Google has never struggled as a company. Amazon barely survived the dot com bust, Apple almost went bankrupt and even Microsoft had to pivot or become the next IBM after Balmer and missing out on mobile.
Facebook being still founder led and having the advantage of knowing how fleeting social media networks have been in the past, keeps Zuckerburg paranoid.
Google’s ad revenue is covering up a lot of project/program mismanagement.
Them going all in on the 'metaverse' is basically 'microsoft missing mobile'-tier. I'm interested in it and even still I haven't seen a single impressive thing yet. It seems like a worse product than VR second-life. They're trying to sell an MMO to people who don't play games.
The internet is already a 'metaverse', and I think the role of our digital lives will continue to expand with increasing proliferation of consumer electronics, barring a major world war or natural cataclysm. But Meta is just trying to force a paradigm shift and EVERYONE sees right through it.
Having a golden goose that has very little risk of going away can definitely be a curse.
You also can’t block Amazon and Facebook ads.
On the YouTube side, you have TikTok that is becoming more competitive for attention and maybe Twitch (???)
Who gives Google money and what do they give Google money for?
When I was working for B2B companies, our “customers” were the IT department and the companies. Our customers weren’t the end users. We tried our best to make the software easy for the end users. But we marketed to the CxOs and made sure they were happy.
In the case of Amazon Retail. They (we) have to convince the customer to give us money in exchange for goods and services.
Right, and Google needs to convince users to love the products and continue using them, so that ads can be shown, and maybe even despite ads being shown.
I have noticed a strong sentiment against paying for products even here on HN where the average user probably makes quite a bit of money. People would rather block ads than pay for YouTube Premium, for example. It shows me that ads are actually a pretty good business model because if "wealthy" people won't pay for products, less wealthy people definitely won't.
Search for “bicycles” on Google with Ad blockers turned off. How do you like the experience?
It sucking less than all other alternatives is a pretty good reason to like it. There is a lot of vested interest in good search engines and the fact that no competitors, even from behemoths like Microsoft, have been able to do any better shows that it's a hard problem to solve.
I think a lot of people are naturally resistive to change and are stuck in the past when the web was simple and 10 links was all it took. Nowadays, the web is so complex that it's nearly impossible to tell what you want to see off a broad query. In my experience, it guesses very well and the complaints about Search having gotten worse are really complaints about the Internet as a whole having gotten worse. What used to be dedicated websites are now uncrawlable pages on a large company's website (e.g. Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, etc). I personally like all of the "onebox" results that don't require me to go elsewhere -- search has become much faster for me in that way.
I actually really don't like Amazon's retail site. It's complex and it's not clear why I see so many repeated identical items as separate listings. One a single listing, I can choose alternative sellers than the default. Is that linking to other listings or is still the same listing? Who knows. It hasn't changed or improved in decades.
They literally left a city streets in ruins after abandoning one of their products.
https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-...
Google is not some fly by night startup. But people have learned to treat it like one and not depend on their products.
I remember back in the days you could have three or so different image viewers created by Microsoft installed on your machine (Office had its own for example). Then there was MSN Messenger, Windows Messenger, Skype, Skype for business, Lync.
That being said, I think Google far surpassed Microsoft in creating things that get shut down and have been for the last decade at least while Microsoft has improved on that front.
Pixel - Google sold less than 1 million Pixels last quarter
https://www.androidpolice.com/google-selling-more-pixels-202...
Apple sells more phones than that in 2 days.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/299153/apple-smartphone-...
Android is not really all that profitable and Google still ends up paying Apple $18 billion+ a year to actually reach mobile consumers with money to spend. The $26 Billion in profit number was over 6 years
https://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2016/01/21/oracle-s...
Cloud - GCP isn’t profitable
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252523200/Google-results...
As far as GSuite, it’s not getting much uptake in the enterprise
https://www.saasgenius.com/blog/why-office-365-is-overtaking...
So, hear me out. What do you think Google would need to pay Apple if Android didn't exist, and everyone? Would it be the same amount as in reality, or would it perhaps be way more? Pretty obviously the latter. So that delta + Play store sales are the economic value of Android.
> The $26 Billion in profit number was over 6 years
That you think a product going from literally nothing to $26 billion in cumulative profit in 6 years would be disappointing is just totally detached from reality. To put this in perspective, in that same time period of 2009-2015 (which I assume your "6 years" means) Amazon made a total of $3 billion in profit.
A better criticism would be that the number is unlikely to be correct, since Oracle would have inflated it as much as humanly possible for the legal case. But that's not the argument you made.
Considering that Apple has most of the affluent users in every market, would it be that much more?
Apple makes more in mobile from Google than google makes from Android more than likely.
> That you think a product going from literally nothing to $26 billion in cumulative profit in 6 years would be disappointing is just totally detached from reality. To put this in perspective, in that same time period of 2009-2015 (which I assume your "6 years" means) Amazon made a total of $3 billion in profit.
Amazon was a low margin retail company and was spending billions on infrastructure. Android already had more market share than iOS by then and was already dominant. How much do you think Apple made on the iPhone during that time period? Has Apple or any other BigTech company had to pay a direct competitor for placement?
> A better criticism would be that the number is unlikely to be correct, since Oracle would have inflated it as much as humanly possible for the legal case. But that's not the argument
That number came from Google in court and wasn’t redacted.
Oh, I'm absolutely sure that's the case. But basically every business on earth is less profitable than the iPhone. Are you saying that every other product is a miserable failure due to that?
Note they're totally different businesses. Apple primarily sells premium hardware, Google primarily licenses an OS to other phone manufacturers.
> Amazon was a low margin retail company and was spending billions on infrastructure.
So? Your argument is that Android is some kind of a product failure because it "only" made $26 billion in profit in its first six years. But what you're ignoring is that that is an absurd level of success. It's 8 times all of Amazon in the timeframe. What Amazon product had that kind of a growth curve from zero, ever? I would bet literally nothing.
If you applied this logic consistently, you should be ripping into Amazon's decades-long failure at creating a hit product. But instead you're making excuses about "low margins".
> Has Apple or any other BigTech company had to pay a direct competitor for placement?
Yes, like all the time? E.g. I'm sure that all of Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have bought ads on Google and YouTube. It's not some kind of indication of business failure on their part [0]; they've determined that those ads have a positive ROI.
[0] Though obviously Amazon's search engine did fail before being killed, like so many other Amazon products.
> That number came from Google in court and wasn’t redacted.
Ok, I'll stand corrected then. But I still have no idea of anyone could argue that's a failure.
Microsoft licenses Windows to other PC manufacturers, the PC market was much smaller than mobile even back then, do you think they only made $26 billion in profit over the time period licensing Windows? In hindsight, “missing mobile” was the best thing that could have happened to Microsoft. If you were a company right now, would you rather be “Android, Inc” or “Windows, Inc”?
> Yes, like all the time? E.g. I'm sure that all of Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have bought ads on Google and YouTube. It's not some kind of indication of business failure on their part [0]; they've determined that those ads have a positive ROI.
Do you think either spends anywhere near the amount?
Windows was at that point a 25 year old business, not one starting from zero. Why in the world would they have the same profit in that time period? Windows absolutely did not make $26 billion in the first 6 years of its life. Does that make Windows a failure?
I have no idea of whether Windows is more profitable than Android right now. You don't either. But both are clearly incredibly successful products.
Again: what product that successful has Amazon ever launched? Just a single example of something that made $26 billion of profit in its first 6 years. Should be easy to find, given Amazon has probably launched thousands of products, many in extremely lucrative high margin areas. And when you fail to name one, maybe consider that your theories on how good Amazon is at creating projects and how bad Google is might not be entirely correct?
> Do you think either spends anywhere near the amount?
Of course not. Why does that matter? Positive ROI is positive ROI.
6 years in the life of Windows , there was nowhere near the number of PCs being sold every year as Android devices.
But I can guarantee you that even from the day that Microsoft license the first version of DOS to IBM that it made more per license sold than Google makes from each Android sold.
> Again: what product that successful has Amazon ever launched?
I see that you refuse to compare Android to its most realistic counterpart - Apple.
The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and even the Apple Watch (Cook said that Apple Watch revenues exceeded iPod revenue a couple of years ago) were all more successful in the first 6 years.
The entire point is that Google hasn’t been able to diversify at all *profitably”.
Uh, what? Of course the iPhone is more profitable than Android, and I have already said so in this discussion. If you think that a product needs to reach iPhone numbers to count as successful, I really don't know what to say.
But I note that you are indeed incapable of naming a single Amazon product that was as successful as Android, while still maintaining that Android was somehow a commercial disappointment, while Amazon is a success story. You really don't see the disconnect?
With the side effect that anyone that cares about their career is in a position on the org chart somehow related to Azure, and the current teams taking care of Windows UI frameworks seem filled with interns and contractors, without any background on Windows tooling history, and our expectations of what they should deliver.
But my comments have basically been around Google not having strong focus and not successfully and profitably entering new markets.
* Gorillas.BAS and Microsoft Flight Simulator aside.
** There's the Dynamics line, which I don't think really counts under 'office' given its complexity.
>But Google should have never been so far behind in Cloud.
I emphatically agree. Google had kick ass infrastructure way before most players and squandered it on internal use only. I think it's one of the biggest blunders in its history and shows the lack of vision in places.
That being said, despite the old wives tale that AWS came about because Amazon decided to sell its excess capacity, AWS was started as a separate initiative with completely different infrastructure when Amazon wanted to enter a separate vertical. It was led by Jassy (not technically from a business development standpoint) - a sales guy who looked at the market and went after a need (I refuse to say by “Working Backwards”). Every initiative that Amazon and AWS has starts with the business case, six pagers, PRFAQ’s etc with product managers and program managers involved. I even had to do a couple to get “funding” to spend time on a couple of features to a popular company sponsored open source solution I wanted to work on.
Being successful in the cloud is all about building relationships, knowing how to meet large organizations where they are, not being stuck on “the one true way”, developing and grooming a network of “partners”, etc. It’s very high touch. Microsoft has been doing that since the 80s and AWS had first mover advantage.
I won’t speak to GCP in particular. But none of the above characteristics is part of Google’s DNA.
(obviously there are still exceptions to this, I have lost count on the number of desktop UI frameworks Microsoft has developed in the last 15 years...)
Then again, look at the revenue mix of the other companies to see how well they were able to move into new markets
- Apple - phones, tablets, watches, computers, accessories, services, and even the AppleTV+ series have been getting rave reviews.
Apple Arcade even isn’t in any danger of being cancelled.
- Microsoft - Windows, Server software, Azure is a strong second, at least they didn’t cancel XBox and I bet their streaming game service will be around for awhile.
- Amazon (same disclaimer I work at AWS): Amazon retail, AWS, Twitch, advertising, Prime Video, the Alexa devices
- Facebook - FB proper, WhatsApp, Instagram -yes two of those are acquisitions. But how many acquisitions has Google screwed up completely?
And then you have Google.
- YouTube is believed to be barely break even from a profit standpoint
- it was revealed in the Oracle trial how relatively little Android makes in profit . Yes I realize the numbers are old. But what has changed since then? By the time of the trial, Android already had the dominant market share. Google pays Apple a reported $18 billion a year to be the default search engine. That has to be more than Google is making from Android per year.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-...
After all these years, everything that Google has don outside of advertising has been a failure as far as profitability.
Same can be said for Google, right? Google is playing an entirely different game than having paid-for-products but instead funneling products into the money-printing Ads machine.
>But how many acquisitions has Google screwed up completely?
I actually don't know and am very curious, how many? More or less than other similar companies? From my memory it's not many but I could be very wrong. Firebase for example, is alive and strong and rarely gets mentioned.
I don't think every company needs to have the same type of business model. Google became popular because it made really great products that were all free* which increased adoption. Maybe some of them (like say, Search) would have never gotten popular if they had charged for it right away. I'm not convinced there's a single right path.
>it was revealed in the Oracle trial how relatively little Android makes in profit
It makes sense though, right? I don't even know how Android would make money directly (ok, I do know of ways, not sure if that's how it is) but it's a precursor for making money from the Play Store.
Look at the diversity of profitable lines that Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have gone into over the last two decades and compare to the number of failed attempts that Google had at trying to diversify.
I’m sure Oracle was counting Ad revenue coming from Android when calculating profits.
People build monopolies for the perceived benefits but this is the price you must always pay. You're no longer competing in a marketplace of customers, as you've flagged, your managers are now just competing in a marketplace of capital expenditure.