[dragonwriter]

> The idea behind that originally was that all of these other projects were going to become so significant that it wouldn't make sense to have them or their management coupled with Google.

No, the idea was that they were high risk speculative efforts and that it didn't make sense to have their branding mixed up with Google, which is a stable, established industry leader.

[koheripbal]

That's a semantic distinction. All major corporations have highly speculative projects that they aren't certain will succeed. With (relatively) minor investments most don't form an umbrella corporation to distinguish them.

In this case, I dont see anything else coming out of non-Google alphabet of meaningful significance, and this org change kind of highlights that.

In my personal opinion, the Google founders probably still DO have some radical plans, but I bet with the increased scrutiny in Congress and abroad they are thinking the Google vrand is more of a liability than an asset.

[dragonwriter]

> That's a semantic distinction.

No, separating branding and separating management are substantively different ideas, not a matter of semantics.

> All major corporations have highly speculative projects that they aren't certain will succeed. With (relatively) minor investments most don't form an umbrella corporation to distinguish them.

That doesn't support your argument that it's a semantic distinction, it instead seems to be an unrelated argument with some implicit premises that argues that most corporations wouldn't have done what Google did to separate Alphabet in similar circumstances, which may or may not be true but is irrelevant to what the point was of Google doing it.

[inlined]

Don’t the companies now also give different financial reporting? Alphabets companies have wildly different expected growths and margins expected. It totally makes sense to be clear with investors that Google’s margins aren’t suffering, Alphabet is just investing upfront capital in Verily or Fiber

[Mistletoe]

Google kills so many projects that they killed their own holding company.

[stopads]

In the past major corporations used to launch speculative research projects and risky ventures, but that rarely happens any more. All the resources are being shifted to stock buybacks, everything else is a secondary priority.

Some companies like Chevron and Texas Instruments have even committed in writing to "returning 100% of all cash flow in perpetuity" to buybacks and dividends. So yes, they have legal contracts saying they won't agree to invest in future growth or investments or research no matter how much money they make, they are so committed to this buyback first model.

Google is a true leader in the buyback wars, they were the first company to commit to $25B in buybacks per quarter, which used to be a shockingly large number for these programs. Lots of other companies have followed that pattern since.

[auiya]

> I dont see anything else coming out of non-Google alphabet of meaningful significance

YouTube. But in general I agree with you.

[derp_dee_derp]

YouTube was pre alphabet, was a purchased acquisition under the Google umbrella, and didn't "come out of non-google alphabet"

[jbms]

YouTube is part of the Google division of Alphabet as it makes money primarily from advertising.

[hordeallergy]

Does anyone know how the subscription YouTube is working out? They sure are putting a good effort into getting me signed up.

[auiya]

I'm a subscriber, mostly because of YouTube Music. I wanted a music platform where I get push notifications of new music by artists I follow. This feature is broken in Spotify and they have no plans to fix (their words). It seems like a simple enough request, but it turns out this feature is also not available and/or broken in YouTube Music. I keep the subscription SOLELY to watch YouTube ad-free now, and for that it is awesome; but I'm considering switching to another music platform. It's hard for me to cancel my subscription to YouTube though because removing all the ads from YouTube is the only thing that makes it actually useful as a platform.

[maxwell]

YouTube Premium is great. I'm happy to pay Google directly, but I've moved away from most of their ad-supported products, including Search.

[spudlyo]

If you love YouTube and hate advertising, then Premium is a very easy decision to make. I'm more than happy to pay Google $12 a month so I can have an ad-free experience on my TV, iPad, phone, and computer.

I have both Netflix and HBO-Now as well, but I'm thinking about canceling them, as 90% of my viewing time is spent on YouTube.

[magduf]

One really nice thing about YouTube is that you can download your favorite programs there with "youtube-dl". I don't know if that works for the premium stuff though (I doubt it). So if you want to download, for instance, all the Rick Steves episodes and then watch them on your plane flight (where you don't have free internet access, or someplace else where the service isn't fast enough to watch YT), it's easy to do, and impossible with those other services.

[jlarocco]

Maybe it's a way to signal that a project might last longer than 5 years before being killed off on a whim...