Comment by throwGuardian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwGuardian | Hacker News Reader

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There's no basis for this claim - well before Sundar, Makani and many other moonshot bets were spun out. Ruth Porat was brought in specifically to account for the wild-west type haphazard spending, resulting in the Google --> Alphabet restructuring.

Most of all, investors wanted clarity on spending, and Google reacted with the restructuring.

Let's take a moment to fairly summarize what's happened: extremely risky ideas that no sane investor would fund, received disproportionate funding, and as far as I can tell, they all failed even after a decade+ of not expecting profitability. There's no reason to pin this on Sundar - the ideas failed on merit

Also, speaking honestly, he's been rather generous with many projects (Chrome OS and related hardware, Stadia, even horribly performing pixel phone sales), despite decades of losing billions for Google.

That's how it happened, but it's also a display of tragic lack of creativity: the way to fund something like Makani is not to pretend that they would be rational bets. If they were rational everyone would be doing them. I think they could and should be "sold" to shareholders more honestly and sustainably as a brand maintenance efforts like the Oracle boats. On the slim chance that they end up turning a profit nonetheless nobody will complain. Perhaps the failure to put smaller projects like Makani on that track is a consequence of the old Google exceptionalism attitude.

(Smaller projects, because Waymo certainly wouldn't fit that framework. But Waymo is sitting right at the ad business core: "ok car, take me to an Italian restaurant" would be 100% directory ad business)

Those projects you mention him being generous about, are purely commercial moves. I don’t understand why you think they should reflect well on anyone.

Does anyone really expect Chrome OS to ever make a dent against Mac or windows in the PC market? Continuing to lose billions with no hope of moving the market is - generous.

At least Microsoft knew when to cut their losses with Windows phone

Educational market is 60% on chromebooks. They are clearly playing the long game.

Instead of overfunding these they could have funded 100's of 'regular' start-ups and then play Darwin with the winners. That would have moved the needle a lot further than this.

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