Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-management-shuffle-points-to-retreat-from-alphabet-experiment-11575579677

by ilyaeck • 7 years ago

216 208 7 years ago

wsj.com

varjag• 7 years ago

First the Reader, now the Alphabet.

popup213• 7 years ago

It will never stop.

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.

dylan6044• 7 years ago

After they axed Reader, I stopped using anything from the G

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.

tyingq5• 7 years ago

If you're having trouble reading it: https://outline.com/pGLZ6U

onreact• 7 years ago

Thank you! Just what I needed.

Does not work on my Firefox though as block sneaky redirects.

bitpush• 7 years ago

I dont know how what you did is legal.

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.

tyingq5• 7 years ago

We have different views on this topic. Surely Outline is capable of taking a reasonable sample of what they are serving up, and seeing that the vast majority of it violates their terms. Throwing up a disclaimer page doesn't change that. Their policy is also contradicted by the "about" blurb on the bottom of the page "Outline is a free service for reading and annotating news articles." As far as I know, most news articles have a copyright.

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.

dzdt• 7 years ago

As usual, I like Matt Levine's take. [1]

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...

mantap5• 7 years ago

That seems way more idealistic somehow. More likely, with a more standard corporate governance Google will begin to rot from within. Apple certainly made more profits under Cook than Jobs, but innovation has slowed to a crawl and he has failed to diversify Apple away from having one product (instead he just added a bunch of accessory products and services). The last thing Google needs is to double down on ads, it takes 2 minutes to block them.

ben_w• 7 years ago

It takes us two minutes to block ads. Everyone on this site is a tiny minority who finds this sort of thing easy.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

abalone4• 7 years ago

innovation has slowed to a crawl

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.

jacquesm• 7 years ago

Google will begin to rot from within

Continue, not begin.

scarface7422• 7 years ago

Since Tim has taken charge, they’ve become much more diversified. The watch and the AirPod business is larger and will probably be longer lasting than the iPod business, the iPad is much more than a big iPhone, and they are in services.

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?

riffraff• 7 years ago

he has failed to diversify Apple away from having one produc

isn't Apple+ the largest diversification Apple has had in a long time?

raxxorrax• 7 years ago

I disagree on the criticism of Apple, since they do try to innovate, but I think you are spot on on Google embracing a conservative business culture centered on selling attention.

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.

ksec• 7 years ago

but innovation has slowed to a crawl and he has failed to diversify Apple away from having one product (instead he just added a bunch of accessory products and services).

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.

Animats• 7 years ago

Non-AMP page:[1]

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...

ngold• 7 years ago

"There is a bit of a walking-away-from-Omelas element to this—you get to think about driverless cars and human immortality because in some dingy basement ad metrics are being tortured—and it was a lot easier to forget the, uh, all the internet stuff in 2015 than it is in 2019."

One of the best and most tragic short fiction stories ever written. It is scary how accurate the metaphor is.

RomanBob• 7 years ago

Are you referring to walking away from omelas?

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.

hammock• 7 years ago

the expectation is a more standard corporate focus on making profits from its ventures in some defined timeline.

That's a reasonable prediction. It's the way Sundar started running Google anyway (demanding profits of the non-ads products or killing them).

melling2• 7 years ago

Google’s attempt to be a modern day Bell Labs was the one thing that set them apart.

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...

drawkbox6• 7 years ago

Looks like the product/engineering/creative focused time of Google is giving way to the metric/marketing/MBA/McKinsey people for a fully pedal to the metal push into their Ballmer phase.

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g

Gustomaximus• 7 years ago

Value creation is still around but they move from building it to buying it.

sorenjan• 7 years ago

The product people get driven out from the decision making, and history repeats itself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AxZofbMGpM

chooseaname• 7 years ago

When will technology/product/engineering/creative companies learn that the value creation is more important than the value extraction?

When MBAs stop thinking that every penny has to be returned to investors.

tootie• 7 years ago

It's sorta what Elon Musk is doing except he's intending his moon shots to be viable businesses.

andbberger2• 7 years ago

Except not really at all. Musk and co have a mandate to be profitable and don't have a vast advertising fortune to fund fundamental research with.

Merrill• 7 years ago

Not every science project results in a commercially viable product. Remember Bell Labs bubble memories and round lead acid batteries?

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.

melling2• 7 years ago

The discovery of cosmic background radiation wasn't commercially viable either.

https://www.bell-labs.com/about/history-bell-labs/stories-ch...

hooande• 7 years ago

It's possible that the idea of a Bell Labs is outdated, because individuals now have more access to information and cheap resources than they did in the 50s and 60s.

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.

gherkinnn• 7 years ago

How many problems can be solved in a garage with little to no infrastructure?

to11mtm• 7 years ago

Ehh, I'm less optimistic about this ever since the changes to US patent law. The guy in a garage has far fewer protections than they used to.

andbberger2• 7 years ago

Information may be freer than ever but capital is more concentrated than ever. You can't do much without capital.

smacktoward2• 7 years ago

Basic research is still very expensive. The "two guys in a garage" model is about reaping the fruits of basic research, e.g. taking something invented in a lab somewhere and turning it into an actual product. Take away the labs, though, and you're taking away the seeds that the people in the garages plant, water and serve up on plates.

jfoster• 7 years ago

Any investor in Alphabet for the long term would hope this isn't the case. It also doesn't make sense at a time when some of their moonshots are looking as though they could pay off. (Eg. Waymo)

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.

petra6• 7 years ago

The problem is funding: let's say funding a self-driving project takes $5B-$10B and 15 years, until it starts to become a real, scalable business.

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.

xyzzyz• 7 years ago

Softbank has dumped $10B in WeWork, a glorified office rental company. If you think there are no investors willing to put $10B in self driving cars, you might still be living in 2005.

MarkMc• 7 years ago

I've been a Google shareholder for more than 10 years, and I would love it if Alphabet spun off Waymo so I could dump my Waymo stock.

My view is that the market undervalues Google and overvalues Waymo but unfortunately Mr Page and Mr Brin force me to invest in both.

repsilat• 7 years ago

Funny, I'm sure a lot of people think the opposite, and that only proves your point more.

buboard• 7 years ago

sounds like a good time for a "traitorous 8" group from google's vast AI teams to jump out of advertising and start monetizing their plans.

tim333• 7 years ago

Placing the head of Google, which contributes more than 99% of Alphabet’s sales, at the helm of it could call into question the entire purpose of Alphabet

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.

endorphone• 7 years ago

The market cap of Waymo is $0 because it has no market cap.

[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.

drawkbox6• 7 years ago

Waymo is in the value creation phase, business/marketing/analysts may not value it as much but there is a goldmine under it.

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...

dylan6044• 7 years ago

And for now Waymo's revenue is estimated to be $5M. While Google's revenue is about $160,000M.

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.

ukyrgf• 7 years ago

This isn't an insightful comment, but I just said out loud "what's Waymo again?" after having seen the name here and there for the past decade. Kinda feels dead on arrival.

mav3rick• 7 years ago

Just because you didn't like the name ? They have the least disengagements and more miles than anyone (with a LIDAR).

irrational• 7 years ago

The fact that you linked to an amp version of the page, instead of the real link, is deeply disturbing to me.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-04/alphab...

tssva• 7 years ago

And I was very appreciative of the AMP version being posted. It made for a much better mobile viewing experience than the typical non-AMP experience from Bloomberg.

smt88• 7 years ago

A forced redesign, in this case motivated by AMP, is what gave you that better mobile experience. It is not something inherent to AMP, and in other ways AMP is incredibly harmful.

Most mobile browsers now have "reading mode" anyway.

tyingq5• 7 years ago

In this case, AMP doesn't help much...it's still downloading a ton of crap.

464 requests and 12MB of garbage for an AMP hosted article.

https://imgur.com/tPHaHIO

bitcurious• 7 years ago

How so? The non-amp version loaded basically instantly for me.

StuffedParrot• 7 years ago

If your life was materially impacted by slow mobile speeds you should spend less time on your phone.

nvrspyx2• 7 years ago

Unlike the AMP version, I didn’t have to wait 5+ seconds for the bottom “Signed into Google as ...” banner to disappear to scroll up on the regular site. It made for a worse mobile experience for me.

ignoramous• 7 years ago

And I was very appreciative of the AMP version being posted. It made for a much better mobile viewing experience...

You should try outline: https://outline.com/XT5ULM

slowmovintarget• 7 years ago

Reader mode shows a blank page.

krilly• 7 years ago

The share button is right there... How do people always miss it when copying links?

emidln• 7 years ago

Why should I use a special share button when my browser already displays the URL and my operating system already enables copy/paste?

shujito• 7 years ago

whateveracct2• 7 years ago

Google makes it a pain in the ass to get to the non-AMP version. You have to click the little (i) and then the link.

stephenr3• 7 years ago

On Safari at least, hitting the share sheet button and then “copy” will always return the canonical URL (which I believe the amp standard requires sites to define)

dang• 7 years ago

I changed the link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21730007 and detached this subthread and marked it off topic.

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...

stephenr3• 7 years ago

So maybe that should inform the powers that be, that the canonical URL should be the one that's used by default?

giancarlostoro2• 7 years ago

If they had assigned a new CEO for Google it could of not looked this way. However this looks bad especially when you hear "We the People" talk about how some of these tech giants need to be broken up. This is not going to help them. I wonder who the next Bell will be.[0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

basch4• 7 years ago

why is it assumed they wont appoint a new Google CEO in the next 6 months to a year?

tyingq5• 7 years ago

If I were Sundar Pichai, I'd probably view being the Alphabet Chief, and not the Google Chief, as a downgrade from just being the Google Chief. That was fine for Larry and Sergey with their founder's stock and deliberate desire to be somewhat disconnected. I don't think Sundar has either of those.

m23khan• 7 years ago

I wonder if Google’s project Sidewalk Labs in Toronto would be affected as well.

crazygringo3• 7 years ago

It has always seemed strange to me that Google become part of Alphabet, instead of vice-versa.

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.

jorblumesea• 7 years ago

Given that Alphabet was basically Larry and Seigei's personal pet projects and the goal was for Google to fund these projects, it's easier to funnel money up instead of out.

puranjay2• 7 years ago

Wasn't YouTube a separate entity under Alphabet, and not a part of Google? That alone would be a $100B company

sunstone• 7 years ago

Alternatively it could be seen as retreating from the Larry and Sergey experiment.

neonate• 7 years ago

http://archive.is/zBtGp

sys_64738• 7 years ago

Google is simply an ad company with a search engine that monetizes all your data. They exist to serve ads. The rest is window dressing.

summerlight• 7 years ago

Larry and Sergey still holds more than 51% of voting stocks. IMO, this is the only thing that matters unless they delegate all the decisions to Sundar. Although I expect "other bets" to be forced to evolve into more realistic businesses but no radical structural changes.

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".

notatoad2• 7 years ago

unless they delegate all the decisions to Sundar.

My understanding from the rumour mill is that's essentially what's been happening for a while now.

partingshots• 7 years ago

This is why without a technological background or acumen, you’ll never be able to find the investments that succeed based on innovation.

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).

HSO• 7 years ago

That Google pretty much remains a one-trick pony after billions of dollars thrown against the wall speaks volumes about the glorification of "success" (or misattribution thereof) and the value of all the hagiographies in its wake.

abvdasker• 7 years ago

I wouldn't call Google a one-trick pony. They've created a bunch of wildly successful products -- Search, Maps, Android, Chrome -- that help feed their ad business.

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).

Google management shuffle points to retreat from Alphabet experiment

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