| I for one would much rather go for an interesting 50-year vision instead of pushing for quarterly stock gains exclusively. That's great if you're, say, under the age of 50 and plan to hold your stock your entire life until retirement. But consider a company whose stock price never went up but which had a great 50 year vision. Maybe towards the end of the 50 years it starts going up fast, but by then you already lived a big chunk of your life and passed many moments when you could have used some of the money. At some point you're going to want ROI. One quarter is short for sure, but 50 years is the opposite extreme. Why wait such a long time for hypothetical ROI that may never come? For Google specifically their problem is their revenue has way outpaced their ability to come up with new ideas. Since Larry Page stepped into the shadows the ambition and drive are gone. I'm not sure there's any vision, let alone a 50 year vision. The only highlights are their successes with AI, and maybe Waymo, but those are small parts of the overall company. AI mostly seems to be leading to incremental improvements in their existing products. When you cast your eyes wider you see large amounts of what might uncharitably be described as self-indulgent waste. How many chat services are they up to now? And how many of them had any kind of interesting competitive advantage? How many languages and VMs without any obvious competitive advantage has Google created? How many internal systems do they rewrite without any clear idea of why, other than because someone needs to get promoted? Dig around and discover just how many projects there are producing uncompetitive 'experimental' pseudo-products nobody has ever heard of and likely nobody ever will e.g. https://nsynthsuper.withgoogle.com/ https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-ini... https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/arts-culture/ex... https://www.blog.google/products/photos/gallery-go/ Google has so many products they end up reusing their own names! Google Go is one thing, Google Gallery Go is a totally different thing - a mobile photo gallery app specifically for Nigeria, for some reason. When you look at the firm closely you see a firehose of projects with zero business case and often near-zero impact. Why does Google think these things are better ways to invest the money than what other companies are doing? |
Silicon Valley often sees "a firehose of startups with zero business case and often near-zero impact." And yet, it is considered a key driver of the economic growth / innovation / good jobs and places all over the world want to replicate its success. Maybe, Google just wants to have an in-house Silicon Valley?