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Comment by jrsj | Hacker News Reader

Google to me seems to be the one with the worst execution at the moment. For all of their spend in various areas when is the last time they’ve had a win? Their core business is still strong but they seem to have lost their ability to innovate. That alone makes their decline seem inevitable to me even without considering external forces

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You can't think of any times they've had a win? They saw the largest growth of any FAANG in the past year. What about cloud and devices (pixel, nest, stadia, Chromecast, etc.)? They made 22 billion just on "other" bets in 2020.

With some of their big bets in custom SoCs, waymo, verily, and all of the research that comes out of it (especially in ML) are certainly interesting, I don't think any other companies are innovating at that level. Whether or not they will profit is another matter, of course.

For starters just looking at growth in the past year is very favorable for them, but look at the past 5 and they’re the weakest aside from Facebook and by a relatively small margin. Almost all of their growth has been post-COVID, so it’s hard to say whether that trend will hold. Personally I expect them to return to the slower growth they had pre-pandemic as to me it doesn’t seem like anything core to their business has changed or is going to change within the decade.

Pixel has always lived in the shadow of Samsung and probably always will. Android hardware profit margins are slim. Chromebooks are doing well in education at the moment but they can’t break out of the low end of the market and each of their attempts to do so have failed. Devices overall are a mixed bag in my opinion.

Stadia isn’t very good, costs too much, has a mediocre game library, and given the massive development cost definitely hasn’t paid off and probably never will.

Nest is a business they acquired that’s continued to grow. This is definitely a win, but it’s a small one, and it definitely doesn’t pay for all the unsuccessful products they’ve built.

Custom SoCs are potentially promising, but it’s a specific niche and others are doing the same so that’s kind of a “wait and see” for me.

Their paid services don’t seem popular at all with the exception of gsuite & YouTube premium (which people mainly buy to get around annoyances like not being able to listen to audio from a video with your phone locked or switch apps on mobile while leaving a video running)

I expect a large chunk of that “other” revenue you mentioned is also Google Cloud which despite how hard they’ve tried is far behind it’s competitors and hasn’t seen nearly the growth that Azure in particular has had.

I think you underestimate stadia. I don 't use it myself, but know a lot of people playing on it and highly recommending the experience.

Isn’t that already discontinued?

Nope. I actually signed up for the free trial while I was out of state in December so I could quickly do a couple things and only bring along my MacBook (complete a few daily objectives on my MMO of choice).

I don't think streaming games will ever quite work out for something like a first person shooter or competitive scenes, but I was really impressed otherwise. I didn't notice input lag nearly as much as I thought I would.

Not to mention YouTube, which has exploded over the last few years to have roughly the same revenue as Netflix [1]. They've basically grown a FAANG, and nobody seems to have noticed.

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/with-skyrocketing-sales-yo...

I know someone who just lost access to their Facebook account, and more because resetting their Google password lead to account lockout, and their phone number too, and that means everything that used that email and phone number as well. A cautionary tale and a terrifying reality to depend on a place famous for no human help available.

Totally agree that the pace of innovation in their core business seems to have stalled. However, I'd argue that Waymo (Google subsidiary) is leading the pack, by far, in terms of self-driving capability.

Not only do they have publicly-usable self-driving vehicles on the road today, they are also testing autonomous trucks for freight. Both of these industries are worth multiple 10's of billions/year in the U.S. alone.

Waymo may be ahead but I’m not sure that’s good enough by itself. The largest manufacturers are all working on their own self driving systems. If Waymo software ends up shipping with Nissan, Jaguar/Land Rover, and Volvo products, that’s still a fairly small portion of the market. They might have some success as a robotaxi business but there will be a lot of competition there as well and likely thin margins for companies that can’t achieve significant vertical integration (Tesla, GM, Ford, VW, etc)

I agree this is definitely their biggest opportunity, but it may be more difficult to achieve mainstream success with it than it seems.

I agree somewhat. About 80% or more of their business is still ads. It only takes some major advertising segment to have a downturn or otherwise decide that digital ads are useless and they'll see a hue dip in revenue. Although I'd see FaceBook as more precarious for similar reasons which is what I voted for.

This doesn't happen though. The money comes from brands, and brands are hungry to spend it. They don't really care about return on the dollar either.

Most of their innovation recently is under the hood or not consumer facing yet. Kubernetes, AI, Waymo, etc

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