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Comment by lawrenceyan | Hacker News Reader

It's always interesting to take a look back on articles like these and see how the opinions / predictions of the author pan out. There has always seemed to be what is in my opinion a largely narrow minded short term oriented negativity directed towards the Google method of moonshots / bets. In hindsight now in 2019, it's clear with signs of growing stagnation on Apple's side and continued successful innovation and growth of Alphabet companies within vastly diverse industries (Verily, Waymo, Malta, etc.) which of the two methodologies was the better choice.

I wonder what the future will hold? Culture seems like the strongest indicator for whether changes can be made. Without the sort of long term vision Jobs had to guide the company from the top down, successful pivoting depends on if internal company culture can support a bottom up revitalization I think.

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You have got to be joking. Looking at the revenue numbers, it's clear that Apple is more diversified than Google. The declining iPhone sales are a short term problem. People are just keeping the devices for longer, not abandoning the ecosystem. Their services and wearables are seeing an impressive growth. I think the watch will grow even faster once Apple makes it a completely independent device.

The difference between these two companies is that one publicizes the stuff it's working on and rushes it to market, while the other keeps it all secret until it's ready.

Also, Apple is working on AR glasses(rumored to be announced next year), self-driving car and are making a big push into digital health.

Apple is far from doomed, they still have a lot of room for growth.

If they announce AR glasses that look like anything besides a regular sized, normal looking, but super stylish pair of sunglasses running amazing software that always works, with a killer feature that no one even knew they needed, it will be safe to end the tired debate of whether Steve Jobs was the biggest reason that they regularly made great things.

I do agree though that Apple is more diversified than a company that keeps selling super-expensive beta tests that get killed after the first or second try doesn't work.

Alphabet is doing all of these things and more though no? With much more success too from what I can garner.

Waymo is the defacto number one leader in self-driving, whereas Apple’s self driving unit is having huge issues internally. Similarly, didn’t Verily just receive a $1 billion dollar investment a few days ago with Silver Lake as the primary backer for it’s various life science hardware/digital technologies it’s working on like LiftWare [1], Project Baseline [2], etc?

[1] Liftware - https://youtu.be/cFHwoOkSj7w

[2] Baseline Study - https://projectbaseline.com

> Alphabet is doing all of these things and more though no? With more much success too from what I can garner.

Apple has more diversified revenue than Alphabet. Why would you say Alphabet is more successful?. All this tells me is that Apple thinks long and hard before publicizing what it's working on, they won't show us prototypes.

> Waymo is the defacto number one leader in self-driving, whereas Apple’s self driving unit is having huge issues internally with getting anything done.

ALL of Apple's reported problems had to do with the MAKING of a car, not autonomous systems. People just don't get this distinction. We will know how far their system is at the end of this month when the DMV releases their disengagement report. By the way, recent developments indicate that Apple is back to building an electric self-driving car instead of a self-driving platform.

So far I’ve listed Waymo and Verily.

What about,

Loon - https://loon.co/

Dandelion - https://dandelionenergy.com/

Wing - https://x.company/wing/

Chronicle - https://chronicle.security/

Malta - https://blog.x.company/introducing-malta-81bceb559061

Apple is almost 100% definitively not working on a molten salt energy storage solution I can promise you. And the reason is because it’s just not in it’s corporate structure or culture. Far too constrained / trapped in it’s niche to expand outwards into such a vastly different market.

Again, Apple has a more diversified revenue stream than Alphabet and it is growing. Contrary to what you are trying to imply, Apple is actually more successful than Alphabet. The difference is they don't tell the world about their internal projects.

> Again, Apple has a more diversified revenue stream than Alphabet and it is growing.

Based on what?

iPhone sales generate 59% of Apple's revenue, while ads generate 86% of Alphabet's revenue.

Hardware sales generate 80% of apples revenue. You can't combine all ads (google vs. other domains) and not combine different hardware types.

Even if we did it that way, Apple still comes out ahead.

Also, that 86% is basically from Google Search ads and YouTube. YouTube's quarterly revenue is estimated to be just under $4 billion. That puts Google Search ads at around 72%, which is still higher than the iPhone's 59%.

The notion that Alphabet's "other" projects succeeded while Apple's languished is completely baseless.

It also includes ad network ads on non google properties (double click and such), which is arguably more diverse than iPhone an iPad.

Google's last quarterly report says 24bn in revenue from Google properties, and ~5bn from non-google properties. If we add in that YT is a separate property too, we get ~60% from Google, ~12% from youtube, ~15% from network, ~14% from hardware/android/cloud.

(I work at Google, but I am using public figures from the Q3 investor relations document and your analyst number for YT revenue).

And none of these are profitable.

A “successful” product for a profit making company is one that makes money.....

Google hasn’t shown an ability to ptofitably sell anything but ads.

According to numbers that came out during the Oracle lawsuit, even Android has only made Google $31 Billion since its inception.

>Google hasn’t shown an ability to ptofitably sell anything but ads.

The $31B revenue would be huge for almost any company. The magnitude of Google's largest cash cow, a glowing golden cow towering over the farm house, makes their normal-sized livestock look small. Because everything is so insignificant compared to advertisements, Google has killed projects that could be the entire product of a sustainable smaller company.

$31 billion revenue of 8 years? To put that in context, that’s about the same amount of revenue from Apple’s non iPhone business in one quarter.

https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/11/reminder-apple-financial-...

And that’s $31 billion in revenue not profit.

The profit over 8 years is only $21 billion.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...

How many companies make 2.6B/year in profit? Rather, how many startups sell for over 1B? Comparing it to another gigantic business is missing the point in the same way that comparing it against ads is. Google has had many giant successes that only appear small when juxtaposed against unimaginably enormous successes.

So besides Android, what other profitable product have they had? Rumors are that YouTube is still break even.

Consider that Google offers the operating system for free, the software for free, and only charges OEM for optionally including Google's software on their phones, and only recently began selling its own phones...$21 billion of profit is pretty damn big.

> Malta’s solution is to store electricity as heat in high temperature molten salt and cold in a low temperature liquid for days, or even weeks, until it’s needed. The key insight behind Malta is that electricity can be stored as heat in high temperature molten salt and cold in a low temperature liquid for days, or even weeks, until it’s needed.

Does nobody proof read these things before they get published?

The grammar is perfectly correct though I think?

Perhaps this portion is what confuses you: stores electricity as heat in "the form of a combination of a" high temperature molten salt and cold in a low temperature liquid. This would be an explicit wording which might help to clarify things, but is not used due to redundancy.

The 2 consecutive sentence both contain the identical LONG fragment "as heat in high temperature molten salt and cold in a low temperature liquid for days, or even weeks, until it’s needed"

And you didn't even mention GV, CapitalG and other investment arms. Well forget the others, I am surprised that Google's investments into Oscar, Magic Leap, SpaceX, Impossible, Slack, Stripe,Lyft,Uber, Snap, AirBnb aren't talked about much. I think these can be counted as successful, guaranteed future cash troves. In 10 years, all these are going to be worth a lot. Google should hold onto these. It's like a mini Berkshire hathaway is brewing up.

Some links: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/17/a-peek-inside-alphabets-in... http://www.gv.com/portfolio/ https://capitalg.com/companies/

> By the way, recent developments indicate that Apple is back to building an electric self-driving car instead of a self-driving platform.

This is the correct approach, yet a lot of people still haven’t internalized this subtle distinction.

For a self-driving platform to deliver on the promise of being more reliable than a human driver, it has to constantly monitor two environments: its internal environment and its external environment, but most discussions dwell on the external.

External environment failure in the worst case scenario can lead to loss of life. OTOH, internal environment failure can lead to internal inconsistency and in the worst case, a machine shutdown; but because cars share the road with other road users, a sudden failure in one car can lead to multiple car accidents and in a worst case scenario, several lives lost. In a way, the failure outcomes are identical.

An electric car is far less complex than an ICE car meaning there are fewer moving parts and subsystems whose state needs to be kept track of constantly. This is where electric drivetrains hold a lot of promise: a low complexity machine can be made more reliable at a lower cost than a high complexity machine.

TIL I learned that contrary to Apple's own statements, it is more diversified than its primary competitors like Google and MS.

Oh wait, no I didn't. Because of those 3, Apple is the least diversified company, and it's major revenue source is driven by a single line of products (the iPhone) which drives nearly every one of its other major revenue sources (i.e., the App Store). The double-whammy effect is part of why investors are so concerned: users not buying new iPhones means that users are also buying fewer apps in the App Store.

Google has indeed been much more successful at shipping vaporware.

I wouldn't call google's products vaporware. There are definitely five that I have used. Search, Gmail, Maps, Youtube, and Android. I barely use google search anymore (DDG is my major driver) - I'm not too content with Gmail anymore, and my youtube use has gone down since their ad strategy has changed.

Probably Maps and Android are the two products they do that I would consider 'quality'.

I'm not happy with Tensorflow, Golang, or Kubernetes.

oh chrome is pretty popular it seems (I use firefox)

Tensorflow, I can understand - I imagine the rampant popularity of pytorch shows we're not alone.

What's your issue with Golang though?

There was an article about how golang takes a very classist attitude... There are programmers who use go, that are the peons, and the programmers who write go, who are anointed.. like hashmaps breaking the typesystem.

It feels like a lot of the things that happen like if err != nil are code smell. I wrote a cli in go and wouldn't mind it again but I program in elixir now and the emphasis on developer joy is refreshing (but it makes wise choices, e.g limiting the scope of macros to lexical)

In the last twenty years, Google/Alphabet has killed more products than Apple has launched.

In a very real sense, Alphabet has an r selected corporate strategy, while Apple is K selected[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

> my youtube use has gone down since their ad strategy has changed.

I pay for Google Music and YouTube for $16 for 5 family members and me. I haven't seen a YouTube ad for years. Best use of my money every month.

I agree. It's clear in hindsight that Apple has provided more innovation and Alphabet is still an ad machine.

I disagree with the innovation portion of your comment, but definitely, advertising is an extremely strong foundation of consistent steady growth / revenue. Whatever the economic forces at the time, Google will always continue to provide. With Apple on the other hand it's foundation currently depends on hit-driven successes requiring repeated 2 year cycle refresh purchases from it's customers to sustain it. The issues with this are evidently shown.

As to your comment on innovation, Apple has largely squandered it's source of foundational income cornering itself into a niche, such that though it may be extremely innovative in it's area (Apple has some amazing processor design for example), is fundamentally constrained by the limited pieces it has to work with.

Basically, instead of undergoing a necessary evolution like we've seen from the progression of Google -> Alphabet, Apple has failed to scale itself in a way where it can keep up. This by no means is meant as a sleight to any Apple employees though, as I know from first hand experience that some of the best and brightest people are working there. It's just a matter of how scaling works. Horizontal scaling allows for unlimited growth, whereas vertical scaling quickly reaches an asymptotic ceiling.

Seeing that nothing Google has done outside of selling ads has been profitable and we can assume that all of Apple’s products generate a profit, how can Google’s ventures be considered a “success”?

A success in that it has transformed the public image of the worlds largest and effectively "only" internet ad platform into one of a benevolent tech company working on problems that will help the world.

Google for most of the last decade has had it 'easy' though. The natural expansion of its ad revenue has reduced the need for it to turn some 'evilness' dials to keep revenue and profit growing. With Apple its very straight forward, they sell things, and if you want their services you pay for them.

How much has that goodwill improved profitability? What were people going to do, revolt and use Bing?

Well, for one, it keeps Antitrust somewhat at bay. But, its beyond search, if you want to monetize your site with ads, its pretty much impossible to avoid using Google.

I appreciate your considered reply to my admittedly flippant reply to what I considered an unconsidered statement, so I'll try to return the favor.

Alphabet's approach to innovation is to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. I’m not disparaging that approach, it’s probably what I would do if I had all the money in the world. But I’m not convinced that any of these “moonshots” are amounting to much yet.

Apple has been described by many as the world’s largest startup. They’re very careful with their focus and resources, even to the point of killing off successful products (not just iPods, but things like their routers and printers). They _could_ just spend money and grow, but they know that would lead Apple to not being Apple anymore.

So what is Apple? A strangely conservative company with a clear vision of the future that they approach slowly and methodically.

Apple brought us the “touch future” and the truly “personal computer” (the one you take everywhere in your pocket). We still haven’t fully realized this potential and Apple is still building on it. Look me up in ten years and let me know if they’ve hit that vertical ceiling.

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