[ekeane]

Intel did a great job coming up with great ideas before everyone else, then killing them off once someone decided they weren't going to immediately make 60% gross margins. I'm constantly amazed at how quickly the company managed to throw away good ideas because it could only make 40% gross margin, or was going to take another few years to develop a market.

[jiggawatts]

Google has the same disease.

[adamc]

Google is still buoyed by their de-facto monopoly on search. If that ends, the world would look different.

[nemothekid]

You could argue Microsoft had the same disease. Ultimately, it's not as terminal because turning around a software-sized cruise ship is alot easier than turning around a hardware one.

Google can be refocused in a 4 years. Intel, at minimum, seems to need a decade.

[tacticus]

Microsoft has a worse case of the same problem but greater monopoly force. Entirely dependent on the captive markets but rapidly snatching up everything they can to enforce it on other markets.

[dangus]

What disease is that? Making more money every year?

Google revenue has only declined twice, and never by more than 3%.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/reve...

[YZF]

Intel also had revenue growth until they didn't.

That said Google could be doing worse. They at least have something around phones and AI. They're trying to attack some new markets. Google was structured so shareholders have no power but share price is still something that is going to drive decisions and hasn't been that amazing recently.

[dangus]

Intel has actually had many quarters of declining revenue, Google has been far more consistent in the last 15 years. Intel has had over 20 quarters where revenue declined since 2010 and they are spread out across 2010-2024, while Google only lost revenue in two quarters.

I would argue that Intel's poor performance is quite detached from Google's consistently exceptional performance. Heck, they aren't even in the same business (primarily hardware vs. primarily media (advertising) and software).

Google is:

- A member of the smartphone app store duopoly

- A member of the cloud compute big 3

- Nearly a pure monopoly in Internet search in Western countries

- Has a higher office productivity software marketshare than Microsoft Office

- Internet cable TV provider with the highest subscriber count

I'd like to understand how it "hasn't been that amazing recently."

[YZF]

YTD S&P 500 has a 26.9% return and GOOG has 25.7%.

Intel has been around since 1968 and Google since 1998. As you say they're also in a different business. But Intel has executed pretty well up to maybe 2007 so over about 50 years. vs. Google's 26 years of existence.

Most of your bullet points aren't anything new, this is Google riding on work that's been done a while back. The question is what will be the new bullet points and whether it will be able to stave competition eating into its existing bullet points. The pressure to get the stock price higher is going to take its toll as the bean counters try to artificially inflate it.

[dangus]

I’m not sure what less than one percent difference from the S&P 500 is supposed to prove good or bad. The S&P 500 is heavily weighted toward Alphabet, it literally is a big part of the S&P 500 itself.

And, you know, Exxon Mobil hasn’t really made a new product in quite some time but they’re doing just fine.

Still, I’d say that Google has had plenty of new products and bets that it has been making, along with great recent performance in many ways.

They’re finally hitting their stride with consumer hardware, with the FitBit acquisition clearly boosting their wearables business and selling a lot more pixel watches than any previous smartwatch effort.

Similarly, Pixel phones themselves have jumped from around 4% marketshare to 8-12% marketshare in the US just this year. Success in that arena is very new to Google, so I would call that a long term investment that is paying off.

Google is investing in custom Tensor processors which is also a recent product launch for them, starting in 2020.

Stadia was a new product that obviously failed in the end but did represent a decent technical achievement and major bet on a new product.

YouTube TV isn’t that old, either, it launched 2017, and being the top subscribed digital cable product is a big achievement.

The elephant in the room for newest major product launch is Bard AI and Gemini. It’s fair to say AI is less than proven and that these may be copycat products, but it’s also true that it’s going to be an area where your big competitors are basically Microsoft, Apple, and Google with little room for anyone else.

And let’s not forget that large companies can boost their value proposition and mitigate competitive threats through acquisitions. Even IBM’s lost decade was overcome, and a lot of it was through acquisitions and business unit spinoffs and closures that helped modernize their offerings (companies like Red Hat and Hashicorp).

[brookst]

If you think Google is in great corporate health and primed for nothing but success, maybe think twice on that.

It is possible that Google maintains current revenue levels. It seems unlikely they will have significant growth unless they fix their culture.

[dangus]

So what you're telling me is that I should be listening to you, a random person on the Internet, and expect that one of the most valuable companies in the world with decades of consistent revenue growth, a monopoly in internet search, duopoly in smartphone operating systems/app stores, one of the big 3 social media companies, one of the big 3 cloud compute companies, one of the big 3 AI companies, and the owner of the digital cable TV provider with the highest subscriber count is just going to magically not be successful in the future?

You might as well be telling me that you think that Saudi Aramco is going to go under because they need to fix their "culture."

[tpetry]

Culture is not important for their revenue, most of the company is not. The ads business is their cash cow which finances the rest of the company. They can have horrible culture and mismanagement everywhere and revenue will still grow - if they don‘t fuck up their teams working on ads.

[brookst]

Gartner says Google’s share of search will decline by 25% by 2026. [1]

Even assuming the teams working on ads are immune to bad culture, how do they grow revenue when their inventory declines?

Google is facing a substantial crisis, and their culture issues reduce their odds of making the necessary transformations.

1. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-02-1...

[hnfong]

At this point it's not inconceivable that either the US or the EU will fuck up their ads business out of anti-trust concerns.