Often companies get excited about a new idea, staff and finance them well… then after a year or two they get thrown into the wider system and expected to survive.
Eventually they are absorbed and managed as if they are the old cash cow, needing layers of management, risk adversion, accelerated timelines, and new ‘processes’ to fix every small problem instead of focusing on the bigger picture.
Spin "the other bets" out as a separate company.
Capitalize it separately.
Literally just don't have it as part of the parent company.
The only advantage of having the company inside the "parent" increasingly becomes accounting tricks, such that excess profits can be shuffled to the "other bet" as a trick to conceal profits from shareholders.
Who might want the capital as a dividend.
Aha, glad somebody is seeing the same thing I'm seeing.
The problem with Google is that it is too large, and too successful. Their idea of having experimental projects is a good one, the problem is that Google makes so much money that they don't commit to them. They become too dilettante about them.
The fix is to do spin-offs, say keeping a minority stake at less than 20%. This generates capital for Google, gives them a share of the upside, but they don't have too much influence on the spin-off. So it's Death or Glory for the spin-off. They are forced to make whatever it is they invented work, or face extinction. There is a smaller management team, focussed on success.
This strikes me as a much better proposition than what we see at the moment, with Google just dabbling around pouring money into something they'll eventually get bored with.
You'd think that what with all the big brains at Google, someone would have thought of this. Maybe someone at Goldmans should make a pitch.
1) An enormous pile of cash would accumulate on Google's balance sheet. 2) The spinoffs would be subject to normal commercial rules about risk, rate of return and such. 3) The spinoffs couldn't be "brand Google." Which is a not-inconsiderable thing.
Clearly though, it's a good call.
DuckDuckGo is great but it’s not nipping at their heels meaningfully.
Most corporate deaths look like Sears. The writing on the wall was there for over two decades.
Hell it was there for four decades, double that time. Walmart was running circles around Sears by the 70s.
Pretty quickly, they figured out upper management had no interest in their ideas to make Sears into a viable online retailer. Everybody left or started coasting. They all knew the company was doomed but cashed their paychecks. After all, that’s literally what they were being paid to do.
Changing offices is an expensive exercise so they wouldn’t want to risk renting space from somewhere that is likely to go under in the next year or two.
My point is the dynamic I mention explains the problems of wework, and is not proved wrong by the argument you put forward, paraphrased, that "businesses have evaluated long-term risk of renting at wework so wework is not at risk"
It wasn’t a long comment, so maybe you should take it at face value rather than trying to change it to suit your argument.
Its more because they killed their already working, well-accepted Google Chat app, not seeing gigantic profit or any market control benefit from it. Somehow they thought it was a better idea to have some 'chat' through the browser - which resulted in whatever 'Hangouts' was. Prioritized 'engineering' and profits over users as its so normal for large public corporations.
Then Slack and Discord came and wiped the floor with all of them.
Kodak invented digital cameras but jettisoned it because they ate into its existing business. Will the same happen with Google?
Look at Meta, and how Apple borked their primary cash cow.
Now, mostly due to concerns about state spying, many jurisdictions are passing enhanced privacy bills.
On top of that, the entire planet now wants cash for news listings.
And the EU is repeatedly extending its legislation, making Pii collection and tracking less and less profitable.
The US keeps considering similar bills. Alphabet can lobby all it wants, but even so, these laws will be passed eventually.
Google needs to smarten up.
Do you need to search and figure things out if you have a personal assistant to do that for you?
Try asking “what herbs and spices go well in a chilli?” in both. I get a sensible, rough answer from ChatGPT within seconds. From Google I get page after page of content farms hiding information in amongst ads and life-story filler.
She was trying to find poems that went viral during the pandemic. Googling it showed a bunch of mediocre articles or irrelevant news stories
I asked chatGPT and it gave me a list of 10 poems by relatively well known poets. A brief review showed that these poems were, indeed, viral during the pandemic. Saved at least 15 minutes of Googling.
There are a lot of pitfalls and erroneous assumptions built into both Google's current search and the information used to train AI/ML models. Two big ones are "assuming that a person searching for something and accepting the answer means it's a successful search" and "assuming a person searching/asking for something actually wants what they're asking for".
I'm a librarian with several years of reference experience under my belt and neither of those things are true. They're both good tools for a well considered and well informed information search, but that 'well considered and well informed' is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Are there tools that do that well right now? Do you know of (maybe niche) projects exploring such ideas?
Search is already heavily ML-powered. Right now it’s impossible to provide ad-sponsored fully-AI-powered search and make it profitable. Remember, you are actually not paying for it at the cost, and users that actually click ads are subsidizing you.
But when it will be possible, Google is going to be in perfect position to capitalize on it.
The current model doesn’t work for this new reality. They’ll have to find a new model. And if history is any clue, the suits will be unwilling to change
The first chat was basically an XMPP service. It was decent, it federated outside of Google, it was fully functional. It even supported group channels (XMPP conferences) internally. But I don't think that was ever exposed to the public.
Then Hangouts was created. It was, per usual at Gooogle, a ground-up rewrite. IIRC not the same team. So they spent at least a couple years playing catch up to get feature parity with the XMPP chat. Worse, Hangouts was one of the first services to suffer from strict team-created "Personas" design philosophy. Any time anyone would complain about a feature, or miss-feature, it was flatly ignored because "You're not one of our Personas". It took years of complaints to get them to change their minds.
By the time Hangouts was good enough to fully replace the previous service it was now boring and people left the team for other new projects. Because maintenance won't get you promoted.
The other random chat services were basically experiential toys.
Now we have Meet, which is is likely another case of "Hangouts is unmaintainable tech, we need to re-write it". Years of getting up to feature parity. And miss-features that won't get fixed.
Every decision since then has been pro-ad network technical competition.
Add to that it was a big source of spam that nobody wanted to deal with.
Apparently the team tried really hard to get more companies on board with opening up federation. But I think the only "major" service that did was what was left of AOL.
I was fortunate as I joined a team that was growing and had heat under them which gave me opportunities to go ham in a space I care about.
I hadn't heard this this term before but I think it is pretty accurate in many organizations. Nothing is worth doing as its impossible to prove ROI conclusively - just do what the boss says instead.
Their past choices have consequences. It’s too late for them to “just not” do anything to reduce that burden.
It’s a poison that seems to seep into organizations as they get larger.
I once gave a talk about “Enterprise Entrepreneurs” after being labeled as one. It can be a good approach to prevent stagnation as grass-roots initiatives often generate great ideas in large companies.
Unfortunately the practice requires executive sponsorship, which can be hard to attain if executives feel *their position and stature is being undermined by subordinates.
So instead of VCs you invest company capital into them.
Obviously 99% of the time employees just leave and startups win the day. Which is fine. But that's basically just how it is. So you either adapt or die until the monopoly/cash cow runs its course.
Facebook turning into Meta making the 'startup' be the whole companies mission is a bold new idea, which I'm skeptical can work. But it's interesting.
The company takes the risk rather than you personally. If it fails but you maintain good relations with the rest of the company you lose nothing and just transfer elsewhere (I guess, I’ve never worked at a big company preferring to go it alone)
I’m far more motivated by working on cool projects, so the reward for me is just as salient if I build something cool within someone else’s company or my own… I guess, having never done the latter.
But yeah, also tbh, risk is a big factor.
The Clayton M Christensen solution to big companies ignoring obvious problems is to have isolated small teams “infrapreneurship” who aren’t under the pressures of the larger org. With Meta’s push towards VR it’s obvious Oculus’s purpose is now Meta’s purpose. And all the downside that comes with such a thing.