[drcode]

I think part of the issue is that their "very long bets" (i.e. AI and self driving) have shown enough progress to now be merely "long bets" now which increases R&D expenses and means GOOG is essentially doubling down on the future via "other bets" in lieu of nearer-term revenue.

Time will tell if that's a good strategy.

[sytelus]

It's not very long bets but very few bets. The YC model has shown us that success is highly unpredictable and if you want to have big winners, make a lot of small bets. This is exactly the Nasim Taleb's philosophy and other well-known approaches to cultivating the long tail and outliers. Google actually had right model 15 years ago where they were churning out one product after another and today's big winners like Gmail and Maps are the survivors of that era. The story goes that Larry Page went to Steve Jobs and Jobs told him to cut down on all the random projects and do fewer things. Unfortunately what works for Apple apparently doesn't work for others.