Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by onlyrealcuzzo 783 days ago
Google makes >90% of profits from Search and Ads.

Even if you group in half of gsuite for Gmail and all of Android (for the default search app) - that's still not even half of the company.

The profit per employee there is probably close to $1.5M - and that's after average compensation above $500k.
1 comments
cletus 783 days ago
And we arrive at collectivism vs individualism and the tendency of people to privatize gains but socialize losses.

Yes, search and ads are the golden goose but so many things contribute to that success. Chrome, for example, is absolutely crucial to search quality. Maps is huge. Android is also critical. Search and ads use a whole bunch of infra (eg Borg, storage, load balancing, serving infra, traffic management, data center infra and so on). Even the people who manage all the corp Linux distributions and video conferencing infra contribute. Source control, build infra, testing infra and so on.

Deciding who does and doesn't "contribute" for something so interconnected like this quickly devolves into a political exercise at best and a popularity contest at worst.

link
onlyrealcuzzo 783 days ago
Maps is part of the search org.

Chrome is part of the android org.

I already included those.

I'm basically not counting YouTube, Cloud, most of Gsuite, Waymo (and all the other bets).

link
cletus 783 days ago
> Maps is part of the search org

Is that true now? It certainly wasn't when I worked there.

> Chrome is part of the android org.

This only happened in the last month.

> I'm basically not counting YouTube ...

Youtube revenue was 20% of search's revenue in Q4 [1] and it's of strategic importance on many levels, including to search directly.

> ... Cloud ...

Cloud is of strategic importance too. Why? Because it helps keep data center costs down. Why? Because Cloud increases the demand for RAM, CPUs, hard drives and flash storage. This allows Google to demand lower prices for all of these things from suppliers.

> ... Waymo

This one is fair. It's a vestige of GoogleX AFAIK. I'm kinda surprised it still exists in the same company that de-prioritized Google Fiber, which realy is core to Google's business.

[1]: https://www.marketingdive.com/news/alphabet-google-q4-2024-e...

link
onlyrealcuzzo 783 days ago
> Is that true now? It certainly wasn't when I worked there.

It depends how you define "org".

link