Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partnership on AI

Re:Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partne... by coldtea on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @09:46PM (#12602775)

>* I can think you can see the point I'm making: yes, Apple has a big pile of cash, a fat amount of profit and high stock value. However, Alphabet its influence and reach is far, far beyond that of Apple. Its just not as flashy & visible.*

Yeah, Alphabet is bigger in every way that counts except those two inconsequential things for companies: revenue and profit.

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Re:Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partne... by wstrange on Wednesday September 28, 2016 @11:03PM (#12603043)

The iPhone exploited a rift in the space-time fabric.

The right features at the right time, everybody had to have one and the margins are totally insane.

That can't last. The market is nearing saturation, and competitive pressures will erode margins.

It seems unlikely they will have another product that generates as much cash as the iPhone.

They will still be a very profitable company, but perhaps not the cash printing machine that we have seen over the last 5 years.

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Re:Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partne... by coldtea on Thursday September 29, 2016 @04:21AM (#12603940)

The exact same thing holds for Google Search. They have not generated any product that brings as much cash as search ads (not even close) -- and that's since 1998 or so.

Google Docs, Google +, Google Glass (lol) etc never went anywhere much, revenue wise, and even Android is mostly a loss as far as Google is concerned, even including licenses and mobile ads (makes a good buck for Samsung though).

> The market is nearing saturation, and competitive pressures will erode margins.

They serve the top end of the market (neither feature phones, not "just give me some smartphone free with the contract") where there are not much competitive pressures and they've been milking more profit than all Android shops combined at that. Besides, that we have been kept hearing since 2008 when Android appeared, and it hasn't even happened in the desktop/laptop space (the sell 5-10% of PCs and get 45% of the PC profits).

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Re:Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partne... by dzhiurgis on Thursday September 29, 2016 @06:31AM (#12604307)

Google has not made anything that generates the profit, but they still can pull some levers to make their search even more difficult (remove verbatim for example) so you'd spend more time on it (thus generate more ad money).

Also they've got those cute/silly moonshots that just might pan out.

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Re:Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Create Partne... by hyperbovine on Thursday September 29, 2016 @01:19AM (#12603429)

Actually only profit matters. If I offered to sell you $2 billion worth of anything for $1 billion, voila, billion dollars in revenue.

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