[dendory]

It's interesting to see how Google, a company that has arguably some of the best engineers in the world and the most brilliant technologists, still only makes a decent revenue on online ads. All of their other startups are losing money.

[acchow]

Google had $75 billion in revenue in 2015 with $16 billion net income. They are a 17 year old company. I think that's a lot better than "decent".

[ryanobjc]

Why, you're right - somehow another $20b a quarter business has eluded them! They're normally just all over the place, I have a few in my couch at home. So weird.

And yeah, all those other 'bets' - losing money. New things are usually immediately hugely profitable, and even thinking about trying something that doesnt make huge bank right out the gate makes 0 sense.

This is in stark contrast to winning companies such as Microsoft, Intel, AT&T, Exxon (and any other oil company), which have all figured out how to get those $80b/year businesses bootstrapped, not to mention who have significantly diversified their revenue from their original business lines!

[adventured]

> not to mention who have significantly diversified their revenue from their original business lines

Both Microsoft and Intel very successfully diversified their businesses at various times. I'm not sure you could have named two other tech giants that did a better job of diversifying away from their original product lines (which was not Windows for Microsoft, and was not microprocessors for Intel).

Microsoft didn't start out as an operating system company, they diversified into that business. Then they successfully diversified all over again. Windows dominated Microsoft's business for about 15-18 years. That's no longer the case. All profit from Windows could go away tomorrow and they would still be earning around $15 billion per year in net income. They're now a heavily diversified technology conglomerate.

Intel was a business initially built on memory chips, which were their first products. They did an extremely good job of diversifying; had they not they would have disappeared with the memory business.

"While Intel created the first commercially available microprocessor (Intel 4004) in 1971 and one of the first microcomputers in 1972, by the early 1980s its business was dominated by dynamic random-access memory chips."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel

[MikeHolman]

I assume you're being sarcastic, but Microsoft has done a pretty good job diversifying. Office, Windows, Azure, SQL, Surface, Xbox, even Bing contribute significantly to the bottom line.

[f2f]

and every single one of those was profitable from day 1!