[wyattk]

This seems like it is Google preparing itself for a future where it will almost certainly be hit with the antitrust hammer here in the US. Google has been getting increasing pressure from the EU [1]. It, at least in the public's eye, has been showing more monopolistic behavior and getting more attention, like discussed here [2]. There has been talk of Amazon and Facebook facing similar antitrust issues in the future too, but those seem to be quieter.

The future is uncertain, but this will sure be interesting.

1: http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/27/technology/business/google-e... 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-...

[flexie]

Google used to be this unique company that again and again would launch exciting new services or products. Often it was services that helped them sell ads, but it was services that users found very helpful.

Gmail, Google Translate, Google Map, Google Earth, Chrome, Android. These were all unique in their own way when they came out and found hundreds of millions (mostly free or low paying) users.

But what is the one thing or service that you use from Google which was launched in the last 5 years and are widely used? Nothing.

What is the one thing that they charge for, except advertising, and that scores of people care to pay for? Nothing.

Sure, there have been ongoing improvements of their services and lots of tools, languages and frameworks released for developers. They have been testing self driving cars and there have been rumours about what they do in their lab. There have been laptops, glasses and loudspeakers, but none of them have really been successful or close to be considered market leaders.

Apparently, it's really difficult for one of the richest companies in history with tens of thousands of the most talented engineers, to market just one new product every few year. Was there ever in history so much money gathered so easily by such an amazing force of engineers?

Even within software services that you would think a global company with the largest user base ever, and millions of paying webshops, could dominate; Why is Google not a leader in payment technology? Why are they not dominating hosting services? Why are they not dominating cloud storage? Why don't we buy content such as books, news, movies or songs on Google? Shared economy? Social networks? Why are they not dominating anything else but a few software services that help them sell their core product, the ads?

Google can make such huge amounts of much money selling ads, that everything else is dwarfed in comparison. How could you ever get the attention of management for a project that could potentially - if everything goes well for 5-10 years - make 5 billion in revenue, when Google makes more than that in a month right now?

Not despite of their money but because of their money, Google cannot innovate. Take 1,000 Google engineers elsewhere and they could do amazing things. Have them in Google, and the world would barely notice if they all called in sick for the next 10 years.

Maybe Google's restructuring will help on this. I doubt it, unless the umbilical cord to all the advertisement money is cut completely. Size matters. Google has gotten way too big.

[nindalf]

I have to disagree with this characterization. I don't work for Google but it is apparent that a lot of work goes into their products. You don't necessarily need to launch a new product to show impact. Improving existing ones is plenty great too, even if these improvements aren't as apparent as product launches. For example, we take for granted that the Google assistant can understand most things we say to it. By this time next year it would have gained a bunch of new capabilities that we would also take for granted, except more people would likely be using it and they'd be happier with it than they are today.

On one hand you acknowledge that they are constantly improving existing software, launching new hardware, new frameworks, new tools and on the other you criticise them for "not launching even one product". It's strange because I've actually heard the opposite criticism of Google on HN, that they launch too many products and don't focus enough on existing ones.

[akvadrako]

Many Google products are getting worse. The Maps UI isn't as good as 5 years ago. Search doesn't find things as well as it used to. And competitors are catching up. The developer libraries and languages they have released are all 2nd rate.

The grandparent is right - they basically haven't been able to capitalise on their incredibly strong position, except by becoming better as selling ads.

[3pt14159]

The UI might be worse, but everything else about Maps is better. It knows where front doors are, you can get directions through buildings if you're walking, it's far more traffic-aware, you can schedule when you want to arrive somewhere and it's public transit is smart enough to adjust for available busses, it works in areas of the world like Kiev with Latin or Cyrillic spelling, it has photos of the insides of most places, you can send the directions to your phone and it opens in the maps app there.

My only major complaint about maps is that it isn't friendly to people with limited data. Tapping on a restaurant in Thailand where I might have 50 megs of data for the whole month loads around 1-3 megs of images when all I want to do is see what time it opens. There are minor UI annoyances but overall Maps is a much, much better product than 5 years ago.

[BatFastard]

I think you are not seeing the larger picture. I am sure I am not, but I get glimpses of it. Google maps has added a huge amount of functionality, just not for getting from place to place. They had that down for the most part.

Now they have rankings, hours, sometimes details floor plans on almost every business, every park, every location in the world, that is mind blowing!

On top of that they have photos of everything, those photos, can be used to generate 3d maps for the web, VR, MR. Those photos are also used to train AI.

I think they are doing a great job of capitalizing on their position.

[remus]

I think that's quite subjective.

[jldugger]

> But what is the one thing or service that you use from Google which was launched in the last 5 years and are widely used? Nothing.

Project Fi? Launched 2015, unsure of subscriber count.

Google Cloud Platform? Launched in 2011.

TensorFlow? Launched in 2015.

Kubernetes? Launched in 2015.

> Why are they not dominating anything else but a few software services that help them sell their core product, the ads?

A lot of it comes down to first mover advantage. Lets take your payment tech example. Paypal was founded to accept online payments within months of Google being incorporated. The way I recall the dotcom era, Paypal was paying customers 10 bucks to open an account. And that money was useful because virtually everyone on ebay accepted it. Network effects are critical there.

Google Wallet tried that same trick and it doesn't really work because there's like a billion startups in the space competing to offer virtually the same API and customer UX. Venmo, Braintree, Android Pay, Google Wallet, fuck, even my own credit cards are now in promoting their services in the 'p2p payments' space. None of them are going to end up looking like a Paypal success, because the market is comparatively fragmented.

Same goes for hosting services: AWS has something like a 5 year head start on customer acquisition, and many of them are locked in to AWS for the forseeable future. Between the AWS specific API deps, and the cost of cloud:cloud networking, they have their work cut out for them. And again, there's a fleet of startups flooding the market, as well as major companies: Oracle and AliBaba are bootstrapping cloud hosts in Seattle, where they're pretty transparently recruiting burnt out AWS engineers.

Arguably, they're structurally at a disadvantage. Google's competitors can freely subsidize user growth, whereas Google doing the same would likely draw antitrust complaints today. It's already kind of a big problem for them, and other market incumbents. I just listened to a fairly level headed discussion on the FT podcast about why Amazon might need to be more strongly regulated. Going forward this restructuring is likely going to be the way Alphabet works: instead of directly innovating, they use the proceeds from Google to buy winners from those overcrowded markets, some of which they may have had VC funding rounds in.

[flexie]

These are tools used by thousands of devs, but not hundreds of millions of users.

[jldugger]

Hundreds of millions of users is a very high hurdle. I'm struggling to think of _any_ product used by hundreds of millions of people launched in the past five years. Care to jog my memory?

[sharth]

Telegram and Snapchat are probably the most reasonable companies.

[jldugger]

Snapchat founded 2011, same time frame as Google+. Which is on the wikipedia list of 100M+ user communities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_communities_wi...), but its hard saying how that google+ number was arrived at.

[digitalzombie]

But the dev use those tools to make tools for users.

The users are using it indirectly.

[fsloth]

"What is the one thing that they charge for, except advertising, and that scores of people care to pay for? Nothing."

I think you forgot Google's enterprise tools (i.e. Google mail, docs et all with an actual helpdesk to call to). People do pay for those. But I have no idea how many customers they have.

[flexie]

Older than 5 years

[mcintyre1994]

Google Photos? I assume it's an Android default because it's a 1b+ downloaded app on the Play Store - so probably 100s of millions of users?

[dragonwriter]

> I doubt it, unless the umbilical cord to all the advertisement money is cut completely.

Forming separate LLCs does that.

> Google has gotten way too big.

Alphabet — and especially the non-Google subsidiaries — isn't Google, and this transformation makes that even more true, legally and financially.

[digitalzombie]

> But what is the one thing or service that you use from Google which was launched in the last 5 years and are widely used? Nothing.

Tensorflow and Keras would be example under "one thing"

It's widely used as in the backend of it and many software and research papers are using it.

I'm using it.

[Jabbles]

You're complaining that because Google is not dominating cloud, payments, digital content, social networking etc, it's too big?

Because Google's Ads business is so successful, comparing anything else to it is difficult.

[NicoJuicy]

Project Tango, Chromecast? Money also through Google apps, email and Android

[flexie]

Project tango is great but not a product with hundreds of million users. It is a tool for developers.

Chromecast has sold 30 mio units since it was launched 4 years ago. Whereas that might be a lot for you and me if we launched a company, it's very little for Google.

If it had been an independent company selling 30 million units in 4 years for maybe $10-15 a piece to the stores, making maybe $5-10 per unit, you would likely never have heard of them. In 4 years Chromecast has probably made less revenue for Google than the ads make per day.

[mattmanser]

It's not free software, 30 million hardware units is massive

[on_and_off]

Google Photo has been launched less than 5 years ago and is a great product.

[bitL]

> But what is the one thing or service that you use from Google which was launched in the last 5 years and are widely used? Nothing.

TensorFlow, Keras

[nova22033]

>What is the one thing that they charge for, except advertising

I don't get the "If you exclude (thing that makes them 70billion $ in revenue) what do they really do?" logic.

[hdhzy]

Excellent insight, thanks for sharing that.

I'd also agree with the following:

> Not despite of their money but because of their money, Google cannot innovate.

[ejanus]

Elite school engineers may not fire up great products and services when all they think of is "fat" pay. Spirit of innovation and invention comes naturally to us when we are "squeezed". Google is a mature company and their primary concern should be on squeezing out money Dollars from their current product lines

[tehlike]

Google photos, chromecast, project fi.

Ps: google employee, but would have done the same if i werent.

[zachkatz]

Reminds me of a certain military industrial complex...

[jedberg]

I think it's the reverse. I think it's so that in the future when one of their self driving cars has an accident and kills someone, they are only liable for however much money that division has, and not all of Google.

[zrail]

Seems likely. This way if/when Google LLC gets hit by massive antitrust fines the rest of the Alphabet subsidiaries will be insulated.

[tryingagainbro]

the rest of the Alphabet subsidiaries will be insulated.

they already are...relatively speaking they make no money.

[dragonwriter]

Since Google makes all the money, that's the opposite of the important direction of insulation. This way if one of the other bets incurs massive liabilities, Google's assets and income streams are insulated.

[throwaway40483]

This would make sense if the other entities were actually making, which they don't. Cut the ties to Google and everything else dies.

[ma2rten]

Why does it matter?

[dragonwriter]

Its Alphabet giving its non-Google businesses the ability to take risks and fail without jeopardizing each other and, especially, Google.

It gives them much greater freedom to innovate.

[godzillabrennus]

When the drama unfolded over the James Damore manifesto I recognized immediately what would unfold next in our cold civil war.

The folks who work at Google may have been appeased but it served as a lighting rod to gather those who oppose the culture in urban areas like Silicon Valley.

I think it's very likely we will now see an accelerated push from the Trump administration and conservatives to break up the big firms in Silicon Valley.

I hope I'm wrong.

[theWatcher37]

I'll take a stab at it.

Internet search has evolved past that of a free market entity; search is now a public utility as much as power and water.

You can't imagine a neighborhood without power and water. You can't imagine the internet without search. Google today is like the AT&T of old. When we bust it up the goal should be power-utility-like entities (bland, unbiased, purely functional entities with mostly technical oversight and immunity from liability)

[Klathmon]

We can't even get internet access regulated as a public utility in the US despite many begging for it, hell we can't even keep internet access neutral! There's no way that a tool used on the internet would become one.

[Toboe]

> There's no way that a tool used on the internet would become one.

Said tool pissed of the party that is most strongly associated with "never regulate!".

[yellowapple]

They're overdue for a bit of regulatory shaking, even amid the ironic circumstances.

[phreeza]

Does any of the subsidiaries except for Google turn a profit though?

[trapperkeeper74]

Yup. Instead of a corporate inversion, it's a corporate dispersion.

[diogenescynic]

During the Trump administration? Not likely. Even Obama didn't take action like that, so I can't see republicans or Trump doing it.

[usefulcat]

Trump has at most 8 years, barring another constitutional amendment. I can believe that Google is looking further than that.

[dragonwriter]

Republicans and Trump are much less friendly to Google, even if less generally inclined to anti-trust vigor,

[ikeboy]

If the fines are for behavior during the time they were together I don't see any separation now being worth the paper it's written on.

[Tuna-Fish]

They are not trying to avoid fines, they want to prepare for the possibility that the company will be forced to split into multiple (truly) independent entities. When the split is done carefully beforehand, the loss to shareholders is minimized compared to a much more abrupt split done by a court of law.

[ma2rten]

If there was a split it would be inside Google, not splitting Google from other bets.

[robbiep]

Another way to look at it is now it's easy to divest some of those entities

[theduncan]

If they were going to do this, they would have pulled the advertising out of google.

This would drop what Google makes, but would also reduce what Google can be fined in the EU.

*edit, I mean the legal entity that sells the ads. DoubleClick, adsense,...

[ikeboy]

The parent links to an EU article about fines and another sibling comment said it would help protect against fines.