wow. When I started there end of 2011 it was something like 35,000, and ~20,000 engineers. And even then when I went down to the Googleplex I always walked around stunned absolutely baffled what all those people were doing. (Our office had about ~300 people back then)
You’d be surprised the challenges that crop up when a company grows to the size of a FAANG. For all the bad press they get, Timmy’s little acronym.io startup doesn’t have to have entire teams to deal with nation state actors trying to use platforms to destabilize global democracy.
> As announced on April 20, 2023, we brought together part of Google Research (the Brain team) and DeepMind to significantly accelerate our progress in artificial intelligence (AI). The group, called Google DeepMind, is reported within Alphabet's unallocated corporate costs prospectively beginning in the second quarter of 2023. Previously, the Brain team was included within Google Services.
"As announced on April 20, 2023, we brought together part of Google Research (the Brain team) and DeepMind to significantly accelerate our progress in artificial intelligence (AI). The group, called Google DeepMind, is reported
within Alphabet's unallocated corporate costs prospectively beginning in the second quarter of 2023. Previously, the Brain team was included within Google Services."
That's not it, the 2022 segment numbers have been recast to account for that reporting change. Most of the difference seems to be explained in the "Reductions in Our Workforce and Office Space" section ($870M) and a reduction in hedging gains ($639M).
Would you please stop posting these? Pre-existing agendas aren't ok on HN because they aren't curious conversation. Obviously criticisms of $BigCo are fine on HN (every thread fills up with them anyhow), but the high-order bit should be curiosity.
Taking HN threads on generic flame tangents in a fixed and repetitive way, which your account has been doing for a long time now, is not what this site is for.
Please just stick to the intended use of the site. Any fixed agenda is tedious, and you've been prosecuting one on HN for many years.
It should go without saying, but I suppose I'll add that this has nothing to do with agreeing or disagreeing with you, only with what HN is for (and what it is not for).
The way this thread appears now (OP is flagged / invisible), it seems somebody made a remark about layoffs and the reaction was negative despite layoffs being at least somewhat relevant to quarterly results. But it's really telling to see YC HN moderation speak up in public here (when very clearly the mods can reach the user by private email) and yet YC HN mods were completely 100% OK with blatent sexism in another Google-related thread, where a user doubled down into "[xx theory] in and of itself that suggests the male was better at the job than she was."
they might trim some infrequently used features but I can't see them completely killing Google Cloud- not only does it make money (the only real money other than ads), the reputational hit would be immense. Imagine telling thousands of enterprises they have to move petabytes to a competitor.
Google is still the greatest business of all time.
Despite people thinking it was heading for a decline due to Bing, ChatGPT, AI ect. It just posted another quarter with all-time high revenue and this year will be its best year ever.
All sectors are growing and profit, minus other bets.
120B in cash.
25 years of growth without a single year of revenue decline is crazy at 300B yearly revenue.
ppl been saying this for the past decade. There is nothing even close on the horizon to replace Google ads or search. Even if Chat GPT gains some traction for search, which is unlikely, it's not a threat at all to Google's mobile ads dominance. Despite endless promotion for the past 12 years, hardly anyone uses Duck Duck Go.
couldn't agree more.
From another point of view, it's time to end the dominance of company G, it has been killing the internet for too long: google ads are now just G tax.
The iPhone was instantly taking market share from BlackBerry from release. By 2011 they already had ~20% of the market share. The same market share they hold today.
Google still hold a dominate position in Search with ~85% of the market share. The same market share they had for the past decade. No one is taking the market from them.
Their Ads business has more competition that every before, yet it still a growing business. The only company that has taken significant share from that has been Meta and that has slowed significantly for the past 3-4 years now.
So who is going to destroy Google's business like the iPhone did to BlackBerry?
You can't build a significant Ad business overnight and Ads aren't going anywhere.
Google has more 1 billion users application than any other company in the world most of them are contain Ad space for them to sell.
The only threat to Google is Meta and again Meta hasn't been a threat for the past 3-4 years.
I hope people understand that their profits come as a result of monopolistic abuse and pitting advertisement buyers against each other in a bidding war.
We are all paying into Google coffers a tiny bit.
Maybe it's not a zero-sum game, but it's not an unlimited-sum game either. Google is doing this at the expense of the general public, through hundreds of mini-dark patterns designed to extract data and sell it back to us, at a markup (in dollars or attention).
The business may be impressive from the point of big numbers, but that's all it is. It stopped being impressive after the search quality has gone downhill and none of the other products panned out.
> pitting advertisement buyers against each other in a bidding war.
How else do you sell a limited resource that more than 1 person wants?
On the other side of that bidding war is a publisher with an ad spot to sell. Sure Google takes a cut of that sale, but in every auction there is always a commission given to the auctioneer.
No one is complaining about Sotheby's making a profit when they sell the latest Banksy painting for squillions.
On the other hand, YouTube ads revenue increased from 7,340 million to 7,665 million in respectively the quarters ended June 30 2022 and June 30 2023.
That is a revenue increase of only about 4% even though they have added way more than 4% of ads in the last year! So maybe on paper it still looks great, but advertisers are definitely spending less.
EDIT: Might also explain why they are obsessed with adblockers now on YouTube. Numbers have to go up in the next quarter again. I wonder whether accepting that the party is over might be a better long term strategy.
Why use the June numbers? In the September quarter the yoy growth was 12%.
There was definitely a relative slowdown as the world opened up after the pandemic. The comparisons from now on will be more relevant to the long-term growth prospects.
Can anyone explain why servers are now more useful for longer than they used to be? I feel the world is spinning faster, and new tech comes out faster. Especially with faster networking and more compute.
In the document they mention this:
In January 2023, we completed an assessment of the useful lives of our servers and network equipment and
adjusted the estimated useful life of our servers from four years to six years and the estimated useful life of certain
network equipment from five years to six years. This change in accounting estimate was effective beginning in fiscal
year 2023, and the effect was a reduction in depreciation expense of $977 million and $2.9 billion and an increase
in net income of $761 million and $2.3 billion, or $0.06 and $0.18 per basic and $0.06 and $0.18 per diluted share
for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2023, respectively.
There are many tasks for which speed is not an absolute requirement.
I bet there are lots of places that parallelisation makes more computers within the ballpark of acceptable performance perfectly cromulent to keep around.
Heck, my 2015 mac is a perfectly serviceable media player when I watch sport.
With repercussions. If they’re estimating a lifespan extension and later go back to the original estimate, they’ll have huge one-off depreciation charges, no?
My hot take is that servers could potentially last longer than 6 years so it is all really just accounting. Or at least is was never as short as 3 years.
When we were in a low/zero interest rate environment - there was a growth at all costs mentality among investors (and therefore management). Since investors didn't give any bonus points if a company was able to operate profitably - might as well depreciate to the max allowable by accounting law and not show a profit. In fact - not showing a profit was actually seen a positive features/badge of honor for a stock.
Now that interest rates have gone up, investors care about ability to generate current cashflow/net income and are prioritizing rational PE ratios - depreciating expenses over a longer time horizon (closer to reality) makes sense.
This is armchair analytics so take me with a grain of salt, but:
- server/cloud computing is largely all about performance per watt
- the latest couple gens intel seem to be struggling to innovate and are just getting better benchmarks by cranking up the power consumption. even AMD's latest release is along the lines of "x% faster per core, XX% more power draw".
So I wonder if this is percolating out into the server/cloud space where people are just watching the chipmakers trade off efficiency for benchmarks and are unimpressed.
New tech in the server space comes out slower than it used to. Moore's Law has almost dried up.
Fifteen years ago, you could assume that you would have 50% larger hard drives and significantly more FLOPS/watt with each year's new systems. Today, that trend has almost entirely stalled.
In short: servers used to have short life-cycles not because they no longer worked, but because they had so much higher operating expenses (electricity, datacenter floor-space) than newer models. That trend no longer holds; the more relevant question today is "how long will the servers work".
> I feel the world is spinning faster, and new tech comes out faster.
Isn't it because it's precisely the opposite? Moore's law stopped a while ago, at least that's what a lot of people think.
So much of the new tech now seems to be around GPU's and LLM's, but that doesn't affect the Google Search or YouTube or Docs servers. So they just keep humming along as usual, with a totally different set of new-fancy-tech servers spun up for the new fancy stuff.
My guess is that server farms are currently used at full capacity. So that while a few years ago the thought was to upgrade existing data centers to more efficient servers, now there is more data centers being built while slightly less efficient servers are left running where they are. This is the accounting change to reflect that: depreciate slower to reflect longer in-practice life.
Also "data center electrical power / compute" (which reflects both cooling and server power supply cost) has held relatively steady for a while which makes it easier to do that.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadEdit: That’s only a small part indeed.
Employee severance and related charges: $86 million
Real estate exit charges: $16 million
Accelerated rent and accelerated depreciation: $207 million
Looks like Google Brain/Deepmind accounts for most of the remaining $1B-plus.
> As announced on April 20, 2023, we brought together part of Google Research (the Brain team) and DeepMind to significantly accelerate our progress in artificial intelligence (AI). The group, called Google DeepMind, is reported within Alphabet's unallocated corporate costs prospectively beginning in the second quarter of 2023. Previously, the Brain team was included within Google Services.
Taking HN threads on generic flame tangents in a fixed and repetitive way, which your account has been doing for a long time now, is not what this site is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It should go without saying, but I suppose I'll add that this has nothing to do with agreeing or disagreeing with you, only with what HN is for (and what it is not for).
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alphabet-q3-earnings-12311976...
If you're trying to pass/catch up to second place (MSFT), growing 6-7 percent less than second place doesn't help.
Despite people thinking it was heading for a decline due to Bing, ChatGPT, AI ect. It just posted another quarter with all-time high revenue and this year will be its best year ever.
All sectors are growing and profit, minus other bets.
120B in cash.
25 years of growth without a single year of revenue decline is crazy at 300B yearly revenue.
Blackberry posted their best quarter in _2011_.
Companies that are dead men walking frequently post record-breaking revenue long after someone else has drank their milkshake.
Google still hold a dominate position in Search with ~85% of the market share. The same market share they had for the past decade. No one is taking the market from them.
Their Ads business has more competition that every before, yet it still a growing business. The only company that has taken significant share from that has been Meta and that has slowed significantly for the past 3-4 years now.
So who is going to destroy Google's business like the iPhone did to BlackBerry?
You can't build a significant Ad business overnight and Ads aren't going anywhere.
Google has more 1 billion users application than any other company in the world most of them are contain Ad space for them to sell.
The only threat to Google is Meta and again Meta hasn't been a threat for the past 3-4 years.
We are all paying into Google coffers a tiny bit.
Maybe it's not a zero-sum game, but it's not an unlimited-sum game either. Google is doing this at the expense of the general public, through hundreds of mini-dark patterns designed to extract data and sell it back to us, at a markup (in dollars or attention).
The business may be impressive from the point of big numbers, but that's all it is. It stopped being impressive after the search quality has gone downhill and none of the other products panned out.
How else do you sell a limited resource that more than 1 person wants?
On the other side of that bidding war is a publisher with an ad spot to sell. Sure Google takes a cut of that sale, but in every auction there is always a commission given to the auctioneer.
No one is complaining about Sotheby's making a profit when they sell the latest Banksy painting for squillions.
That is a revenue increase of only about 4% even though they have added way more than 4% of ads in the last year! So maybe on paper it still looks great, but advertisers are definitely spending less.
EDIT: Might also explain why they are obsessed with adblockers now on YouTube. Numbers have to go up in the next quarter again. I wonder whether accepting that the party is over might be a better long term strategy.
There was definitely a relative slowdown as the world opened up after the pandemic. The comparisons from now on will be more relevant to the long-term growth prospects.
In the document they mention this:
In January 2023, we completed an assessment of the useful lives of our servers and network equipment and adjusted the estimated useful life of our servers from four years to six years and the estimated useful life of certain network equipment from five years to six years. This change in accounting estimate was effective beginning in fiscal year 2023, and the effect was a reduction in depreciation expense of $977 million and $2.9 billion and an increase in net income of $761 million and $2.3 billion, or $0.06 and $0.18 per basic and $0.06 and $0.18 per diluted share for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2023, respectively.
I bet there are lots of places that parallelisation makes more computers within the ballpark of acceptable performance perfectly cromulent to keep around.
Heck, my 2015 mac is a perfectly serviceable media player when I watch sport.
When we were in a low/zero interest rate environment - there was a growth at all costs mentality among investors (and therefore management). Since investors didn't give any bonus points if a company was able to operate profitably - might as well depreciate to the max allowable by accounting law and not show a profit. In fact - not showing a profit was actually seen a positive features/badge of honor for a stock.
Now that interest rates have gone up, investors care about ability to generate current cashflow/net income and are prioritizing rational PE ratios - depreciating expenses over a longer time horizon (closer to reality) makes sense.
- server/cloud computing is largely all about performance per watt
- the latest couple gens intel seem to be struggling to innovate and are just getting better benchmarks by cranking up the power consumption. even AMD's latest release is along the lines of "x% faster per core, XX% more power draw".
So I wonder if this is percolating out into the server/cloud space where people are just watching the chipmakers trade off efficiency for benchmarks and are unimpressed.
Fifteen years ago, you could assume that you would have 50% larger hard drives and significantly more FLOPS/watt with each year's new systems. Today, that trend has almost entirely stalled.
In short: servers used to have short life-cycles not because they no longer worked, but because they had so much higher operating expenses (electricity, datacenter floor-space) than newer models. That trend no longer holds; the more relevant question today is "how long will the servers work".
Isn't it because it's precisely the opposite? Moore's law stopped a while ago, at least that's what a lot of people think.
So much of the new tech now seems to be around GPU's and LLM's, but that doesn't affect the Google Search or YouTube or Docs servers. So they just keep humming along as usual, with a totally different set of new-fancy-tech servers spun up for the new fancy stuff.
Also "data center electrical power / compute" (which reflects both cooling and server power supply cost) has held relatively steady for a while which makes it easier to do that.