vvswarup

About

Username
vvswarup
Joined
Visits
52
Last Active
Roles
member
Points
198
Badges
1
Posts
338
  • Google plans to sell Boston Dynamics robotics division - report

    If Google is starting to pay more attention to the time-horizon needed to realize revenue from its projects, then that represents a big change in attitude. In the past, Google proudly trumpeted its projects in the lab. It took pride in the fact that it spent billions on dabbling. 

    If Google's plan to sell Boston Dynamics does indeed represent an attitude shift, it remains to be seen how investors view Google's stock. Google's board of directors was always a paper tiger but that wasn't enough for Google's founders. They shamelessly proclaimed that in order to protect themselves from shareholders, they would create new class of shares that didn't have any voting rights, effectively giving the founders absolute, unchallenged authority. In spite of this, Google's Class C stock (non-voting) doesn't trade at that big of a discount to the Class B stock (old share class). 

    Investors have cited Google's penchant for making long-term bets as a reason for believing in the stock, despite the founders having free reign to throw money on pet projects without any thought to how the company was going to make money on it. What do they say now?

    cornchip
  • Google plans to sell Boston Dynamics robotics division - report

    sog35 said:
    LOL.

    but, but, but, but, Apple Watch is a failure.....only sold 12 million units in its first year.....

    Another multi-billion loss for Google.  Add this to the Motorola disaster and soon to be Nest disaster.
    How do you figure Motorola was a disaster? They developed some amazing models at fair prices, creating another major and more importantly, pure, Android handset manufacturer. And if you think the price they paid was to much, just do the maths - they took several billion in cash, several billion in deferred taxes, sold off a couple of divisions for a couple of billion, kept the patents and sold it for the balance. They buy companies, try some things, sometimes keep them and sometimes don't. Look at some of the successful ones - Youtube, Picassa (now Photos), Keyhole (became Earth then Maps), Android, Waze. I wouldn't say Google is a company like, e.g. HP or even Microsoft that overpays then writes them off a couple of years later.
    Maybe the OP is being a bit too liberal with the English language, but Google doesn't deserve an ounce of praise from the media (which it got) for the acquisition. To begin with, Motorola wasn't an acquisition. It was a shakedown. Motorola was losing money on smartphones-everyone but Samsung and Apple was. Then-CEO Sanjay Jha was looking for his red carpet exit. At the time, the patent wars were in full swing and Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle had their sights set on Android. Motorola threatened to ally with Microsoft and Google couldn't have that. Motorola had some valuable patents and was a well-known Android OEM. Sanjay Jha made Google cough up billions for the money-hemmorhaging Motorola. Motorola wasn't some "moonshot." It was a distress buy.

    Again, the OP was probably exaggerating. But I think the OP was poking fun at the media's attitude regarding Google's M&A strategy. The media praises Google's M&A strategy to a point that it says Apple should emulate it. You say that "they buy companies, try some things, sometimes keep them and sometimes don't." This is true when a company buys a startup that's testing out a prototype.That's not the type of companies Google is buying out. A company worth billions of dollars has a product on the market. At that kind of valuation, we're talking about revenue streams. Companies don't buy revenue streams just to "try some things." For some reason, the media thinks it's a great thing that Google buys revenue streams just to dabble. 

    macky the mackycornchip
  • Google to ban Adobe Flash-based display ads, go 100% HTML5

    vagrant said:
    cali said:

    Whis is Giggle doing this?!!!?!?!?

    For years fandroids have been telling us it's a special feature that Apple's hardware/software is too weak to handle!!!!!!!!1
    I work at Google.

    Wow.  Just wow.  I had heard about the Reality Distortion Field, but I never really believed it until now.  Do you guys ever read the rest of the Internet, or do you just stay on this site and jerk each other off?

    1) Google hates Flash and has been working to destroy it for at least as long as Apple has, if not longer.  Google doesn't own the entire eco-system, like Apple does, and can't make such just universal edicts as Apple can, or as quickly.  

    2) The reason Jobs cut Flash was not because Flash is ugly and has security holes.  Jobs cut Flash because Adobe, which got it's start from Apple, was only focusing on the Windows version of Flash and the other versions of Flash were crap.

    3) This is not the first action Google has taken against Flash.  The iSheep are acting like Google just woke up this morning and suddenly saw the light.  Google has been hacking away at Flash for as long as Apple has.  Flash makes it much harder to index the contents of the Internet and Google has forever been pushing HTML5 over Flash.  Google is just not willing to suddenly take the decision making away from its users.  Apple is.  And there are pros and cons to both approaches.

    4) Google publicly bought the Android company and set out to get into the mobile phone business long before Apple announced the iPhone and long before Eric Schmidt was on the Apple board.  Apple knew that Google was working on a phone long before Google knew that Apple was working on one.  The first Android phone was announced shortly after the first iPhone.  Saying that Android copied Apple because it was released a few months later is as ridiculous as saying that Apple copied the LG Prada because it was released the year before.

    There's nothing in the iPhone that hadn't already been done before on some other phone.  The brilliant thing that Jobs did was line up all the parts manufacturers and make the phone that people had been asking for, rather than taking the safe route like the moron MBAs at mobile hardware companies.  I bought the first iPhone and I loved it.  Not because, "OMG I never imagined a phone could be like this!" but because, "Finally someone manufactured the phone we have all been asking for!"

    5) No one ever said that Apple hardware/software was too weak to handle Flash.  The Flash player for OX S and IOS just sucks because it was poorly written by Adobe.  More than half of the engineers at Google use Apple product and love them.

    6) The only people who like Flash are the people who write apps in it.

    Wow.  I mean wow.  You people really need to get out to the rest of the Internet more often and learn something.

    If Google wanted to destroy Flash, Google would have stamped out Flash from Android before Apple did it. If you're trying to break an addiction to something, you're not helping yourself at all if you keep the object of addition within reach of you. Content providers who are after eyeballs couldn't care less about HTML5 being better than Flash. Apple shut a lot of content providers off from a rather large number of eyeballs, and that's what got their attention. I'm sure the Internet would have eventually moved to HTML5 given time. But the change would have been much slower. 
    tallest skil
  • Google to ban Adobe Flash-based display ads, go 100% HTML5

    bulldogs said:
    brakken said:
    In breaking news today, Alphabet mgmt for sub-section Google apologised profusely and deeply to Apple's late Steve Jobs for the bullshit it spewed about Flash for the past seven years. 

    Fandroids immediately took to their Windows PCs to rail against the unfairness of life, and to reassert the pseudo-communist 'open' superiority of the world's second most malware-friendly operating system. Many also questioned Apple for allowing Flash on Macs. 

    Meanwhile at AI, the dullest and least insightful article on the topic ever was posted, totally failing to provide either historical context or amusing witticisms. iSheep of the site were suitably unresponsive about such a 'last decade' topic. 
    In reality, most Android fans own Macbooks (a few own Linux machines) and despise Microsoft far more than they do Apple. They view Apple's disdain for Google and Android to be strange and regrettable and would have much preferred Google and Apple join forces against Microsoft - who used to be a real threat to Google's core search/ads business, and the need to defend themselves against Microsoft was what motivated Google to acquire/release Chrome, Android and ChromeOS in the first place, to prevent Microsoft from locking Google out of Internet Explorer and Windows - instead of embarking on the strange, years-long, mutually counterproductive and doomed to fail (as there was always going to be a midrange or low end market, and if Google and Android didn't fill it, Microsoft and Windows Mobile would have) war against Google and Android, and joining Microsoft in the process. Had Apple joined forces with Google in the beginning, both would have succeeded, both would have been better for it and Microsoft would be severely weakened as a result. Instead, Apple implicitly joined their old foe Microsoft in what turned out to be a losing strategy, with both hoping that Google's failure would result in Microsoft supplanting Google in the low and midrange device market, and with Microsoft's apps and services replacing Google's. Claiming that it wasn't a tag-team is untenable, as both Ballmer-era Microsoft and Apple engaged in the tactic of trying to pressure and frighten Android manufacturers into abandoning Android using infringement lawsuits. Both Apple and Microsoft knew that the result of this would be for those manufacturers to be forced to adopt Windows for their phones and tablets, as no other viable option was available. Apple - for some reason - was willing to countenance (and in an indirect but very real way encourage) Microsoft and Windows as a frenemy in the mobile space but not Android and Google, even though Apple claims that BOTH infringed on their IP. (The difference: Apple actually sued Microsoft where they never did get around to suing Google.) Result: instead of joining together and severely weakening Microsoft, Microsoft was able to retrench and successfully reinvent themselves as a multi-platform cloud software and services company who will increasingly compete with Apple down the line. And their attempts to crush Android was such a massive failure that Tim Cook went from trying to scare users away from Android over security and privacy issues in 2015 and 2016 to developing apps for Android like everybody else with a serious cloud software and services model - Apple's new direction - is going to. (Apple Music on Android was merely the first. iCloud for Android will follow, so will Maps and other more apps and services.) But Apple's cloud and services direction (and VR too) means that they now have 2 big competitors in that space: Microsoft and Google, both of whom have far more experience and talent in those areas than Apple does. Had Apple chosen to openly partner with Google instead of secretly partnering with Microsoft in an attempt to kill Android off, Microsoft would be severely diminished and Apple would have a strategic partner instead of 2 strong, well funded, technically capable competitors. (As it is, IBM is Apple's strategic partner on services and ... good luck with that.) So like Nokia, Apple cast their lot with Microsoft instead of Google and lost. The fact that they didn't lose nearly as much as Nokia did doesn't change that. That's the real story, whether Apple fans like it or not. Apple decided that they preferred that Microsoft get the low-end and midrange smartphone and tablet market instead of Google. Why? Maybe because iTunes was already on Windows; maybe because Microsoft Office was available on OS X ... who knows. We just know this: Apple chose the company with a bad CEO, an outdated product and business model and on the downswing (Microsoft) over a company with much better leadership with modern tech and a forward-looking business model. And you see the result: both Microsoft and Apple are now making apps for Android. Apple even open-sourced Swift in order to help facilitate cross-platform development of Android and iOS apps! So please stop pretending otherwise. It was Apple - not Google or "fandroids" who started this war, and it was Apple who lost it. Case in point: remember how the success of Apple Pay was going to drive people to Android? Well, now Android Pay and Apple Pay have the same usage rates despite the Android smartwatches not supporting NFC, and only a tiny percentage of Android phones supporting NFC or fingerprint sensors (and despite Android Pay launching only a few months ago and being supported by only a fraction of the banks and credit unions that support Apple Pay): http://www.luxurydaily.com/android-pay-apple-pay-reach-parity-as-mobile-pay-adoption-grows-report/ Guys, seriously. The war is over. Apple lost because they chose to team up with Microsoft against Google instead of Google against Microsoft. Time to admit it and move on.
    Apple was more than willing to partner up with Google. Google chose to compete against Apple by developing Android. I won't go as far to say that Android was stolen because I don't think it was. But Google chose to compete against Apple, simple as that. 
    lostkiwicornchip
  • Apple, Inc CEO Tim Cook's piqued peek at Peak iPhone

    There isn't that "get in now before it's too late" feeling with Apple stock like there is with Amazon, Google, or Facebook or other tech companies that command higher multiples. The bottom line is that people don't think Apple will grow by leaps and bounds in the future. Apple's famed secrecy doesn't help and neither does Tim Cook's private, low-key personality. People are convinced that Apple intends to sit back and milk the iPhone, never mind that Apple has spent more than it ever has on capex and R&D. How much does it cost to make a thinner iPhone with a better camera? All that R&D has to be going to something. 

    In spite of that, the worst thing Apple can do right now is to start trying to play the game of directly influencing investor perception. Investors are sometimes slow to come around. That's why we have asset bubbles all the time. Investors don't take the time to ask some important questions. Apple should reject the experts and work on making good products. 


    qonlinebrucemcai46argonaut