- Revenue increased from $76B to $86B (13% increase)
- Operating income increased $18.1B to $23.7B
- Net income increased $13.6B to $20.7B
- Diluted EPS increased $1.05 to $1.64
There could be other factors in play like the recent volatility in Netflix within the same sector, as well as the upcoming FOMC meeting tomorrow causing increased fear. Markets aren't always as accurate and efficient as some believe, and stock prices always become more volatile around earnings.
All those other factors would have been priced in at the end of the day. The only new information since then would have been the earnings release. If the absolute numbers are better than expected, then maybe it's the relative numbers (as compared to Microsoft who also released earnings) that are worse than expected?
Also keep in mind that the "expected" are not the actual expected, but rather "publicly expected numbers that are freely given out and therefore useless". Investment firms have private expected numbers that are far more accurate, the publicly given out ones are designed to manipulate retail investors.
Completely true, it would be a combination of both. Clearly it didn't meet a lot of expectations indicated by the selloff, but selling could also be aggravated by a sell day in the Nasdaq/XLC and high impact economic events on the horizon. This is all conjecture from me, I am by no means a market expert, just offering a way to rationalize the above comment on how a good/"not that bad" earnings report can still result in a stock having a large selloff.
Google missing on ad revenue is like Apple missing on iPhone revenue. It's even worse for Google because it's a larger part of their business. Is the miss a blip or a signal of a slowing ad market or are LLMs eating into their business? Hard to know, but that's the concern.
Isn't Bing Google biggest search competition?
Is the general public using chat as a general search engine to replace the more traditional search engine or is it just us tech people. I can tell you I know of no one doing this outside of tech coworkers and even then just use it for programming related tasks to a very limited way.
Google revenues come from ~90% ads. It's an ad company.
The company gives guidance, so the estimates are not pulled out of thin air. Google should know their ad business very well at this point.
People selling after an ad miss is medium/long term thinking. They could be wrong, but was the miss caused by a wider economic slowdown (see UPS earnings) or was it Google specific? Either way, it could be sign of Google slowing down or the economy as whole.
From your misplaced sarcasm, it seems that you might not know what "guidance" means in this context. It's the company predicting what their financials will be in the future, such as "our revenue will be in the range $X-$Y in the next quarter". There's a lot of space for discussion between those kinds of predictions and the weather. For example, they could discuss what happened in the previous quarter. They could discuss future plans, without making any exact claims on the impact of those plans.
If you truly believe Google releases guidance, how about you just find a quote for what that supposed guidance was for Q4? You won't find it, because Google does not release guidance. The GP just made it up, just like they made up the numbers.
TAC shouldn't be part of that computation. It's an expense, not revenue. (Yes, it's confusing that it's in the same table as the revenue numbers, but so is the headcount and you wouldn't try to work it into the equation somehow.)
Also, if you only consider the search revenue you'll err in the opposite direction. It's 55% of their revenue, so pretty soon not even a normal majority. You should look at the "Google Advertising" line.
Yet when we beat expectations in ads but barely miss in cloud the stock tanks as well. There’s no reasonable explanation I’ve heard for our stock behavior after our earnings beat expectations.
We beat expectations across the board a couple quarters ago except in cloud. Stock dipped the next day. I’m unconvinced this dip is a meaningful signal into the trajectory of Google or is based on any reasonable concern.
Almost definitely the case that people are disappointed in the ad revenue.
GCP is growing to be a meaningful part of Google's revenue, but the actual profit at Google is almost entirely ad revenue. If that is a miss, and on the horizon we see AI disrupting search and increased competition in digital video advertising then what does that mean for the future of Google?
I think that's probably being a bit pessimistic, but that's probably the argument.
Without being an expert in these matters it could be that while the earnings were good they may have already been "priced in"[0], so if the earnings weren't quite as high as expected or particular areas of revenue have contracted unexpectedly[1] then it could cause the price to move downwards. It could also be a result of larger market fluctuations, as a lot of larger F100 companies have also gone down by a similar amount today[2]. Any one of these factors or a combination of them together is likely the cause of the stock price movement seen today.
In the 18 years i've been at GOOG, what direction the stock moves post-earnings is always random, and then talking heads try to post-facto rationalize it.
I've seen Google blow away earnings and all expectations and be down 10%, and completely miss expectations and pop up 5%.
Everyone has an explanation for this but a while ago there was this online game someone made which would give you some metric about some public stock and then you had to guess to buy / sell. It's not that straightforward.
Here, GOOG was $144.99 on Jan 18 and $144.50 on Jan 30 and this is supposed to be some dramatic shift in things? Bullshit.
The absolute performance isn't very important for the stock price. What matters way more is the performance vis-a-vis market expectations. So in this case, the market was expecting something better (or there was some other guidance in the report that spooked investors).
"expectations" is a weird Wall St concept where some small number of people who don't necessarily know much get to invent a set of numbers for the company results in the future. Then a bunch of other people who know even less believe/pretend that those expectations mean something, and will buy/sell the stock accordingly when the actual results are revealed. Yes Kabuki Theater.
Actually it's about as bogus as software project planning/management, so perhaps all fields have similar made up nonsense. Hopefully not the people designing bridges. Or airplanes. Oh wait...
Not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but being a software engineer I found employment count interesting. Though 5% change in head count seems hardly major.
If I were to guess, I'd say that this estimate is including hardware, cloud resources, software licenses, benefits, stock options, and probably more that I can't think of in addition to salary, but I too would like a more detailed explanation on how they came by that number.
Where is that typically? Most of those are had costs for an employee, not % based. Google has employees from $50K to $1mm+, I very much doubt that all expenses double as income doubles.
Well, if total average costs per employee for G would be very roughly 1 million, there you have it. I think it may be half of that if at all, but it impacts the increased revenue significantly in any case.
I agree with the sentiment, but costs do impact revenue when those costs represent an investment in something that can be used to increase revenue, like employees.
I guess a significant number of employees are just working really hard on things that don't matter. When every single thing that needs working on is already being worked on, a lot of people are going to be doing busy work. There was a post by Stevie Yeggie where he talked about working at google. he looked really hard to find a new project to lead but absolutely everything was already being worked on, he found. eventually he just couldn't see himself leading or doing meaningful work there and quit.
the lesson here, i think is that there are limits to how much can be done, without moving into new industries and spreading horizontally.
But isn't that just bad management / prioritization? Isn't the solution to just shuffle people to more useful projects instead of firing them? Especially at a company that hires general engineers who can work on any project, and also at a company that has a lot of internal tooling which makes ramping up new engineers slow and tedious.
They'll probably grow back to 190k within a few months, but those 8k new hires will probably take months if not a year to fully ramp up.
the problem is there's not enough high value projects to do. to much labor, too many employees and too much funding relative to the number of projects that actually bring value.
Because all the high value stuff(high ROI stuff) is already done or already being worked on. all that's left is low ROI projects which take up huge amounts of time but bring little value. employees and managers know they generate little value, so they end up doing more of them to compensate which makes the problem even worse as there's less and less high value stuff to do.
there's just too few opportunities, hence the need to expand into new industries.
Of course there are enough high-value projects to do. You just need to be willing to experiment, expand horizontally, and let your employees go out on a limb with new ideas; something that no corporate leadership anywhere has ever been willing to do. They didn't run out of valuable problems to solve, they just have shit-ass worthless leadership just like every other (public) corporation in America.
well, it's not like they're not trying to branch out. the list of failed project at google is incredibly long.
i sometimes wonder if they would have more success with atoms based innovation rather than bits (reference to avc article on the matter). but that would necessitate hiring something other than software engineers.
Google also outsources SWEs. My friend in Mexico worked as this. They have an acronym for this kind of worker, I can't remember. But for example, they contract out work to SWEs at https://www.epam.com.
Yes! Can't believe I forgot. He was an interesting guy - a biologist who was deported to Mexico after living in the US since childhood without citizenship, and then tried working in a lab in Mexico, but the pay was so bad he learned to code and eventually became a TVC.
Extremely cool individual who I miss. Maybe I should say hi to him.
I don't think you realize how many products Google has. Cruise had ~ 4k employees at its peak. Waymo is just one tiny project in Google. Splunk had 8000 employees, GCP has a competitor to it. Bigquery is a competitor to Snowflake, who has around 5,000 employees. Databricks had 4k employees, which GCP also has a competitor to. This is just a fraction of the software just in cloud.
That's not apples to apples, though. Snowflake has 5,000 employees in the entire firm. The BQ Product+Eng+partnerships team is a fraction of that, and the SG&A functions are all shared services across all of Cloud, just like your Databricks comparison.
Waymo and Cruise are valid comparisons. GCP competitor to Splunk (Stackdriver) is a complete joke. I would be shocked if more than 500 people are working on that thing
I think that says as much about those other companies as it does about Google. Namely, that despite Google's reputation for having become a bloated bureaucracy, there are in fact economies of scale happening at Google, and in fact it's those other companies that are bloated. 8,000 employees for collecting and searching logs? 5,000 employees for a data warehouse? Even accounting for the share of sales, marketing and G&A employees that contribute to Google's equivalent products, I'd be shocked if Google has anywhere near as many employees working on these things.
In fact it's even worse than that. A lot of Google's employees are dedicated to maintaining tools and infrastructure that Google built up over decades and hundreds of thousands of engineer-years because "the cloud" didn't exist when Google started. These other companies get all that "for free" (or rather, for nominal pay-as-you-go fees -- but certainly without the massive engineering investment that Google put in over the years) by building on AWS, GCP, or Azure. Without public clouds and the vast growth in open-source cloud infrastructure tooling, those other companies likely wouldn't be viable businesses.
180k people? That's not how many people were fired. 8k were fired, which is less than 0.5% of the company. Finding useful projects for that many people doesn't sound that ridiculous.
In my org at the Goog, we didn't have any layoffs, but we also aren't expecting any new headcount any time soon. Projects that need more staff are expected to cannibalize it from other projects under the same VP.
I feel like this is actually a good way of doing things, and wish Google did this more broadly. Just think if everyone who would have been laid off was instead transferred to a project that needs their skills, or given training to move into a role that's needed. Can you imagine what type of employee loyalty and morale that would engender?
Rewarding managers by headcount is like rewarding software engineers per line of code, yes, but that is how basically every company rewards managers.
Imagine how obnoxious code reviews would be if everyone wanted to submit as many lines as possible for their salary to go up, that is how management headcount requests works today.
The problem with this (and I was also in an org that didn't get any headcount -- for several years) is that those non-growing teams often ultimately just wither and die, whether it's through internal transfer, attrition or layoff. Google doesn't really reward managers for their managerial skill, and there's nothing that says "managerial incompetence" at Google more than having the same size team for years on end.
The idea that a manager’s success should be measured in the number of people below them is truly idiotic. That is how you end up with companies like Google increasing their headcount by massive amounts during the pandemic only to have to turn around and do layoffs a year later.
Middle managers serve a role but honestly many of them can be replaced without really disrupting anything. At a certain point, you become too far removed from the actual work that is being done to really matter.
On the other hand, there are many low level managers with teams of fewer than 10 people who can be very valuable and hard to replace. People with deep expertise in the specific area they work on.
Measuring a manager by their headcount is just a lazy way to evaluate impact and calculate salary.
> Isn't the solution to just shuffle people to more useful projects instead of firing them?
Yes. However how do you find those less useful positions? And identify whether it's the developer who is less productive or the position?
For top management the easiest way is to fire people broadly and assign it all over equally by pushing the decision down the management chain. Medium managers know their teams a tiny bit (but often not much ...) than too management and identify the least troublesome positions.
And then you let them bring up cases to keep their headcount or hiring new.
Works, after a short bump in productivity, if it's just (human) resources and numbers in a sheet. (Similar to other budget cuts, where you give a Mandate to reduce cost by X% everywhere and then see who cries the loudest and who adapts) Of course has impact on trust etc. which has an invisible cost.
The key word is "meaningful" and that's going to vary depending on the employee's interests. I transferred a few times at Google. When I looked at internal job listings, there were lots of jobs that I didn't want to do.
I suspect that many good jobs went to people who learned about them in some way other than official job postings. (This is generally true.)
You don't just multiply employees x time = revenue. Google develops IP, systems, and processes over the course of years which pay out on long time scales. You would probably start feeling the financial effects of these layoffs in a couple years, and continue feeling them basically forever.
It's quite possible for the engineers to work really hard in ways that even directly harm the company, either directly, or by increasing the political costs of making a better decision.
My favorite here is Bridgewater and their HR/Evaluation/Alignment system. There's books written about it. Developing it and running it took a high percentage of workers and contractors. Its implementation had all kinds of negative effects on everyone else, including the people doing the actual investment. But it took a pandemic, and the CEO being sidelined, for the whole thing to be basically thrown away.
I'm aware of their alignment system from the book Principles, but I'm curious why/how you came to the conclusion it was a negative?
Pandemic and larger-than-life CEO stepping down both seem like the major outliers in the dynamic you described. Bridgewater was very, very successful for quite some time with that policy in place.
I had always assumed (perhaps cynically) that Bridgewater's elaborate system was part of its marketing to people who run endowments and pensions. It gives people a sense that they are working with the best and hardest working, even if in reality their returns are equal to other less notable firms.
Talking to some Googler friends, it also seems like everyone there think they are "leaders". The reality is that most people at google end up working on something meaningless. That's the reality when you are in a company of 200k where the core business is at complete maturity.
> Talking to some Googler friends, it also seems like everyone there think they are "leaders".
I guess we have different friends, but that doesn't match my experience. Of course, pumping yourself up and making yourself look more impressive for perf/promo is a huge thing, and accounts for a lot of pointless stuff being done just so you can say you "launched"/"landed" something. But the flip side of that is the recurrent memes about stuff like so-and-so over in that other division solved some incredibly hard technical problem, and "I'm just here copying protos around." Lots of Googlers realize they are just worker drones.
This is anecdotal, but whenever I read details about layoffs at FAANG companies ("$foo people were fired from the $bar team"), I'm shocked by the headcounts.
I get it, developing and supporting some feature at a company like Google requires more people (both in engineering and elsewhere) than if you banged out a prototype of something similar at a startup. But I've read stories where hundreds or thousands of employees were laid off, and they were all working on some small service (or even an obscure feature of that service) that never had a chance of moving the needle for the company and offsetting their costs.
I'm sure most of those employees were hard-working, motivated, and tried to build the best product possible, but there are no other companies on earth that would pay that many people top-of-market salaries to work on anything that isn't existential to the company. Other companies would simply go out of business if they operated this way, but in big tech companies, this is lost in the noise when times are good. But when things slow down, big tech companies start to pay very close attention to this.
To me it shows that Google doesn't know how to generate significant revenue with those eight thousand people. I am worried it indicates Google is running out of good bets and has limited future growth.
Of course, the counter argument is that technology allows Google to do more with less people. I am not convinced by this argument, because Google's competition has about the same ability to do more with less people. If you can improve individual productivity than why not scale that across more people.
To summarize, this indicates to me that Google is reducing their value on human capital.
The folks who make up "human capital" have been reducing the value that they place on Google the employer, too.
I mean that in several ways: Google doesn't have nearly as good a record of successfully recruiting (or retaining) top-tier talent as they did just 5-10 years ago. It is no longer seen as a dream position, or even a strong candidate's first choice. Similarly, hiring managers who see Google on a resume don't treat it as highly as they did 5-10 years ago.
Google is rapidly on its way to becoming just another big boring technology company, like SAP or Salesforce or Oracle. Now the culture of those around it has finally started to catch up.
One year is barely enough time for the marginal impact of those 8k people to matter.
Say that made 3 revenue products revisions slip by 2 quarters, and not ship six cost-saving optimizations (if you make google search 0.001% faster, you save millions in compute). Further, say that made 100 companies not renew their 7-figure ad contracts. If all of this was evenly spread throughout the year, it still hits revenue and profit only a comparitive small amount in one year.
It takes time for those sorts of changes to propagate all the way through the system until they finally impact revenue and costs. The effects are long term.
I'm on record as saying that Google hired way too much and way too fast, but it isn't quite as simple as, X-people produce Y-revenue, so (X-1)people produce Y-Z revenue.
Sure, it’s not LIFO, and this churn can be a nasty way to get rid of the expensive oldsters. But as a percentage, the bigger companies are generally still well above 2020 staffing levels.
I bet either their comp was very high due to their tenure relative to their output, or they spent too much time at the same level and weren't showing upward trajectory. I know that you only need to be an L4 officially to get past the up or out stage, but that doesn't mean that they won't find people to lay off who have been an L5 for 12 years
Top grading is the MBAs dream. Replace someone who doesn’t stand out and get someone who on average will be average, so presumably better than the 10y vet you just exited. Don’t worry about what they know, because coders are monkeys.
Yes, some tenured people suck. But it’s their salary that drives this behavior.
> The company added that for 2023, it's taken charges related to employee severance of $2.1B, with $1.2B in exit charges taken for the last three months of the year. It's also continuing work to optimize global office space.
Short term revenue gain (2~3 years) can be all done by "optimizing" core ads businesses but that's not sustainable for a decade. The real question is how to build a longer term growth potential for Alphabet, and probably more than half of the employees are working on less certain business areas to figure it out.
I wonder if that is good news. You can look at it either as they slowed how much money they pour into the moonshots incinerator, or they stopped investing in potential unicorn lines of business.
Well, a lot of the money goes into Waymo which is just ramping into revenue service. With the filing they submitted last week, they want to serve all of Silicon Valley and all of Los Angeles County, which is more than an order of magnitude expansion in their market. Waymo might be a real investment and not just an emergency profit reducer.
Waymo _might_ be the sole survivor here... they are ABSOLUTELY trying their damndest with it. It's remarkable to not go a single day without seeing a driverless Waymo doing its thing. (I live in Central Phoenix, they're _everywhere_.)
The core concept is being proven pretty well, in markets with good weather and good roads at least... whether they can achieve some sort of critical mass that allows them to recoup any of the investment, even on a single capitalized vehicle... who knows. I've heard each Jag costs ~$250k fully loaded... that's a lot of ~$14-on-average trips before breakeven, and obviously the trips aren't free.
That all being said, riding in one feels like the actual future, and if they close in on this first-mover advantage and keep on keeping on, and strengthen their Uber integration, and open in more and more markets... there's a real chance they establish themselves and make this thing actually capture a significant portion of the trip economy.
That being said, it's not generalized, so opening markets is expensive because they're all individually trained for each mile of road in the market, I expect they'll be functionally useless in bad winters (but that's not a dealbreaker, per se), and those operating expenses remain high. Though I do expect we'll begin to see those lower, now that they're so deep into the proof of the concept. (They're finally starting highway driving here in PHX, which is really the last hill to climb.)
Interesting. I could imagine Uber mortgaging their whole market cap to acquire Waymo as a lifeline to staying relevant in the long term. They would essentially be "buying" what has always been their long-term product vision.
The most valuable owner in this space is whoever you communicate with to tell them where you want to go. They get to offer you a price, they get to offer you alternative destinations, and they get to offer you "deals". For example that means that a different supermarket can make an offer you come to them instead, or you can be offered a different price should a different route be taken, a ride share happen, a journey delayed or brought forward, and numerous other possibilities. It isn't too dissimilar to typing what you are interested in to a search engine. That will be extremely lucrative.
But for it to work, that entity will have to have ultimate control over where the vehicle goes. Everybody is going to want to have that ultimate control, and not cede it to someone else. That would make licensing not really work out since Google would retain control.
Color me skeptical, but I've never gotten in a car without having decided my destination first. I don't go to "any supermarket", I go to Supermarket X because they have the goods I need at a price I accept or the best promos that week or whatever.
If letting your rideshare company decide your destination was really a thing, why wouldn't Uber be doing it already be doing it with human drivers?
Honestly I have no idea why you are attracting downvotes. This feature seems inevitable, and arguably desirable. I am sitting here trying to use Maps to figure out if there are any pizza places that are open in my city right now, and if I could summon a car with the destination vaguely set to "pizza" and be presented with options, that might be OK, even futuristic.
agreed. adding discoverability and reviews of Google Maps with a self driving ride share button would be a great combo. i switch between maps and Uber apps to accomplish this currently.
They wouldn't decide for you, merely make you an offer. Eg you say "go to supermarket A" which you fully intend to go to because it fully meets your needs and expectations. You get an offer to go to supermarket B instead, and that supermarket will also pay for your journey. You can still go to your original intended destination. Some number of people will take the offer. The entity controlling the vehicle gets the commission, and supermarket B gets a way to acquire customers.
> why wouldn't Uber be doing it already be doing it
They are already most of the way there [1]. Driverless vehicles will be cheaper to operate which will make physical locations more amenable to paying to acquire visitors.
I'm sure they'll license it out eventually, but if it only works in a few metros then it's too early. They need it working in more places for it to be worth it to license probably.
They said it costs as much as a “moderately equipped S-Class” 3-4 years ago. At the time, that would be ~$140k. That includes the base car cost, sensor hardware, compute, redundant vehicle systems and their integration. So not quite $250k, but still steep. I think the Waymo-Geely robotaxis coming next year will be interesting cost-wise.
> That being said, it's not generalized, so opening markets is expensive because they're all individually trained for each mile of road in the market
This is a misconception. The Waymo Driver is, in fact, designed to be generalizable. There some steps like mapping and initial validation in each market, but the same software runs on Waymo vehicles in every city. It’s definitely not individually trained for each mile in each market.
There's a significant amount of cope involved when someone steps up to say that Waymo only works on rails, doesn't work in conditions where they have operated for years, etc. It is necessary to continue believing that Tesla is still in this race.
> It’s definitely not individually trained for each mile in each market.
Oh, that's very interesting. Being in the test/training market, and having read that they were training on every mile while they were here, I thought that was a key differentiator, but if it _is_ generalizable, that's absolutely huge.
(And living here, during training, we'd see trains of 5-6 Waymos cruising down the streets of our neighborhood, so it kind of tracked with what I'd already heard from their videos and posts.)
Thanks for the correction. It's amazing what they've accomplished, and it's also a blast to show out-of-towners who have no idea this is _widely available_ here in Phoenix.
They've been testing in snow markets in winter at least occasionally for many years.
It makes sense to start with easier markets to a certain extent...though SF is definitely not an easy market in terms of urban design/clutter. It would've been way easier for them to follow up Phoenix with Vegas.
If they can handle SF, then aside from weather they can probably handle just about any other city in the US.
Yeah, but wintry places are mostly useless. The Bay Area and the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area see some $2 trillion in GDP. That's more than 15 states put together. New York City and Chicago are big economic centers, of course, but they have good public transit.
So you can make a pretty big business just pretending winter doesn't exist.
I really hope Waymo succeeds, or at the very least survives in its current markets. It is so much more comfortable, convenient, and safe than traditional ride share.
I switched to more or less only using Waymo for ride-share in SF after I got into the beta last year, and almost without exception every Uber or Lyft ride I have had to take since then for timing, availability, or route reasons has been some kind of debacle. Ranging from just an unclean and odd-smelling car to a ride my partner and I had to end early with the "pull over now" button when the clearly intoxicated driver missed multiple exits and slid on and off the highway median figuring out what to do.
By the way, that driver was a "Platinum" tier driver per the Uber app. I reported what happened in detail in a message to support, specifically using the safety issue area of the app, and got back an automated message explaining to me that my credit card charge differed from the amount shown onscreen because the ride ended early. I have previously ranted at length on HN about the nasty dark patterns Lyft uses to attempt to trick you into using their "priority pickup", which is always slower than promised and condescends to you with fake "just a few more seconds" messages while it waits for a driver. Recently, my Uber app has begun auto-selecting Black cars for no conceivable reason, except that it does this after 10pm on the weekends when it's more likely I'm in a rush and/or sleepy and/or intoxicated.
The user experience of Uber and Lyft has gotten so poor it feels like outright hostility from these apps towards the users. I've certainly had multiple drivers who behaved outright hostile to their customers. By comparison, the Waymo experience is perfect.
The jarringly bad nature of my recent experiences with Lyft/Uber compared to Waymo has likely inspired some hyberpole, but - I have been an Uber and Lyft rider for almost 10 years myself. Back then I was at town meetings in Syracuse, NY advocating for Uber to come to town. I know the experience can be good, but it seems like over the last couple years the experience has gotten considerably worse on average.
Experiencing Waymo has also altered my standards. Now I really notice how often the car is dirty and unkempt, stinks of pot or cigarette smoke, or the tire light is on, or the driver is handling the car poorly. Waymo is usually the same price, and none of that ever happens. If they pull this off I don't see the business model for human based rideshare surviving unless the cost of AV rides skyrockets once they need to be independently commercially viable.
I also live right off the highway, so I think I am more prone to getting people who pick up my ride on the way to or from somewhere else and then get upset about where they have to go. Pretty much the only place I need an Uber to these days is over the bridge to the East Bay when BART is not realistic, which is usually because I'm in a rush. One of my recent trips I wound up late anyway, because the first driver who pulled into my complex explained to me "because the uber app gives me these bad rides" I should cancel the ride for him, and pay a fee, because it was so unreasonable for me to expect him to deliver me to the destination I had called the ride for.
Edit: on another bridge trip, my driver was excited to show me his 'tiktok famous' friend on his dash mounted iPad while we went over the bridge. Diamond driver, perfect rating, surfing social media with one hand and steering with the other. Maybe Waymo has just made me picky and most rideshare users now expect to share use of an iPad with the driver in traffic
I'm afraid any cleanliness advantage is temporary. People are filthy enough in cars driven by actual humans, can you imagine what they'll get up to when there's nobody at the wheel?
Yeah, I'm sure some of the experience quality is because the only other riders are people Waymo selected for the beta, and nobody wants to get kicked out for misbehavior. We've joked a few times "don't forget that water bottle, I don't wanna get banned!"
On the other hand though, I have seen misplaced items in Waymos a couple times and when I reported them in the app they pulled the car for cleaning ASAP. I actually did leave a water bottle once - a disposable, single use one - and they emailed me asking me if I wanted them to return it! That kind of vehicle management feels more like a benefit inherent to centralized taxi fleets than a benefit inherent to AVs, but it's something Waymo can take advantage of. I would guess the in-car cameras would be capable of detecting vomit-related events etc too.
I didn't know they had those. Wonder if they'll eventually add a mode where you could opt-in to livestream games like Cash Cab or Carpool Karaoke. Would make the commutes more interesting :D
Waymo seems like it'll go the distance. Clear market leader in the US, and it doesn't seem particularly close, even if it's taken them (and everyone else) longer than expected to start scaling.
Cruise attempted to just start launching before the tech was really finished and it backfired horribly. Tesla is still doing Elon things, looks like the tech is mostly spinning its wheels as they work on yet another hardware revision that'll definitely handle self-driving this time.
there is so far only a tiny market for drone delivery and it seems like it would be unlikely to grow into a multibillion dollar business. Their competitors (who have more experience with shipping physical things) are also evaluating this with mixed success.
Most of the difference is explained by an increase in revenue while holding expenses constant:
"Other Bets, which includes the Waymo self-driving car business and the Verily life sciences unit, reported revenue of $657 million, up from $226 million the year prior. Its loss narrowed to $863 million from $1.24 billion."
So revenue up 400 million, and losses dropped by 400 million.
That theory doesn't make any sense. Both measures are moving in the same direction (i.e. both units are becoming more profitable). If it was some kind of revenue shifting trick, the numbers would be moving in opposite directions.
Those posts are an HN staple, this place wouldn't be the same without it. I think I've been using GCP longer than most people's projections of how long it would last.
Did you know the IBM cloud is the biggest in the world?
Public companies can structure their business however they prefer. If the story needs to be that Cloud is growing and profitable on a numbers sheet, you need no more than the finance geeks to make it happen.
I work in GCP, I don't get the sense that people are unhappy here. I think it's more likely that GCP, unlike the rest of google, is more of an amalgamation of many corporate cultures, (both good and bad).
A little bit more Amazon/Oracle, a little less traditional 'Google'. I think most people work 45 hours a week. I don't see anyone slacking off. But it's not a death march, it pays well, there are tons of perks still.
shrug It's not some magical fantasy land that some people make google out to be, but it's a nice job with interesting problems, smart coworkers, and it pays well.
> I think it's more likely that GCP, unlike the rest of google, is more of an amalgamation of many corporate cultures, (both good and bad).
You don't understand why people fear the culture changing to something else? Most people there like the Google work culture, of course they would fear the culture becoming more like Microsoft or Oracle.
When I worked at Google I had no deadlines, full control over what I do during my work days, full ability to prioritize different projects or help people get things done if they ask etc. If that suddenly changed it would feel horrible, as you can understand, if you are used to a typical work culture maybe you don't see it but if you are used to the typical Google one they at least had before then it is a massive owngrade.
Just to clarify, I have full control of what I work on, a lot of say in my OKRs and more freedom than anywhere else I've worked in my almost 20 year career.
However, Cloud seems pretty intent on shipping and meeting deadlines so if we commit, I do feel pressure to make that deadline.
I would prefer they spin cloud off into its own bet and TK becomes the CEO of a real company (now he's "CEO at Google Cloud", which isn't its own business entity in alphabet, and he reports to "CEO at Alphabet").
I don't see any likely path by which Kurian would become CEO of Alphabet.
"Kurian joined Oracle in 1996, initially holding various product management and development positions. His first executive role was as Vice President of Oracle's e-Business division."
In what way is he awesome? His primary job was to improve Google Cloud's market share and it isn't any better as far as I can see, perhaps worse as Azure has increased the lead.
When Google renamed to Alphabet, the pun was that it was an umbrella company covering those parts of the business that had exceptional financial return – mostly Ads – and the "long bets," some of which would provide future growth as the established business saturated, and some of which would fizzle – think X. The established businesses would saturate the risky investments, giving a long term growth strategy.
Market beating returns: Alpha. Long bets – Bet. Alphabet.
From page 1:
The following table summarizes our consolidated financial results for the quarters and years ended December 31,
2022 and 2023 (in millions, except for per share information and percentages
But the numbers appear to be billion (no way revunue 80mil) in the following table? what am i missing
I really think we are at the inflection point where Google is seen and perceived as the next IBM.
More and more people now realize that the ad/attention economy is overall a bad thing for internet/the world.
Googler who at some point were seen as above-average engineers are now seen as leetcoders TC-Maximizer with very little ethical thoughts or opinions on what they work on.
ads sector will only grow. chatgpt-like tooks will be able to integrate ads, a lot of new articles will have autogenerated ad pages, apple launched apple vision + meta's quest 3 is already released which gives a lot of new ad opportunities. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, there are a lot of places where ads are not yet integrated, but some already moved to this direction (like ad tier in netflix and judging by their userbase nr increase, more changes will follow)
So idk, I don't think we are at some inflection point at least for now&near future
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadBesides, it’s a good opportunity. If it’s down, the stocks are on sale. I still regret not buying Meta when the markets were crashing last time.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/stock-market-today-nasdaq-fal...
Revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs: $72.32 billion vs. $70.97 billion expected ($63.12 billion in Q4 2022)
Adjusted earnings per share: $1.64 vs. $1.59 expected ($1.05 in Q4 2022)
Cloud revenue: $9.19 billion vs. $8.95 billion expected ($7.32 billion in Q4 2022)
Ad revenue: $65.5 billion vs. $65.8 billion expected ($59.04 billion in Q4 2022)
I hope that 0.3 is not the reason for that slip haha
By the way people are asking chatgpt or copilot what they used to Google. Not everything but a lot. I most certainly do and I think I'm not alone.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-18/microsoft...
I know for sure some people who use chatgpt in place of Google search like students or people needing translations.
Right, they got $300 million less than expected.
Which means they only got 99.544072948% of what the analysts expected.
That means they missed analyst expectations by 0.455927052%.
Not for total Revenue. Not for EPS. Not for net income. Not for diluted EPS. For the one category, Ad Revenue.
Resulting in a 6% after-market drop.
0.455927052% miss. 6% drop.
I think it's entirely possible that people focus too much on short term metrics and not enough on long-term growth.
The company gives guidance, so the estimates are not pulled out of thin air. Google should know their ad business very well at this point.
People selling after an ad miss is medium/long term thinking. They could be wrong, but was the miss caused by a wider economic slowdown (see UPS earnings) or was it Google specific? Either way, it could be sign of Google slowing down or the economy as whole.
That's not true, and hasn't been for a decade. For this earnings release, the proportion of revenue from ads was 76%.
> The company gives guidance
No, they don't. As far as I know they've literally never given guidance.
If you truly believe Google releases guidance, how about you just find a quote for what that supposed guidance was for Q4? You won't find it, because Google does not release guidance. The GP just made it up, just like they made up the numbers.
Also, if you only consider the search revenue you'll err in the opposite direction. It's 55% of their revenue, so pretty soon not even a normal majority. You should look at the "Google Advertising" line.
GCP is growing to be a meaningful part of Google's revenue, but the actual profit at Google is almost entirely ad revenue. If that is a miss, and on the horizon we see AI disrupting search and increased competition in digital video advertising then what does that mean for the future of Google?
I think that's probably being a bit pessimistic, but that's probably the argument.
[0] https://www.kotaksecurities.com/articles/it-is-priced-in-wha...
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alphabet-misses-expectations-...
[2] https://www.investors.com/market-trend/stock-market-today/do...
I've seen Google blow away earnings and all expectations and be down 10%, and completely miss expectations and pop up 5%.
Here, GOOG was $144.99 on Jan 18 and $144.50 on Jan 30 and this is supposed to be some dramatic shift in things? Bullshit.
Every buyer and seller has their own price and own reason for it.
1. "sell on the news"
2. results vs "expectations"[1]
"expectations" is a weird Wall St concept where some small number of people who don't necessarily know much get to invent a set of numbers for the company results in the future. Then a bunch of other people who know even less believe/pretend that those expectations mean something, and will buy/sell the stock accordingly when the actual results are revealed. Yes Kabuki Theater. Actually it's about as bogus as software project planning/management, so perhaps all fields have similar made up nonsense. Hopefully not the people designing bridges. Or airplanes. Oh wait...
Having read the book, the section "Change in Useful Lives of Our Server and Network Equipment" immediately caught my eye. It's a classic maneuver.
Amazon has multiple books with that title.
Total costs increased from $57.9B to $62.6B, and Net income increased from $13.6B to $20.7B
- 2022: 190,234
- 2023: 182,502
Total increase in revenue of 10 billion.
Not sure what conclusion to draw from this, but being a software engineer I found employment count interesting. Though 5% change in head count seems hardly major.
[0] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
The post I was replying to was implying that cutting employees boosted revenues somehow.
the lesson here, i think is that there are limits to how much can be done, without moving into new industries and spreading horizontally.
They'll probably grow back to 190k within a few months, but those 8k new hires will probably take months if not a year to fully ramp up.
Because all the high value stuff(high ROI stuff) is already done or already being worked on. all that's left is low ROI projects which take up huge amounts of time but bring little value. employees and managers know they generate little value, so they end up doing more of them to compensate which makes the problem even worse as there's less and less high value stuff to do.
there's just too few opportunities, hence the need to expand into new industries.
i sometimes wonder if they would have more success with atoms based innovation rather than bits (reference to avc article on the matter). but that would necessitate hiring something other than software engineers.
Not contradicting your point really, just a note
Extremely cool individual who I miss. Maybe I should say hi to him.
In fact it's even worse than that. A lot of Google's employees are dedicated to maintaining tools and infrastructure that Google built up over decades and hundreds of thousands of engineer-years because "the cloud" didn't exist when Google started. These other companies get all that "for free" (or rather, for nominal pay-as-you-go fees -- but certainly without the massive engineering investment that Google put in over the years) by building on AWS, GCP, or Azure. Without public clouds and the vast growth in open-source cloud infrastructure tooling, those other companies likely wouldn't be viable businesses.
I feel like this is actually a good way of doing things, and wish Google did this more broadly. Just think if everyone who would have been laid off was instead transferred to a project that needs their skills, or given training to move into a role that's needed. Can you imagine what type of employee loyalty and morale that would engender?
Values shifted with the focus on earnings and growth getting less impressive.
Imagine how obnoxious code reviews would be if everyone wanted to submit as many lines as possible for their salary to go up, that is how management headcount requests works today.
Middle managers serve a role but honestly many of them can be replaced without really disrupting anything. At a certain point, you become too far removed from the actual work that is being done to really matter.
On the other hand, there are many low level managers with teams of fewer than 10 people who can be very valuable and hard to replace. People with deep expertise in the specific area they work on.
Measuring a manager by their headcount is just a lazy way to evaluate impact and calculate salary.
Yes. However how do you find those less useful positions? And identify whether it's the developer who is less productive or the position?
For top management the easiest way is to fire people broadly and assign it all over equally by pushing the decision down the management chain. Medium managers know their teams a tiny bit (but often not much ...) than too management and identify the least troublesome positions.
And then you let them bring up cases to keep their headcount or hiring new.
Works, after a short bump in productivity, if it's just (human) resources and numbers in a sheet. (Similar to other budget cuts, where you give a Mandate to reduce cost by X% everywhere and then see who cries the loudest and who adapts) Of course has impact on trust etc. which has an invisible cost.
I suspect that many good jobs went to people who learned about them in some way other than official job postings. (This is generally true.)
My favorite here is Bridgewater and their HR/Evaluation/Alignment system. There's books written about it. Developing it and running it took a high percentage of workers and contractors. Its implementation had all kinds of negative effects on everyone else, including the people doing the actual investment. But it took a pandemic, and the CEO being sidelined, for the whole thing to be basically thrown away.
Pandemic and larger-than-life CEO stepping down both seem like the major outliers in the dynamic you described. Bridgewater was very, very successful for quite some time with that policy in place.
I guess we have different friends, but that doesn't match my experience. Of course, pumping yourself up and making yourself look more impressive for perf/promo is a huge thing, and accounts for a lot of pointless stuff being done just so you can say you "launched"/"landed" something. But the flip side of that is the recurrent memes about stuff like so-and-so over in that other division solved some incredibly hard technical problem, and "I'm just here copying protos around." Lots of Googlers realize they are just worker drones.
I get it, developing and supporting some feature at a company like Google requires more people (both in engineering and elsewhere) than if you banged out a prototype of something similar at a startup. But I've read stories where hundreds or thousands of employees were laid off, and they were all working on some small service (or even an obscure feature of that service) that never had a chance of moving the needle for the company and offsetting their costs.
I'm sure most of those employees were hard-working, motivated, and tried to build the best product possible, but there are no other companies on earth that would pay that many people top-of-market salaries to work on anything that isn't existential to the company. Other companies would simply go out of business if they operated this way, but in big tech companies, this is lost in the noise when times are good. But when things slow down, big tech companies start to pay very close attention to this.
Of course, the counter argument is that technology allows Google to do more with less people. I am not convinced by this argument, because Google's competition has about the same ability to do more with less people. If you can improve individual productivity than why not scale that across more people.
To summarize, this indicates to me that Google is reducing their value on human capital.
I mean that in several ways: Google doesn't have nearly as good a record of successfully recruiting (or retaining) top-tier talent as they did just 5-10 years ago. It is no longer seen as a dream position, or even a strong candidate's first choice. Similarly, hiring managers who see Google on a resume don't treat it as highly as they did 5-10 years ago.
Google is rapidly on its way to becoming just another big boring technology company, like SAP or Salesforce or Oracle. Now the culture of those around it has finally started to catch up.
Say that made 3 revenue products revisions slip by 2 quarters, and not ship six cost-saving optimizations (if you make google search 0.001% faster, you save millions in compute). Further, say that made 100 companies not renew their 7-figure ad contracts. If all of this was evenly spread throughout the year, it still hits revenue and profit only a comparitive small amount in one year.
It takes time for those sorts of changes to propagate all the way through the system until they finally impact revenue and costs. The effects are long term.
I'm on record as saying that Google hired way too much and way too fast, but it isn't quite as simple as, X-people produce Y-revenue, so (X-1)people produce Y-Z revenue.
- 2021: 156,500
2023: What?!?! Laying off a fraction of recent hires? The world is ending!!
Obviously this sucks for the laid-off, but…you don’t need a very long memory to put this in perspective.
Yes, some tenured people suck. But it’s their salary that drives this behavior.
2021: this is clearly a bubble
2023: execs do "shocked Pikachu", "we have hired for a different economical environment!"
https://seekingalpha.com/news/4060311-alphabet-falls-4-as-ad...
2019: 118,899
2020: 135,301
2021: 156,500
2022: 190,234
2023: 182,502
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/numb...
So could there still be 10-20% extra as workers?
Google Bets lost $863M in the same period, much less than ever before.
The core concept is being proven pretty well, in markets with good weather and good roads at least... whether they can achieve some sort of critical mass that allows them to recoup any of the investment, even on a single capitalized vehicle... who knows. I've heard each Jag costs ~$250k fully loaded... that's a lot of ~$14-on-average trips before breakeven, and obviously the trips aren't free.
That all being said, riding in one feels like the actual future, and if they close in on this first-mover advantage and keep on keeping on, and strengthen their Uber integration, and open in more and more markets... there's a real chance they establish themselves and make this thing actually capture a significant portion of the trip economy.
That being said, it's not generalized, so opening markets is expensive because they're all individually trained for each mile of road in the market, I expect they'll be functionally useless in bad winters (but that's not a dealbreaker, per se), and those operating expenses remain high. Though I do expect we'll begin to see those lower, now that they're so deep into the proof of the concept. (They're finally starting highway driving here in PHX, which is really the last hill to climb.)
But for it to work, that entity will have to have ultimate control over where the vehicle goes. Everybody is going to want to have that ultimate control, and not cede it to someone else. That would make licensing not really work out since Google would retain control.
If letting your rideshare company decide your destination was really a thing, why wouldn't Uber be doing it already be doing it with human drivers?
Not yet...
> If letting your rideshare company decide your destination was really a thing, why wouldn't Uber be doing it already be doing it with human drivers?
Because Uber isn't an advertising company. They're still chasing fares like scrubs
> why wouldn't Uber be doing it already be doing it
They are already most of the way there [1]. Driverless vehicles will be cheaper to operate which will make physical locations more amenable to paying to acquire visitors.
[1] https://www.uber.com/us/en/advertising/
They said it costs as much as a “moderately equipped S-Class” 3-4 years ago. At the time, that would be ~$140k. That includes the base car cost, sensor hardware, compute, redundant vehicle systems and their integration. So not quite $250k, but still steep. I think the Waymo-Geely robotaxis coming next year will be interesting cost-wise.
> That being said, it's not generalized, so opening markets is expensive because they're all individually trained for each mile of road in the market
This is a misconception. The Waymo Driver is, in fact, designed to be generalizable. There some steps like mapping and initial validation in each market, but the same software runs on Waymo vehicles in every city. It’s definitely not individually trained for each mile in each market.
Oh, that's very interesting. Being in the test/training market, and having read that they were training on every mile while they were here, I thought that was a key differentiator, but if it _is_ generalizable, that's absolutely huge.
(And living here, during training, we'd see trains of 5-6 Waymos cruising down the streets of our neighborhood, so it kind of tracked with what I'd already heard from their videos and posts.)
Thanks for the correction. It's amazing what they've accomplished, and it's also a blast to show out-of-towners who have no idea this is _widely available_ here in Phoenix.
My math says that's about 25 trips per day to break even in two years (modulo maintenance costs).
Google expanded testing in Buffalo, NY in November 2023, including new sensor hardware: https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1aedrmy/ne...
It makes sense to start with easier markets to a certain extent...though SF is definitely not an easy market in terms of urban design/clutter. It would've been way easier for them to follow up Phoenix with Vegas.
If they can handle SF, then aside from weather they can probably handle just about any other city in the US.
So you can make a pretty big business just pretending winter doesn't exist.
I switched to more or less only using Waymo for ride-share in SF after I got into the beta last year, and almost without exception every Uber or Lyft ride I have had to take since then for timing, availability, or route reasons has been some kind of debacle. Ranging from just an unclean and odd-smelling car to a ride my partner and I had to end early with the "pull over now" button when the clearly intoxicated driver missed multiple exits and slid on and off the highway median figuring out what to do.
By the way, that driver was a "Platinum" tier driver per the Uber app. I reported what happened in detail in a message to support, specifically using the safety issue area of the app, and got back an automated message explaining to me that my credit card charge differed from the amount shown onscreen because the ride ended early. I have previously ranted at length on HN about the nasty dark patterns Lyft uses to attempt to trick you into using their "priority pickup", which is always slower than promised and condescends to you with fake "just a few more seconds" messages while it waits for a driver. Recently, my Uber app has begun auto-selecting Black cars for no conceivable reason, except that it does this after 10pm on the weekends when it's more likely I'm in a rush and/or sleepy and/or intoxicated.
The user experience of Uber and Lyft has gotten so poor it feels like outright hostility from these apps towards the users. I've certainly had multiple drivers who behaved outright hostile to their customers. By comparison, the Waymo experience is perfect.
Experiencing Waymo has also altered my standards. Now I really notice how often the car is dirty and unkempt, stinks of pot or cigarette smoke, or the tire light is on, or the driver is handling the car poorly. Waymo is usually the same price, and none of that ever happens. If they pull this off I don't see the business model for human based rideshare surviving unless the cost of AV rides skyrockets once they need to be independently commercially viable.
I also live right off the highway, so I think I am more prone to getting people who pick up my ride on the way to or from somewhere else and then get upset about where they have to go. Pretty much the only place I need an Uber to these days is over the bridge to the East Bay when BART is not realistic, which is usually because I'm in a rush. One of my recent trips I wound up late anyway, because the first driver who pulled into my complex explained to me "because the uber app gives me these bad rides" I should cancel the ride for him, and pay a fee, because it was so unreasonable for me to expect him to deliver me to the destination I had called the ride for.
Edit: on another bridge trip, my driver was excited to show me his 'tiktok famous' friend on his dash mounted iPad while we went over the bridge. Diamond driver, perfect rating, surfing social media with one hand and steering with the other. Maybe Waymo has just made me picky and most rideshare users now expect to share use of an iPad with the driver in traffic
On the other hand though, I have seen misplaced items in Waymos a couple times and when I reported them in the app they pulled the car for cleaning ASAP. I actually did leave a water bottle once - a disposable, single use one - and they emailed me asking me if I wanted them to return it! That kind of vehicle management feels more like a benefit inherent to centralized taxi fleets than a benefit inherent to AVs, but it's something Waymo can take advantage of. I would guess the in-car cameras would be capable of detecting vomit-related events etc too.
I didn't know they had those. Wonder if they'll eventually add a mode where you could opt-in to livestream games like Cash Cab or Carpool Karaoke. Would make the commutes more interesting :D
Cruise attempted to just start launching before the tech was really finished and it backfired horribly. Tesla is still doing Elon things, looks like the tech is mostly spinning its wheels as they work on yet another hardware revision that'll definitely handle self-driving this time.
"Other Bets, which includes the Waymo self-driving car business and the Verily life sciences unit, reported revenue of $657 million, up from $226 million the year prior. Its loss narrowed to $863 million from $1.24 billion."
So revenue up 400 million, and losses dropped by 400 million.
Public companies can structure their business however they prefer. If the story needs to be that Cloud is growing and profitable on a numbers sheet, you need no more than the finance geeks to make it happen.
People in cloud are profoundly unhappy. It's scary.
A little bit more Amazon/Oracle, a little less traditional 'Google'. I think most people work 45 hours a week. I don't see anyone slacking off. But it's not a death march, it pays well, there are tons of perks still.
shrug It's not some magical fantasy land that some people make google out to be, but it's a nice job with interesting problems, smart coworkers, and it pays well.
You don't understand why people fear the culture changing to something else? Most people there like the Google work culture, of course they would fear the culture becoming more like Microsoft or Oracle.
When I worked at Google I had no deadlines, full control over what I do during my work days, full ability to prioritize different projects or help people get things done if they ask etc. If that suddenly changed it would feel horrible, as you can understand, if you are used to a typical work culture maybe you don't see it but if you are used to the typical Google one they at least had before then it is a massive owngrade.
However, Cloud seems pretty intent on shipping and meeting deadlines so if we commit, I do feel pressure to make that deadline.
I don't see any likely path by which Kurian would become CEO of Alphabet.
Market beating returns: Alpha. Long bets – Bet. Alphabet.
But the numbers appear to be billion (no way revunue 80mil) in the following table? what am i missing
More and more people now realize that the ad/attention economy is overall a bad thing for internet/the world.
Googler who at some point were seen as above-average engineers are now seen as leetcoders TC-Maximizer with very little ethical thoughts or opinions on what they work on.
All of those changes are a positive thing.