Re:The death of Google
by nostrademons on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @05:45PM
(#18180070)
Heh. My first project at Google made roughly $100M/year. It was shut down by my department (Search) after 3 years because it "didn't move the needle", resurrected by Ads for another couple years because it apparently moved the needle enough to make it worthwhile for them, then shut down for good. I remember joking "Well, could I buy it off you if you don't want it? I'd love to have a $100M business", but it was a little too integrated with Google's systems & salesforce to make that feasible.
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Too bad they don't have Amazon's foresight to platformize their systems and salesforce.
That is a very salient observation. Of course if they did that they would lose people who would step out, start their own business and just rent Google's infrastructure, but as AWS has shown that could become a meaningful part of their annual return anyway.
I doubt it was lack of vision. For a long time, one of Google's most important competitive edges was it's efficient infrastructure. With AWS coming in and Google moving to become an AI company, data probably became a more serious competitive advantage and they started Google Cloud Project
Re:The death of Google
by IAmGraydon on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @09:05PM
(#18181148)
$100M in net revenue? What was the cost to start, run and maintain this project?
Re:The death of Google
by nostrademons on Tuesday October 09, 2018 @11:35PM
(#18181761)
3 engineers. I (and a teammate) carried a pager for about 6 months but then Search SRE took over ops; it shared backends with other search systems and was primarily a frontend innovation so the marginal cost was minimal. There was some ongoing AdSales cost for it - basically we built a tool to visualize related queries for your search [1] and then AdSales got a hold of it and said "Woah, we can show this to clients and tell them 'These are all the other queries you should be advertising on'", and then the clients spent a whole lot more money advertising on a whole lot more queries.
[1] https://www.ducttapemarketing.com/using-google-wonder-wheel-...