But while the company still earns the majority of its revenue from advertising, during his tenure Page has helped to diversify the business. Notably, YouTube is expected to generate nearly $6 billion in revenue this year
Maybe I am being pedantic but aren't revenues from Youtube also based on advertising?
To the broader point though, why aren't more investors also putting money toward these "moonshots?" Is it because they don't have the liquidity to do it? Do they cost too much for the risk? If that were true then the Google's investments would be widely panned rather than held up as "making the right bets" as this article mentions.
It seems like these "singularity" technologies are the types of things that valley investors would be all over.
That probably should have said 'search advertising'. YouTube is a different type of advertising. Google needs to plan for a day when search advertising comes under attack from the next big thing. Maybe traditional search fades away, etc.
The interesting thing is that neither YouTube nor Google search have much user lock-in.
YouTube has content producer lock-in, which is tremendously helpful. And it may be that there's just no room for improvement massive enough to pull people away, that video delivery is close enough to its peak to not leave any room for real competition.
But if content was elsewhere, YouTube revenue would vanish very quickly indeed.
Search, on the other hand, still has massive room for improvement. Someone, somewhere will eventually do it. And there's nothing that would keep users on Google search when they do.
It's not like Facebook where's there's a huge network effect. Once there's a notably better search option, it wins very very quickly.
> Search, on the other hand, still has massive room for improvement.
This is true, but it's also a really hard problem and most likely any improvements will require enormous scale to implement (because they'll be based on statistical analysis of prior search queries), which only Google and a handful of others have. So no network effects, but huge economies of scale.
Plus, having used some other search engines (DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Bing, etc.), I feel that Google still has a comfortable lead than the competition.
25% of google searches are unique. I bet another 25% would be so rare and numerous you couldn't possibly have time to tune them. In fact, when you think about how much revenue a single search brings, a search is going to have to happen on the order of 1,000 times (at least?) before you can have a human hand tuning them.
That's from 2007. I wonder how much Google's autocomplete has changed that statistic. Even still, 25% of searches may be unique strings, but I doubt 25% of searches are meaningfully/semantically unique.
> Search, on the other hand, still has massive room for improvement.
Broadly agree.
For what Google does in search, say, first-cut,
keywords/phrases and results sorted by
a measure of gross popularity, page rank,
and date (but, for a second-cut, clearly
now with a lot of refining tweaks), it seems
to me that they are doing a terrific job.
But as far as I can tell, Bing is doing
about the same.
So, if are looking for something, have a few
keywords/phrases that fairly accurately
characterize what want, then Google/Bing
can work well. They can be just terrific.
But that scenario does at
best poorly on a significant fraction of
("safe for work") search.
For this fraction, there are a lot of approaches,
Web sites, etc. but nothing very good.
For this fraction, I worked out some new
techniques and wrote the corresponding software.
For where Google/Bing work well, and often they
are just terrific, my work will usually
not be as good and only occasionally better.
But for nearly all of the fraction of "at best poorly",
my work should be quite good and much
better than anything else. My work is
different, very different, and I believe that
being so different is necessary
(clearly not sufficient) for success in
the fraction I am attacking.
Currently I'm loading some initial data. Then ...,
maybe people will like it.
Of course, with all the usual start-up advice,
my work is doomed to fail because I'm
a solo founder if don't count my kitty
cats! And, I'm not a college dropout.
I didn't even drop out of grad school and
did get my Ph.D. And I'm past 30. So,
right, doomed!
But being successful at what I'm attempting
would be exceptional; so we have to expect
that much of my project is not the usual.
So be it. I have some fairly good reasons
to believe that my work should be successful;
no way am I doing this just "on a wing and
a prayer".
What do you think? Announce a private beta
test here on HN? Get feedback? Get it
working well. Polish the UI/UX. Go live,
get more publicity, run ads, grow?
One of the biggest lock-ins for Google search and YouTube, are the moats around the services (the moat being how hard and expensive it is to build a legitimate competitor).
To compete with Google search you need... perhaps billions in funding to build the scale, speed, accuracy, redundancy, distribution, etc.
To compete with YouTube, you need to spend incredible sums of money to host and stream 720 or 1080 videos; the volume of content uploads; and then to be able to afford all the lawsuits that come with the business regarding content. That's a billion dollars in financing just to get up to proper YouTube punching weight.
The same is true of Facebook. One of its best shields, is the immense cost and scaling challenge to handle a billion users, regardless of if it's gradual. It's incredibly difficult to do well, and with the reliability that Facebook has always had.
Exactly this, I use youtube because everything I want to watch is only on youtube, I use facebook because everyone I want to keep in touch with is only on facebook, I use search because because it's a good product and not because something external is forcing me to use it. If a better search comes along I'm gone in a second.
If you're locked into the google ecosystem, switching is that much harder. Searching from Chrome, Android, Gmail... Google Search would have a continuity savings.
content producr lock-in, is from some contract, technological issue or just ubiquity of Youtube? If Facebook starts its video service pushed heavily on Fb, it will get eyeballs, what is stopping it?
The next "big thing" was supposed to be Siri, Cortana etc which are built into the OS and don't interact with Google. And there has been curious examples of Apple crawling web sites.
Traditional search will never fade away, it'll be diluted. It's the same premise as what's happening to Microsoft with Windows, or Intel with the 'old style' CPU. The traditional desktop type OS isn't going to disappear, as people have been regularly and incorrectly claiming for ~20 years - it's going to be / has been diluted in terms of usage and importance.
Why didn't investors put money toward creating the real actual moonshot? Because, amazing idea that it was, there was no sustainable business there.
Just because an idea is inspiring, amazing, even culturally transformative, that doesn't mean it can be a business. And generally speaking, investors are only interested in ideas that can be businesses. (That's what makes them investors instead of philanthropists...or politicians.)
Here's another reason--new technologies don't always win, because older technologies improve too. When I was editing a tech e-newsletter over a decade ago, a major hot new technology was called organic light-emitting diodes (OLED). This display technology had a huge viewing angle, did not need a backlight, and was super power efficient. It could be printed onto plastic substrates that were flexible and even translucent. It was going to kill the LCD.
Except, it didn't. LCDs improved fast enough to hold onto the market--they got LED backlights, power efficiency, higher and higher resolutions, better viewing angles, better colors, and (maybe most importantly) cheaper and cheaper and cheaper because the volumes were so huge. And it turned out that OLED's had some problems that were not so easily solved. So while OLED is used commercially today, the volumes are small. LCDs, so far, have kept on winning.
The time horizon for moonshots is way too long for the average VC. Google started working on autonomous cars c. 2010, and I'd be fairly astonished if they're available for sale to the general public by 2020.
Google is a public company, and I think the average Wall Street investor is even more 'short-term' than VCs. In fact, it should be a surprise that investors are not questioning such spending. What insulates these moonshot projects from investor ire is that as an expense, they are only a very small part of the total revenue of Google.
Page is shielded from such investors by a Board of Directors. Presumably they have a better understanding of Google's long-term vision. It's also worth keeping in mind that Google performs extremely well even viewed from short-term metrics.
I could see them partnering with Tesla or some other forward thinking automaker in the near future. It would be a very large investment to also build their own cars which probably wouldn't pay off as well as a partnership.
Well some startups that were making progress towards these moonshot ideas have been bought by Google. Also, they have a significant portion of the world's smartest human beings. But there are exceptions; there are companies, big ones and startups, that are working on self-driving cars, cancer-detecting nanotechnologies, high-altitude balloon-based Internet, robotics, home automation, etc.
Thinking further into this question you've posed...there has been a lot of discussion here on HN about how hardware is harder to work with than software. Whether this is true in anything other than for psychological or cultural reasons, who knows. But certainly there is more 'entropy' with your invested failures along the road to success and it's not as simple as deleting or cutting and pasting LOC in a computer file. Hardware is material.
>To the broader point though, why aren't more investors also putting money toward these "moonshots?"
Because only ultra-large, incredibly-rich companies can afford to have seriously large investments fail quite this often. Which is not to say they're a bad idea! This is how blue-sky research works.
Disney is a classic example of a company that made huge leaps and transformed itself from a single revenue stream to a very diverse one.
Can you think of what the board of Disney said to Walt when he decided to open a brick and mortar theme park when their only product to date had been a few animated films? Or how what they said when he unveiled the original vision of EPCOT as a real city with a theme park bolted on.
I don't have a strong opinion in Google doing their moonshots but it's happened before.
> * you think of what the board of Disney said to Walt when he decided to open a brick and mortar theme park when their only product to date had been a few animated films?*
I read an article on Walt once that covered this.. he went to all his friends and family and told them his plan. Every single person told him he was nuts and it would never work.
That was how he knew he was on to something - the fact it had never been attempted before only made him more certain it was going to work.
> he went to all his friends and family and told them his plan. Every single person told him he was nuts and it would never work.
> the fact it had never been attempted before only made him more certain it was going to work.
Those are interesting reasons for being certain it will work. The combination of all the people you cherish the most telling you it's a bad idea and the fact that no one had tried it before. I mean, sure, I understand the romance of it and these reasons giving someone the drive to try it and succeed. But making you certain it's going to work? That I don't understand.
If people are universal in their opinions that something isn't going to work, you then have to assess their credibility.
If you decide that the problem is they lack some specific insight that you possess (and you're really sure about that fact), then in combination with their universal negative position, I believe you can be confident that you're on to something. There's a tendency for strikingly new things to be laughed at, or otherwise denounced as absurd; once you notice that effect at play by people, and you can reasonably confirm your own thesis that you know something they don't, it's a great indicator.
I'm sure there are plenty of people that went to all their friends and family with an idea, were told it wouldn't work and when they tried it it didn't.
A few? Walt got to Hollywood in 1923 and Disneyland opened in 1955. Perhaps more than a few. I would think the board would be fine with it, like Google's board seems to be fine with what Page is doing.
"As Google’s core business continues to thrive, Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology"
I am one of the folks who doesn't believe that Search Advertising is "continuing to thrive", rather I think if you look at the steady erosion of CPC and the growing cost of paid distribution you will see that Google's search advertising business is dying (or at least no longer organically growing). Google can pump those tires with additional inventory, cutting off partners to keep more of the revenue, and buying more traffic, but the bottom line is that if you just ran the business as usual search advertising revenues would be flat to down over the last 8 quarters. In that context their only choice is to find another Golden Goose quickly before the momentum flips.
That said, I've been saying this for several years and they keep pumping and boosting the top line revenue. So it is entirely possible they consider this the normal evolution of their business. Maybe its just advertisers who are pickier or want a better return on their advertising dollar. I don't know, but I do know search advertising is losing profit margin faster than the market is growing.
I nearly posted my standard view of
Fortune but relented. But with your
comment, here goes! My view of Fortune
is that they have a formula for
such articles.
First glance, the article seems to be
to provide information to the readers,
say, as in "this is what this really successful
guy does that you, the reader, might learn
from and find useful in your work in business".
But my view is that this first glance is
nearly totally wrong.
Instead the formula for the articles is
not to provide useful, or even very solid,
information at all. Instead, the formula
is a manipulation of the reader: The reader
is made to feel good about themselves.
How? The article makes the subject's work
look simple, definitely like the reader
can easily see themselves doing the same. Then the
reader feels like they are on the right track,
that is, already doing as well as the
subject of the article. So, the article passes
out a lot of simplistic insights, cliches,
trivialities, etc. that any reader can agree
that they could have done.
Really
it is best for the formula if the
reader comes away learning
nothing at all; that is, part of the formula
is to make the reader conclude that they
are already on the right track, already
know as much as the subject in the article,
could easily do just what the subject does,
and, thus, are on the way also to being worth
billions. So, a main goal is that the reader
learn nothing!
So, are making the reader feel good by confirming
that the simplistic thoughts that they can
easily already have really are the right stuff.
Or, such an article is vicarious, escapist, fantasy,
emotional experience entertainment (VEFEEE).
And that's the article. The formula is to
manipulate the reader into coming back for
more, thinking that, "I'm reading Fortune
and, thus, learning from the best Captains of
Business; oh, oh, oh, I'm learning so much;
and, since these guys are worth billions,
I can be, too.".
I concluded all this long ago. I am surprised to
see Fortune still following the same old
formula. Heck, I kept reading to the end just
to see if they had any significant content
beyond their old formula -- they didn't.
So, net, I gave up on Fortune for years, and
now I'll give up on the Web version for more
years! What a big pile of nutten, deliberately,
very carefully crafted, total nutten!
Well, let's see: private rocket company sending stuff to the international space station, fastest production sedan and it's electric, made electric cars cool. Some of the goals seem to be accomplished.
Maybe, but so has Page—a self-driving car, a box where you can basically ask a question, the first major piece of wearable electronics after the watch—this aren't trivial. And yet, it doesn't impress me much more than Musk's existing achievements have—they're both in edison territory at the moment—brilliant businessmen—not Gutenberg, world-changing level yet.
Agreed, Google does a ton of things extremely well but the world would be more or less the same with subpar search or subpar youtube from some other company. If they can realize the self driving car or get everyone wearing glass then they've changed the world.
Tesla is on the forefront of getting the car industry to accept something they said couldn't be done. Battery powered cars. This will change the world, or maybe be required step for us to not wreck it.
"A brainiac who works in the lab walks into Page’s office one day wielding his latest world-changing invention—a time machine. As the scientist reaches for the power cord to begin a demo, Page fires off a dismissive question: “Why do you need to plug it in?”
It’s a tall tale that is repeated affectionately by the whizzes inside the futuristic lab because it captures the urgency and aspiration of their boss to move technology forward."
Is this really repeated affectionately? (If at all.) That sounds like a bug, not a feature.
It sounds like the typical strategy of just asking for something more when it's presented to you, to get more results. It's easier to ask than to make.
The joke was probably intended as a jab at unreasonable managers, but joke-Page did catch an important engineering flaw: After you use the wall-socket-powered time machine to travel through time, there is likely to not be a wall socket at your destination...
I think it being a time machine trumps its being powered by plutonium: go to future for cure to cancer, come back, and just like that, the plutonium is irrelevant.
the joke is why you're still depending on some manager's opinion, bringing it to his office (for what? for demo? for approval?) when you have invented time machine.
It would be great to see google diversify their business model as well as their technology so they weren't getting most of their profit from advertising.
It does -- there are products for enterprises, hardware, Google Play ecosystem, Internet access (fiber, loon), operating systems, investments into health research and robotics, self-driving cars, house energy and safety products (Nest). Not enough?
Enterprise (with Google Docs), and maybe Chromecast, are the two arguably profitable non-advertising products. The other product areas are surely in the red.
Google is trying to diversify, but they haven't been successful at turning a profit on non-advertising products, at least not yet.
I understand that, but it's not what I meant. I meant is how he knew that other products such as Play store are not profitable? I don't think Google breaks down the profit reports to this level of granularity, so it might be just reported as an ad revenue/profits.
Looks like Xerox PARC to me: one fantastic business funding great research projects.
They are protecting that business well, by seeing and acting on mobile early, by acquiring Android and developing it.
I think heads-up displays (eventually) will be the next big thing, because they remove hardware size-limitation (cf. watches), and Google is at least ready for that, with Glass.
I'm glad that Google has enough money to take on risky projects. So much of what they do fails - they essentially only have advertising. But to be honest nothing in that article seemed that world-changing or interesting. Even the nanoparticles are mundane and not much more of an extension of the work that's been going on since the 90s on bio-chips for detection.
But nanoparticles for drug deliver is interesting but they've been doing something similar with bio-engineered antibodies since the early 2000s. (in fact, if you're rich enough you can get a tailored cancer treatment with antibodies specific to your own specific cancer - this has been around for awhile)
I've long hoped that self-aware AI would come out of Google, but perhaps not.
In comparison, Elon Musk seems like the true visionary.
> Even the nanoparticles are mundane and not much more of an extension of the work that's been going on since the 90s on bio-chips for detection.
Using antibodies and tailored cancer treatment is still a reactive treatment. As the article states, the Google X Labs is aiming for "constant monitoring" of your body with these nanoparticles - hence creating a "proactive" ability to constantly monitor your body of potential issues. If achievable, that's pretty remarkable.
> In comparison, Elon Musk seems like the true visionary.
Both Page and Musk are visionaries. The logic you use to criticize Page's "mundane" ideas can be equally applied to Musk - serious attempts at modern electric cars have been around since the 90s [1][2], and space travel has been around since the 60s. Your logic would dictate that Musk is merely extending the work in those fields.
Your criticism of Page's "moon shot" ideas not being world-changing/interesting greatly misses the point.
Page and Musk have different areas of strengths, but I don't think you can call one of them a "true visionary" compared to the other. They've already both proven to be incredibly prescient on more than occasion.
As for self-aware AI, we're a long ways away from that. Neither Page nor Musk nor anyone else is remotely close to self-aware AI.
You may be giving up too soon here. None of the fruits of Google X's labors have hit mainstream production yet. You'll be able to judge them once they have.
Maybe I am being pedantic but aren't revenues from Youtube also based on advertising?
To the broader point though, why aren't more investors also putting money toward these "moonshots?" Is it because they don't have the liquidity to do it? Do they cost too much for the risk? If that were true then the Google's investments would be widely panned rather than held up as "making the right bets" as this article mentions.
It seems like these "singularity" technologies are the types of things that valley investors would be all over.