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Comment by bunnycorn | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't matter, what matters is that they published the story with a picture (a stupid picture, that there's no way it would work without alien technology) in hundreds of websites, generating buzz and a rise in their stock value due to investors goodwill.

This is why I dislike Google. If you read the news, you would think they have the future in their hands, but after 10 years of Android, many more of YouTube and Gmail, and only one thing works, only one thing brings them 90% of their revenue: advertising.

And boy do they sell advertising, but they also know how to advertise themselves...

Google is like a children whose parents give free access to chocolate (ad business money). Why would a child eat anything else besides chocolate? It's tasty, it's sweet, it's easy to eat. And it turns out that engineering something is not as easy as turning up ads on YouTube.

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It's hard to create a multi-billion business like ads. It's not surprising they could not and probably will never be able to replicate that success. There's a handful of success like these in a century and it rarely comes twice from the same company. I agree with hype of their futurist stuff, they should tone it down if it's just for buzz.

It's hard now when Google have their market position. For Google it was easy to grab the low hanging fruit.

I wonder if former competitors like Altavista just never though of spying on their users and selling the info or if they assumed it would be illegal and didn't do it?

Yea I thought something similar - executives at the older companies feared jail time for doing some of those tactics so they stayed away. Of course there’s always lawyers to read the fine print, but still...

Ah come on, the truth is not at all that altavista didn't spy, or didn't do ads. It's that they (and exite, yahoo, infoseek, ...) completely overdid the spying and ads and Google instead massively optimized their backend.

And then a crisis came boom no more competitors.

Google was the least obtrusive of all of the search competitors, and the most useful. That was their great strength.

Man thinking about when this happened, it's now some 20 years ago. I'm old.

Altavista had enough issues with trying to become a portal versus being a good search engine (plus being sold multiple times), which probably hobbled them more than anything else.

I was pretty surprised that gmail was successful. I didn't imagine that people wouldn't care that their email wasn't on their own computer. But, there you go.

Well, people had been using hosted email from their ISPs, AOL, Hotmail, etc. long before Gmail.

Gmail came out and offered an insane amount of storage, basically toppling the regime.

So surely Gmail wasn't the one that surprised you. That ship had long sailed before then.

It is... if you don't have Google money, Google brand, Google costumer goodwil, Google P&R team, Google capability to attract talent, Google global outreach, Google datacenters, etc. If you ARE Google, and you have all of that? I think it's more difficult to explain why they failed.

Because they found a better solution through partnership with dexcom.

https://www.wareable.com/health-and-wellbeing/dexcom-g6-cgm-...

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medical-devices/jpm-dexcom-dis...

Is it a transparent contact lens that you put in the eye?

So you don't like Google because all their revenue comes from advertising, but you're also angry that they're trying to branch out into things other than advertising?

I think what the parent is saying is that if you listen to the hype, you would perceive Google as bringing a lot of innovative tech into the world. But the reality is many of these hyped projects that provide this perception are quietly shut down, and at the end of the day after more than a decade Google is still just an ad machine. The parent is upset about the difference between what Google sells itself as doing versus what they actually do.

yeah, i understand what the parent is saying, and i think it's stupid. how are they supposed to diversify if they don't try? or are they supposed to do all their R&D in secret, just to avoid any perception that they might not be entirely evil?

yes, their PR people hype up their R&D efforts. But the point is that they're doing R&D, and why shouldn't they get a PR win out of that?

Well the point is it's been over a decade. They've done a lot of trying with little return.

The projects they're attempting take decades. Period. Loon, for example: Two years for a handful of prototypes, two years for LTE functionality and a "real" trial run, two more years for a mesh network so they aren't bottlenecked by satellites, another year for a large-scale real-world trial run (Puerto Rico), and now we're at the present day. Their job now is to demonstrate that they can keep a balloon fleet up long enough and at sufficiently low cost that it's safe to transition an entire country's economy over to the system. That's probably going to take another ten or fifteen years simply because that's how long it takes to show that your system is reliable enough to be core, critical infrastructure. And Loon is just an easy example. Waymo, Brain. Anything to do with healthcare. Etc. There's a reason these things are called "moonshots".

I thought loon was also considered a failure, although not shut down yet. It's an interesting idea on its own, but it's somewhat dated in that there are better technologies now that don't cost as much to run.

Last I heard it was declared economically viable and spun out. Wikipedia says Loon is currently contracted to provide internet service to a few particularly inaccessible chunks of Kenya, and its performance during the hurricanes last year is probably enough to guarantee its continued existence regardless.

Waymo doesn't count?

Thanks, MTE

Peter Thiel likes to say that monopolies in general try to portray themselves as non-monopolies, as players in a broader field than just their lucrative specialty. This portrayal is supposed to reduce regulatory scrutiny.

Applying this to Google means that funding a broad swath of technology projects makes the company look like much more than the dominant online search ad company. It's a general technology company.

An alternative is that Google has a main revenue source, but they would like to diversify that.

You know, as long the attempts fail, there would be no way to tell the difference between both, which meshes pretty well with "but it's really hard" comment made before.

i'm not much of a thiel fan (e.g., poo-poos college, then sells book spouting business 101 concepts) but i agree with this.

it's the main reason why google became alphabet: not so much for true diversification (because there is no discernable diversification strategy in their portfolio), but as a legal maneuver, a regulatory shield, and a playground for the leadership.

Trying?

This is not trying.

This is effing up every other possible competitor.

If someone goes to a dumb VC asking for money for a product that is actually feasible, they will be turned down because they read on Forbes that google is making that miraculous device that is stupidly ridiculous in so many levels.... but hey! It's google! A Fortune 500 company and its on Forbes!

So, what, every research project and every startup should succeed? That's not how progress works.

This is a hilariously bad take... a) Have you heard of Waymo? There could not be a better example of a company with the future in their hands, due to a decade of investment and research in autonomous driving, about to launch a product many years ahead of its closest competitors. b) You say this is what you dislike about google, but is this not true for any of the big 4? Does Facebook or Amazon have anything that compares to their main cash cows?

> waymo

So how is your waymo car going?

Does it drive well?

Does it get good mpg?

Is it that secure?

Waymo is one of the worst offenders:

https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-sergey-brin-youll-ride-in-...

It was promised in 2012 to be completed in 2017... 2018 is ending and there is still no waymo anywhere besides on google's hands.

While Google has been promising that didn't deliver, not even close, others have been actually delivering self-driving cars to the hands of real costumers and don't get any credit.

As far as I know, waymo has the only public beta of an autonomous vehicle, and it's been running for over a year.

In other words, waymo has put sdcs nn the hands of a limited set of consumers, and right on schedule.

Or do you think that sergeys comments imply autonomous vehicles for public purchase, because that isn't implied and in many cases doesn't make sense.

Everyone and their dog has autonomous vehicles.

Meanwhile Google is trying to patent technology it's not theirs:

https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/02/waymo-self-driving-lidar...

You didn't actually address my specific comment: is anyone else publicly testing an SDC? Is waymo not doing that?

That's what you originally claimed.

Tesla isn't testing SDCs?

There's a difference between L2 and L4/5 autonomy. Tesla have not shown themselves to be capable of jumping to the harder side of that. Waymo, cruise, Uber and Lyft all are, but of the 4, waymo certainly appears to be the most advanced.

To be blunt, Tesla is doing glorified lane following, and everyone can do that. It's not going to turn left at the next traffic light anytime soon. The others will (or at least will try).

Yes, there is difference, but there is also a staggering difference between Google which doesn't have anything on the market, and Tesla that you can go out and buy one and drive it today.

I'm unclear what you mean by "on the market".

Waymo is currently having people pay for an AV rideshare service that can drive you around, and where the clients don't sit in the drivers seat. Whereas Tesla is apparently out here shipping a vehicle that (according to reddit anyway)[1] has hardcoded "do not brake here" zones on the map and almost crashes as a result.

Tesla's vehicles can't reliably drive on a freeway, much less on surface streets. Sure you can buy something, but its not an autonomous vehicle. Because as you rightly point out, you're still the one driving.

[1]:https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/9y6zpb/another...

Yeah, it's hard to believe that they intended to build this into a product considering they hadn't even done basic research to determine the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose. It's going to be really hard for me to take any of their products seriously because of this.

WTF are you on about here? YouTube doesn't work? Gmail doesn't work? Search doesn't work? Android doesn't work? Maps doesn't work? This is just absolutely a ridiculous stance to take.

The person you are responding to clearly means "only one thing works to make money", as "works" in the context of a business and a discussion about stock price is not "it functions correctly" but "it brings on income".

But YouTube, gmail, etc. all drive people to advertising. That's like saying the words in the NYT don't "work".

You're argument doesn't make sense. YouTube, Android, and Google are 100% completely different businesses and are all wildly profitable.

What you seem to be confused about here is that you think a business model is the same as a business itself. This couldn't be further from the truth.

Profitable because people pay for those services?

No, nobody is paying for YouTube red, nobody is buying "Android", they are profitable because they put ads in people screens. Nothing more, nothing less.

Again, you're failing to understand the point. There is a difference between a business model and the business itself. There are many different ways to monetize a product/service besides direct sales.

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