Google Earnings Reveal $3.6 Billion Lost On 'Moonshots' In 2016 (cnn.com)

Thursday Google revealed earnings results for 2016 showing the total loss for their "other bets" division had reached $3.6 billion. An anonymous reader quotes CNN : The "other bets" portion of its business includes ambitious projects like self-driving cars, life sciences research and high-speed Internet access... Alphabet shuttered a project to beam Internet to rural areas with solar-powered drones, halted the expansion of its costly Google Fiber effort, and forced Nest to cut costs and pay for its own legal and PR expenses. At the same time, the company has moved other moonshot projects closer to market. In December, Alphabet spun off its self-driving car program into a separate company called Waymo and began working on partnerships with automakers.
Google's CFO says going forward they'll "continue to calibrate the magnitude and pace of investments".

Comments

Not every single research project pays off...

[StevenMaurer]

But the ones that do more than pay for the ones that don't

News at 11

Re:Not every single research project pays off...

[ColdWetDog]

No, the pharmaceutical companies have managed to pick the the "We Do Evil" moniker because of a bunch of less-than-stellar behaviors

- Spending more money on advertising than research
- Pushing the bounds of advertising, both to the public and to professionals to rather dubious levels
- Pushing the prices of older, well established, simple drugs to sky high levels - just because they can
- Lobbying the spineless Congresscritters to keep drugs from other (actually healthier, safer) countries out of the US unless the go through a US company.

To be sure, they aren't the only morally limited players. Congress gets big hug for the above mentioned cowardice and the inability to fund the FDA to decent levels. The Executive Branch has had it's fair share of screwball ideas (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid 'Security'). Doctors and hospitals haven't looked out for patient interests in decades. Insurance companies have never looked out for anybody other than themselves.

And finally, Americans want Tesla healthcare at Trabi prices.

Capitalism is a bad way to run an economy although arguably better than anything else we've played around with. But whatever it is we're doing in the US (It isn't really capitalism) isn't working at all.

Accounting

[Areyoukiddingme]

It's crap like this that's why we can't have nice things. Specifically, Google Fiber is not a loss. Accountants put it on the books as a loss, but it's not. It's just an expensive investment in physical plant with a long payoff period. It may takes years, even decades, but it's not like people are going to stop using this new-fangled thing called the Internet.

Wall Street has been the death of American innovation. If money spent doesn't earn a profit in the next quarter, Wall Street doesn't like, it, doesn't want it, and doesn't understand it. The stock price of Tesla Motors is a fine example. Here we have a company investing hugely in physical plant, and Wall Street has no idea what to do with it, so the value of TSLA fluctuates by 50% of its value, all the time. So-called "financial analysts" don't even know how to talk about it. It doesn't fit into their neat little boxes.

(And there's a job that's just ripe for automation. It wouldn't even take a sophisticated neural net. 90% of the financial "analysts" in the world could be replaced by some templates and a bucket of Markov chains, driven by a small shell script.)

So Google will shut down Fiber, having utterly failed to modify the behavior of the incumbent ISPs. And we will all pay for it. And pay and pay and pay and pay... It's Comcastic!