It’s tricky - companies with high margin businesses are loath to scale into low margin businesses. It makes the firm look more like a commodity than it is. Meanwhile startups in large enterprises are often desperate to grow revenue to show relevance.. leading to low margins.

It just seems like they wasted their lead, margin and talent.

Bell Labs produced a lot of interesting stuff with their monopoly profits. Apple R&D seems to come up with lots of interesting new product lines.

GOOG bought Nest and managed to become an also-ran in home automation.

GOOG other bets might produce something with Waymo, but when.. all this autonomous car stuff is continuously 5 more years, every year. That's about the closest they've come so far, no?

Just give it time, Steve. 5 more years should be about right :)

This isn't right. In the real world every effort saps a little bandwidth from the CEO/top execs, potentially harms the brand, potentially causes the org to calcify. Better off handing the money back.

One solution with that is to spin off a company that does these things, while keeping majority ownership.

It's probably better, but I'd just as soon take the money back as a shareholder.

Most shareholders would be happy if they could average a 14% return.

Yeah I'm saying that what appears to be a 14% return won't be, and/or creates risks. Putting small amounts of capital to work to earn 14% is a distraction for Google. The distraction has the potential to cost 100's of billions.

> The distraction has the potential to cost 100's of billions.

Not doing this has the potential for Google to miss the next technology trend, potentially crashing Google completely.

That being said, I completely agree with you on a different note. "Professional" spectator sports in schools and higher education. In my opinion, it should be completely banned. Every single such initiative distracts from a school's or university's core mission. It does not matter if each dollar they spent on it makes back ninety cents or two dollars. It is still a distraction that everyone has to do because everyone else is doing it.

My friend Jerry and I explored this topic in detail using Xerox PARC as an example [1]

I think Walter is right that spin-off is the right strategy, and (not very well known) Xerox actually did do that with a lot of PARC innovations. Just not with computers.

[1] https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight