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A comment on Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World. Parent comment

Re:Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the ... by TheOtherHobbes on Monday February 01, 2016 @09:25PM (#11017299)
Data centers are just the modern version of what used to be called plant and machinery, and Google is just an updated industrial corp in the tradition of other former and current household names, but with a slightly more colourful logo.

The business focus matters because the ad market is in trouble, and unless Alphabet has something in the pipeline to replace ads, five to ten years from now the company is going to be where Yahoo is today.

This seems hard to imagine now, but no one expected DEC to fail, or HP to turn into that thing it turned into, or Microsoft to sit on a grenade labelled "Windows", or IBM to drift off to the margins of the web - and so on.

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Re:Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the ... by jonknee on Tuesday February 02, 2016 @12:18AM (#11017741)
> The business focus matters because the ad market is in trouble, and unless Alphabet has something in the pipeline to replace ads, five to ten years from now the company is going to be where Yahoo is today.

What evidence shows the ad business in trouble? Alphabet recorded revenue and profit in the quarter.

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Re:Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the ... by magicalist on Tuesday February 02, 2016 @08:18PM (#11024093)
> This seems hard to imagine now, but no one expected DEC to fail, or HP to turn into that thing it turned into, or Microsoft to sit on a grenade labelled "Windows", or IBM to drift off to the margins of the web - and so on.

Sure, but for every unexpected floundering there are many more predictions of failure that never occurred. I'm not sure how unexpected failures in general give any insight beyond that they exist.

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