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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Alphabet Revenues: $22,451

Google segment Revenues: $22,254

So everything else Alphabet is a cost center. Even the ROI for the $197M in revenues from Other Bets is offset by Other Bets losses.

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By design, right? The other bets are exactly that - bets.

The point of Alphabet is to surface visibility as to how much these bets cost. Not to showcase their profitability.

I don't think so. As I understand it the "other bets" are supposed to be the things that become big businesses and can shore of the shrinking margins on search advertising and the market share loss to Bing.

Shrinking margins don't seem like a problem yet. Operating margin went up YoY from 25% -> 26% and revenue was up 20%. For the record, here's the discussion we had last year about search advertising margin: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10796448. Odds for your prediction of widespread Google layoffs in 2016 are looking worse by the day.

And market share loss to Bing? Don't make me laugh. Bing revenues are up 9% YoY (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2017-Q1...) while Google website income is up 23% YoY (note we don't have breakdown into search but conference call says this was primarily generated by mobile search & YouTube).

I agree widespread layoffs are probably not in the cards unless the next quarter really tanks. I don't count cutting back projects like Google Fiber as "widespread".

Bing's growth and CPC improvement in the Americas comes at the cost of the only other search engine.

I wouldn't get too excited about the 20% revenue growth, it didn't quite match the 21% total growth of the segment[1].

[1] https://www.iab.com/news/first-quarter-u-s-internet-ad-reven...

Those numbers are rather suspicious when Microsoft is not getting meaningful revenue from bing.

Do you have any evidence that Google is losing market share? The latest reports I could find (from Feb 2016) showed that Bing's incredibly small increase in market share in the Americas is actually less than Google's growth, and at the expense of Yahoo and Ask.

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/bings-share-search-marke... sees it a bit differently.

0.2% change in one month does not make a trend.

Desktop market share is also increasingly less relevant to the search engine game.

> market share loss to Bing

wut?

And by the time that happens, they have become proper revenue-generating businesses rather than "bets".

Alphabet is becoming the Bell-Lab, Xerox Park of this generation?

- Invent a lot of cool tech (self driving car, AI) and lets others (Uber, Tesla) to make $ from it.

It's hard to say google invented either of those things with a straight face. Advanced the state of the art, certainly.

Depends on if their top employees get poached by some of the other companies. In that way, it could happen.

Alphabet did not invent the self-driving car or AI lol. C'mon dude, most of Alphabet is PR to recruit the <<best and the brightest>>. Half of the stuff they start up at X they shut down in a year and then don't even release the source.

As much as I want your analogy to be true, it just isn't.

They must be kicking themselves for spinning off Niantic. With Pokemon Go I guess their revenues in Other Bets segment would have been significantly higher. Why make bets in the first place if they're not going to see it through?

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