When I learned corporate finance it was pretty much a given that a conglomerate should trade at a discount.

Now Google is somewhat insulated from share pressures because they have two classes of stock. This makes the owners think they can use it as their personal playground.

But Google will eventually succumb to shareholder pressure. Why? Because so many employees are soooo heavily invested in Google stock. So even if Larry and Sergey want to do all this cool stuff their executive staff is incented to follow the market. And not only the executive staff but employees at almost all levels. Just so much comp is tied to share prices.

Just think if you were a Google exec with your net worth tied up in Google stock and you're charged with making strategic decisions about where to invest Google's capital budget, you're going to be pretty tempted to direct it towards revenue generating opportunities over and above "science fair" projects. Sure, you'll do your best to kowtow to the CEO's personal projects, but ultimately you and your fellow execs are going to behave more like hedge fund managers. And I wouldn't blame anyone who does.

As you allude, Google's ability to deliver depends on the share price. While they are free from activist shareholders, they aren't free from competition for talent. A rising stock price keeps employees happy. Employees with lots of out of the money options get jealous when their friends experience IPOs.

The OPs point still stands regardless; unless for whatever reason you think you'll get 1) a windfall of stock grants that are 2) calculate from some actual monetary amount divided by the current stock price, you want the value of your stock to go up.

This is in contrast to actually purchasing a stock on the market.

So when the rsu has vested, it is converted to normal stock, where you can sell on the market for cash?

With the smaller Google-specific "well but" limit that insider trading rules restrict employees from trading in the company stock except for narrow trading windows after the company's quarterly reports.

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rule-10b5-1.asp

Starting up interesting long-term projects and then canning them at the first sign of a cloudy quarterly forecast is not how you compete for top talent. It just makes the entire company look spastic and irresolute.

Google/Alphabet is in a good position to build the next Bell Labs. Instead, they're building the next Lucent. That's a bummer.

I think most Google employees would fall into either (1) those who don't have enough stocks to care much about stock price, and (2) those who have too much money to care.

Google's secretiveness is hurting them. They don't get public feedback when their management screws up. This allows screwups to continue longer. If their R&D people were presenting papers at conferences and filing patents, as AT&T, IBM, and Xerox did in the days when they had big labs, this problem would have been caught earlier.

This is a downside of trying to protect intellectual property by secrecy, rather than patents. You lose external feedback.

That said, in science bad management is kind of the norm. Many big labs in academia are horribly run yet consistently publish huge results. In industry the counterbalance is the ability to easily move on to a different employer, which seems to be what's happening. If true, the bad management should correct itself. One hopes.

Full disclosure: I work at a company that could be seen as in the same area as Verily.

Boston Robotics and Nest were both heavily characterized as having issues working with Google proper. And both Nest and now Verily have both been recently characterized as having issues with leadership.

Apparently Tony Fadell told the Dropcam founder that he hadn't 'earned the right' to report to him.

It seems Alphabet companies have a lot of trouble brewing these days.

The goal of Verily is to "tackle big mysteries of disease prevention and health". That's rather vague and they even admit that they will "evolve the mission" over time.

Bell labs was perhaps the closest thing to having a bunch of smart people getting together and solving interesting problems-- unfortunately, today, in the era where results-oriented project managers run the show, magical places like Bell labs are a thing of the past.

To be fair, also in an era when Ma Bell doesn't have a virtual monopoly over telecommunications in the United States--may have worked for the time but really wasn't such a wonderful thing. Bell Labs did do a lot of wonderful things but they resulted in part from the fact that they were funded by an organization which was essentially insulated from market competition.

It's not clear to me whether it's bad for academic scientists to leave for industry- that includes me and a number of people I have recruited from academia to work in industry. It's worked well for me, but it was very unpleasant for my cohort to expect to become professors, when they couldn't, due to the NIH budget freeze.

But were they all intending to do that in the first place?

Do you think most people who go to graduate school are intending to become academics? Lots of people say that, but it's not what I see in PhD students - many want to go into industry from the start.

I don't know a single person in my program who actually said they wanted to work in industry (other than the company founders).

Perhaps it's different in other fields.

For the engineering PhD programs (chemical, biomedical, electrical, and mechanical) I'm familiar with at (what was once termed) Carnegie R1 universities, the split ends up being around 50/50 for academia vs industry track after graduation. For bio at the same schools, I saw the same as you, near unity for academia. Of my engineering PhD cohort, I was the only 1 of 14 who founded a startup.

Furthermore, industry is notoriously tight with the results it produces; even if, internally, it's producing good science, the fact that this science isn't being broadly shared with other people is a huge drag on the pace of progress. Academic openness is indispensible to scientific advancements.

2. Suppose you don't care about providing steady scientific employment for individual scientists but do value scientific progress (I find this position contradictory to the point of absurdity, but let's roll with it). Even in this case, cyclical funding cuts are still a source of waste:

a) society essentially wasted money subsidizing the education of people who are now not using their training (some might be, but probably many aren't).

b) funding freezes are often temporary, but by the time spending rebounds all those scientists you spent billions of dollars training have moved on to indsutry (research or no). So now you have to double down and train a new generation in order to make progress.

Quantum Physics was more or less a governmental sponsored project. The Internet was a governmental sponsored project.

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge is the ultimate risk taking and governments not private institutions should perform this as government are the ones who benefit the most.

The point is not that government is better at innovating than private organizations it's that they are better suited for actual research in things that doesn't have a market yet.

Private companies on the other hand are much better at taking knowledge which can be applied to the market to then run with it. But up until that point I think it's fair to say that we would want to sponsor research into basic science for the good of the whole society.

Most major discoveries are accidents, it's those accidents which leads to market application.

Instead history shows us that you can't find something by looking for it. I.e. the most important research we have done haven't had a market to begin with but rather have let the pursue of knowledge be the primary motivator.

This was not the result of free market competition.

Edit: ok, maybe not _every_ way. Pipes are "inspired by an idea from Multics". https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/hist.html

Many of the things that Multics had eventually made their way back into various UNIX derivatives, because they were great features that a modern OS wants to have. Multics was way ahead of its time in many ways.

Interesting. Can you name some?

Theere's plenty of waste in the government, but you'd be hard-pressed to find the typical types of government waste or incompetence in for example the NSF. Unless you believe basic science is wasteful I guess.

"Galileo Galilei most humbly prostrates himself before Your Highness ... to write of having decided to present to Your Highness a telescope that will be a great help in maritime and land enterprises. ... This telescope has the advantage of discovering the ships of the enemy two hours before they can be seen with the natural vision and to distinguish the number and quality of the ships and to judge their strength ..."

Much of the most impactful research has taken decades to play out and the original research didn't necessarily have medical goals, but turned out to be necessary to making progress.

Some companies have high enough profit margins to dedicate large budgets to research with no immediate applications. Genentech is the first one that comes to mind, but there are others. It takes a great deal of courage to fund this sort of research when you are a CSO or CEO because of constant calls for immediate profits.

I've seen this play out for so long- in biology, in physics, and IT- that I've become inured to the idea that most good ideas take decades to play out until the profits arrive.

I am not entirely certain whether it's correct to say Pasteur was working for the government. When a scientist reaches his level of stature, she pays her own ticket.

The extreme irony of you writing this comment on the Internet should not go unnoticed. Are you really unaware of the extent to which the government underpins all of the interesting long range research in the country?

AT&T and ITU and others never would have been able to do this with the tech they promoted- we'd all be using 56Kbps modems to call BBSes today if they had won.

This is such a ridiculous statement I can't tell if it's sarcasm (from the post I guess not - but that's the kind og argument I'd make if I wanted to make a strawman argument on this), extreeme hyperbole or you really beleive it ?