In a way this seems like an admission of the failure of the "Alphabet" thing. The idea behind that originally was that all of these other projects were going to become so significant that it wouldn't make sense to have them or their management coupled with Google.
But a half-decade later, it's still 99.9% Google, so just double-up the Google guy to lead both tiers. Same as it ever was.
> The idea behind that originally was that all of these other projects were going to become so significant that it wouldn't make sense to have them or their management coupled with Google.
No, the idea was that they were high risk speculative efforts and that it didn't make sense to have their branding mixed up with Google, which is a stable, established industry leader.
That's a semantic distinction. All major corporations have highly speculative projects that they aren't certain will succeed. With (relatively) minor investments most don't form an umbrella corporation to distinguish them.
In this case, I dont see anything else coming out of non-Google alphabet of meaningful significance, and this org change kind of highlights that.
In my personal opinion, the Google founders probably still DO have some radical plans, but I bet with the increased scrutiny in Congress and abroad they are thinking the Google vrand is more of a liability than an asset.
No, separating branding and separating management are substantively different ideas, not a matter of semantics.
> All major corporations have highly speculative projects that they aren't certain will succeed. With (relatively) minor investments most don't form an umbrella corporation to distinguish them.
That doesn't support your argument that it's a semantic distinction, it instead seems to be an unrelated argument with some implicit premises that argues that most corporations wouldn't have done what Google did to separate Alphabet in similar circumstances, which may or may not be true but is irrelevant to what the point was of Google doing it.
Don’t the companies now also give different financial reporting? Alphabets companies have wildly different expected growths and margins expected. It totally makes sense to be clear with investors that Google’s margins aren’t suffering, Alphabet is just investing upfront capital in Verily or Fiber
In the past major corporations used to launch speculative research projects and risky ventures, but that rarely happens any more. All the resources are being shifted to stock buybacks, everything else is a secondary priority.
Some companies like Chevron and Texas Instruments have even committed in writing to "returning 100% of all cash flow in perpetuity" to buybacks and dividends. So yes, they have legal contracts saying they won't agree to invest in future growth or investments or research no matter how much money they make, they are so committed to this buyback first model.
Google is a true leader in the buyback wars, they were the first company to commit to $25B in buybacks per quarter, which used to be a shockingly large number for these programs. Lots of other companies have followed that pattern since.
I'm a subscriber, mostly because of YouTube Music. I wanted a music platform where I get push notifications of new music by artists I follow. This feature is broken in Spotify and they have no plans to fix (their words). It seems like a simple enough request, but it turns out this feature is also not available and/or broken in YouTube Music. I keep the subscription SOLELY to watch YouTube ad-free now, and for that it is awesome; but I'm considering switching to another music platform. It's hard for me to cancel my subscription to YouTube though because removing all the ads from YouTube is the only thing that makes it actually useful as a platform.
If you love YouTube and hate advertising, then Premium is a very easy decision to make. I'm more than happy to pay Google $12 a month so I can have an ad-free experience on my TV, iPad, phone, and computer.
I have both Netflix and HBO-Now as well, but I'm thinking about canceling them, as 90% of my viewing time is spent on YouTube.
One really nice thing about YouTube is that you can download your favorite programs there with "youtube-dl". I don't know if that works for the premium stuff though (I doubt it). So if you want to download, for instance, all the Rick Steves episodes and then watch them on your plane flight (where you don't have free internet access, or someplace else where the service isn't fast enough to watch YT), it's easy to do, and impossible with those other services.
The original reason was that smart people like career progression. Money alone isn't enough to keep them - they want something good on their business cards. Otherwise some will leave to become CEO of another company.
By making a group of companies, you can have many CEO's, more directors, more VP's, etc. and therefore keep hold of more smart people who are after external recognition more than money.
I doubt Einstein cared what was on his business card, but I'm sure he cared very much about being in the right career position to do the work that interested him, and to have the ability to influence his work and others.
I dont want to nitpick, but some of his most influential work - dubbed the "annus mirabilis" papers / "amazing year" [0] - was done while he was an assistant examiner at the patent office in Bern. Definitely not a position he was aiming for, but still, a highly productive time.
Typically job titles as noted in that post accompany some varying level of responsibility and leadership. If this is simply about what title is on your card then OK, sure. But in my experience, many (not all) are seeking the autonomy and influence behind those titles. Einstein had titles too, but it was the influence and work behind those titles he wanted. It's the same for many "careerists", a term I do not like.
I think you're losing sight of the original argument I was responding to: that a main reason for spinning off bits of Google as separate Alphabet subsidiaries was to allow job title inflation for the same role.
There's only one CEO per company, so if you want more CEOs you need more companies. Being CEO of Waymo probably isn't that different from being Manager of the Autonomous Cars Division or whatever, but it sounds more impressive.
But you forget that to Patrick Bateman the (so called) greater good and broad knowledge expansion or other humanity-propelling criteria weren't nearly as relevant as the question if Patrick Bateman appeared successful.
The image of Patrick Bateman was more important to Patrick Bateman than Einstein or his accomplishments.
It is, but most people are at least slightly narcissistic. Most people get at least a little bit of validation & happiness from obtaining a "better" job title. Also, it's not really just the plain title itself, but the trust the company has in you that it represents. Being able to say to somebody, "I'm VP of ____" gives you some cachet in today's middle/upper-middle class.
Sure, there are also people who couldn't care less what their title is, but I can't help but feel that most people would find the possibility of a 'better' title at least moderately motivating.
Titles are a currency in some parts of society. I am strongly anti-title and also pretty strongly anti-celebrity but I think it’s important to recognize that these things both have value to most of the people around you.
I think the reason they went for this is so that the sub-companies would not be at risk if Google (the search engine / advertising giant) had a problem.
I don't think it was mostly motivated by management separation, as much as it was desire to break out revenue and expenses by unit. And this is unchanged.
You're conflating a lot of things here. GOOG class A versus C (GOOG vs GOOGL) dates to a 2014 restructuring of ownership, whereas the Alphabet reorg was in 2015.
Can you break out revenue in a single company? Sure. But you can also easily do it with the structure Alphabet adopted. And, this structure also lends itself to easier valuations of entire units, useful if acquisition of a unit is something being considered.
> The idea behind that originally was that all of these other projects were going to become so significant that it wouldn't make sense to have them or their management coupled with Google.
This isn't entirely true. A major consideration was fear of anti-trust litigation. If all of these are the same company/orgs/departments, then you could reasonably say that this "search company" is far too powerful. If there's a search company and a youtube company and a self-driving car company (etc.) then you can make a (specious) argument that you're not vertically and horizontally a monopoly.
keeping it as separate entities meant that useful data could not be shared. Under one org, more data can be safely shared while respecting user privacy.
Google might not respect the desire for an open internet without ads and no single large player.
But i believe they fully respect their users privacy, comply with most of the law around privacy already, and have the strong desire to fully comply with it in the future.
Maybe I'm naive that way. But painting them as not respecting privacy at all is a bit blunt and not nuanced enough.
Saying "they fully respect their users privacy" is also blunt and not nuanced.
They are a huge company with thousands of teams pursuing their own agendas and made up of people of varying degree of scruples and viewpoints with regards to privacy.
I've worked for large companies that handle sensitive user data, and they all have at least some teams of people trying to figure out how they can respect the letter of privacy laws just enough, while ignoring the spirit of those laws, in order to profit from the personal data they hold, regardless of the potential side effects or long-term impact on the data subject.
What i meant was that i believe they try to follow the law around privacy. The law might not be "good enough", but that's in us not them (modulo the lobbying).
I'm not trying to say larger companies are innocent. Saying they don't respect privacy insinuates to me that they intentionally violate the law, and i don't think that that's true.
If you only base good/bad actions around the law (which I understand is really the only _real_ reference point we have), then that's part of the problem.
Technology moves faster than the law, we all know this.. What we need are ethical companies who not only respect the law but also respect the data owners.
We need a company with a motto like "don't be evil" or something like that.. if only, right? ;-)
Compliance with privacy law is not a good indicator of respect for users' privacy when you're in a position to nudge privacy legislation to limit its impact on you.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but there certainly is evidence out there that suggests Google in fact does respect user privacy. For example, activity.google.com. They are also pretty up front about their privacy policy, how they use cookies, data retention policy, and so forth on policies.google.com. There is a lot of information there.
There's a case to be made that Google is trying to do the right thing.
I don't understand how being under Google vs being under Alphabet changes that.
They're still fundamentally one org sharing data with itself. If anything, I would think the company segregation would make it more complicated and difficult, wrt logistics, legality, and internal politics.
Lack of any obvious vision or ideas: a safe pair of hands. The similarities are there, and not just Sundar/Ballmer but Sundar/Ballmer/Cook. It seems visionary CEOs like to appoint non-visionary successors. Someone who won't make big changes to their baby.
This is often inherent in the organizational structure of big companies. To the extent that there are visionaries in a big company, they're usually not anywhere on the executive team, or even anywhere that the CEO comes in direct contact with. If they were, they'd clash with the CEO's vision, which first of all would be confusing and inefficient for the organization and second is a power contest the CEO would win. So if the board wants to appoint a visionary from within, they usually need to reach several levels down in the org hierarchy, to someone who's run an innovative division semi-independently but been protected from overall company politics. If they elevate this person to CEO, everyone above them in the org chart will quit, as they've now been passed over for the top job.
It's not an admission of failure. Two businessmen created one of the most successful, influencial businesses ever and are passing the torch. They're rich AF and probably want to retire.
He's talking about the decision to make the Alphabet conglomerate, not Sergey and Larry. Obviously no one disputes the two of them are extremely successful.
They probably understood that the game is rigged in their favor and no matter who is leading the company, they will be just fine anyway. Also, playing a rigged game gets boring after a while.
I don't know man. Doesn't that sound a little bit suspicious? If you were to create Google why would you just peace out? Look at Bill Gates. He still wants to do things but the google founders are all MIA. How do guys like that just lose all ambition and disappear?
I don't know their lives. Maybe they will do stuff like Bill Gates. All I know is that if I were them, I'd have stepped down long ago. Either way they achieved great success and are leaving on a high. I don't know how anyone can interpret it differently.
If I had created Google I would have peaced out looooong ago.
Sure, I wouldn't disappear completely, but I'd work on low-stress things where I have a lot of free time and don't have so much responsibility under me.
I'm looking at early retirement in the next year or two. I'm certainly not anywhere near as financially successful as Brin or Page or Pichai, and I doubt I've put in as much stressful work as they have, but I've done ok for myself, and I'm looking forward to doing literally anything I want with my time, without having to answer to anyone, whether it's a boss, investors, or board of directors.
I guess only time will tell how much I like this arrangement, but I'm pretty optimistic about it, and am tired of hearing the usual "oh but you'll be bored and want to work again" tropes. There's a lot more to life than work...
Perhaps they didn't envisage it turning into a giant surveillance and advertising machine. I doubt that is what they imagined when they started on their PhD's.
Are you proposing that Larry and Sergey are starting a secret society of billionaires who are withdrawing their genius contributions from society as a protest against government regulations?
If Larry and Sergey were the kind of people that were quitting and disappearing in the book, they would not quit, but instead try to sneakily dismantle Google from within, like d'Anconia in the book. :)
Even if your observation is correct, it's not a bad thing. A failed experiment is hardly a failure. I doubt the legal border between Alphabet and Google won't prove useful in the future.
I am both cautious enough of Google that I've started avoiding using some of their products, and still have an opinion on how they should organize themselves that has very little to do with those feelings.
I was sort of hoping Alphabet would be a spot they could stick all of the projects that aren't going to make a billion a year. I think it still makes sense to maintain projects that 'only' clear $20+ million a year in another division. That would cover a lot of projects that are getting cancelled and causing them serious PR problems (like accusations of being a group of spoiled man-children who can't be relied upon to stick with anything for longer than four years).
Basically there's a lot of space to make money and products that they won't touch, and I don't think it has anything to do with Wall Street. It's just an artificial limitation they've imposed upon themselves.
Anybody inventing AGI would be a big deal, but (1) don't hold your breath and (2) it could just as easily be a negative for Google and for the rest of us.
And their core goal of truly autonomous vehicles is a technical challenge that at this point seems like it will take at least several years more than what they originally thought 3 years ago. Their situation is not similar to FB in 2008 at all.
Even if they overcome this the bigger question is whether the market opportunity is worth the R&D costs, and whether or not bulky self driving vehicles are the best and most lucrative solution to mass transit.
Speaking of market opportunity, are there SDVs being tested in outside of California and Arizona? The rest of the US gets its fair share of rain, snow, and ice. Even if the Bay Area can manage self-driving cars, when would we expect a rollout in places like Minneapolis or Boston?
Yes, there are. Off the top of my head, in the US:
Las Vegas (Aptiv), Pittsburgh (Aptiv, Aurora, Ford, Uber ATG), Dearborn MI (Ford), Miami (Ford), Washington (Ford). There's also a retirement community in Florida that Voyage is testing in.
That seems like a huge problem. Even places with idyllic weather like California can have bad days. I'm skeptical of anything purporting to be a revolution in transportation when it will largely limited to a few select areas and is prone to catastrophic failure based on something as common as snow or rain.
Because of the elevation of parts of CA & AZ, it's absolutely possible to encounter snow and ice (and even whiteout conditions on interstate highways!) in those states, if you make the effort to find it. A smart testing team would make the effort to head for the mountains when the forecast calls for wintery weather.
Even if the answer there is "never", so what? Do we really need to set the bar at "replace all vehicles everywhere in all situations" for it to be a success?
It becomes much harder to justify buying a self-driving car if there are many parts of the country where I can't drive it. Even a mid-tier sedan can be driven all the way up the west coast from southern california to Seattle as long as you have chains and wait for the pass to be open. Waymo's cars are designed to not even have steering wheels, last time I checked...
Most likely due to Waymo being not designed for personal consumer use... but I’d also say they are pretty detached from having to deal with real societal problems.
Self driving cars is indeed a cool technical problem to solve if you asked an engineer, but if you asked society what it needed I doubt self driving cars would be the answer.
I don't think it was a failure at all. It was a hedge against slowing ad revenue growth. They didn't want the billions they spend on moonshots dirtying the books of the ad business. This was specifically to keep the stock price moving up and up. I think they should find someone new to be CEO of Alphabet so they can focus on the non ad business companies.
Plus they got to change the name that appears in investment portfolios, and take the opportunity to appear at the top, since they are almost always alphabetically ordered, and at the very least they would be appear above Amazon since l comes before m, and also above Apple.
not that I know anything but it seems like the decision was complex both to create the Alphabet and now to kind of merge it under one CEO.
I think some of the reasons could be they no longer see a risk of anti Monopoly regulation targeting them so they don't need to keep everything so divided. they genuinely want to give Sundar a go. They need a process to gradually fade out The original founders, but also importantly ensure those founders isolate their risk from any future missteps the companies take, and vice versa.
maybe the two co-founders were simply getting in the way.
Anyone who thinks Google is a failure should reconsider. They have had their share of bad decisions, but nothing has yet challenged their dominance. They keep spreading to other areas of tech. They may not dominate the AlphaBets, but they sure attract attention and investment.
I don't know any other company that people love to hate. A large number of those will flee Google in droves when/if a viable alternative presents itself. Their lock-in on email and dominance in search may be enough of a moat to last forever but if your users (paying and free) hate you then you are on borrowed time.
Facebook too. I hate both with a similar passion. But I'm in tech and thanks to HN I have a vague idea how the sausage is made. Do regular users share our dislike of these companies? If not, which is what I suspect, this fleeing will be mostly nonexistent.
I think generally, people do hate both, though neither as much as Twitter.
Personally I feel most strongly about Google, because I really believed the marketing back in the day. Took me a long time to get disillusioned, and when I did I felt all the worse for having been a supporter for so long.
Why would anyone hate Twitter? I mean, I don't care for it either, but it doesn't really affect me because I simply don't use it. I don't have an account, and really don't pay attention to it, except for all the "tweets" from Trump in the news.
Facebook is different. It's pretty hard to avoid using Facebook without being an outcast in a way, if all your friends and family are on there and they use it to communicate, schedule events, etc. There's also Facebook Marketplace which seems to have taken over for Craigslist for selling stuff locally. I'm one of those people who has an account there, but never actually posts anything, but I keep it because I have a few people who insist on using it to communicate; I've met lots of people like this.
Twitter just isn't like this at all. I think it's dumb, but it's easy to ignore.
But a half-decade later, it's still 99.9% Google, so just double-up the Google guy to lead both tiers. Same as it ever was.