the past is gone (though that doesn't mean it couldn't come back).
Because there’s no financials to analyze, the companies that succeed this way basically go from making nothing / losing money for many years before all of a sudden becoming exponentially profitable. The signal doesn’t exist on the financial side, which is why so many people in Wall Street often fail so badly when valuing hard technology companies.
It’s why a company like Waymo will in 10 years be valued more than the entirety of Google, yet many in finance won’t even have an inkling of this in the present day.
Also, by the way, this is why I believe the venture capital industry in Silicon Valley was able to uniquely succeed in the beginning due to a heavy concentration in extremely technical investors compared to the rest of the United States and the world in general (i.e. the VC capital of the world is in Silicon Valley and not New York for a reason).
