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Google 'Wasting' $16 Billion On Projects Headed Nowhere
hapworth writes "Google's engineering culture is 'wasting profits,' according to a new report published today that refers to $16 billion worth of Google projects that are going nowhere. According to the analysis, it's not that the ideas — such as the Kansas City Fiber Project, driverless cars, and other engineering efforts — are bad. Rather, it's Google's poor execution that is killing the company and adding billions of dollars worth of projects to its 'trash pile.'" On the obvious other hand, Google's done a lot of interesting things over the years that they've managed to make work well, and that strayed from their initial single-text-field search bar.
What do they mean! Is google really being "killed"? I wonder where that money could be better spent, maybe on raises for the execs!
You fund 1,000 projects, in the hope that 1 of them will return more then the other 999 consume. What Google is doing, is what most US companies are failing to do to get ahead of the rest of the world.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
... into an innovative company, and then don't want them to innovate. They want their nice safe already-innovated to profit like a not-quite-so-safe innovator. Paradoxical, yes - but seems the norm.
Just waiting for a shareholder initiative to kill the 20% developer personal research time off. To soon be followed by demands of a new CEO that will outsource and reduce staff to improve sagging profits.
Check your premises.
Also how is this different from Xerox Parc, Bell Labs and IBM Research (or even Microsoft Research) where staff are given the freedom to innovate and experiment with technologies with no immediate marketability. Without such basic research, which corporate America has been languishing in their support of over the past decade or two, we wouldn't have the transistor, laser or so many other key pieces of our modern world.
Google should be commended for being a good corporate citizen and giving back to science and society. Or as another commenter said, where should the money go, executive raises and dividends for shareholders?
"Robots. Elevators to outer space. A nationwide fiberoptic network. ... Is it all worth it?"
You need to waste a lot of money and time to generate exceptional results. If you only do low-risk things, then sure -- you can grow you pile of dough now, but then another start-up google will come at some stage and pull the rug under your low-risk business.
Besides, "is it worth it?" kind of question is meaningless for a geek. It is interesting, ergo it is worth it.
While interviewing for an internship with Google, one engineer I spoke to described what Google does from his perspective: Google once discovered a hose that money poured out of. Its name is online advertising. Now, they spend their time searching for either the next hose, or new ways to increase the flow rate of that first one.
Now, whether this is the Chrome browser, Google+, Google Docs, self driving cars, whatever- they have no idea if any of them will be worthwhile. But, they have some of the smartest people in the world tinkering around to try to find out. And if they spend $16 Billion to find a hose worth $100 Billion, or more, then they come out ahead. But, that's the thing about exploration- you don't know what you're going to find.
That being said – of all the examples you mentioned – how much profit did AT&T make from these?
Can you see how having a closet full of transistor-based network switching equipment could be an advantage to them over an entire office building full of vacuum tubes? Or worse, human operators switching phone calls instead of a UNIX-based phone switch? Or how lasers (and thus fiber optics) may have been useful to them? Or information theory, i.e. data compression?
So how much profit did AT&T make from them? How about all their profit? I am not aware of anything AT&T currently does that doesn't depend on every single one of those things. And certainly anything related to the original, AT&T-as-telecommunications-company role does.
The question that I think the writer is asking is that Google is spending a lot money that belongs to investors on long term high risk speculative projects.
That money doesn't belong to investors. It belongs to Google. Google, in turn, belongs to investors -- but that isn't the same thing at all. You can't buy a hundred shares of Google and then walk into the bank and withdraw that proportion of the cash from Google's bank account, because it's not "your" money. The people the shareholders elect to run Google get to decide how that money is spent, and if you disagree with the holders of the majority of voting shares (i.e. Larry Page and Sergey Brin) how the company should be run, you're free to invest in something else.