
Google, in Rare Stumble, Posts 23% Decline in Profit - mitchbob
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/technology/google-alphabet-earnings.html
======
pgt
Following Google's [ad-blocking
restrictions]([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20044430)),
I switched from Chrome to Firefox and from Google Search to DuckDuckGo. It's
been great so far, browsing in incognito mode by default. Gmail and Docs has
been the hardest addiction to kick so far, but I've heard good things about
Fastmail. More friends are following suit.

It may seem like we developers are in the minority, but the minority rule
applies to us: tastemakers make the apps that run in your browser and you
install Firefox on your parents' machines at thanksgiving.

Windows 10's forced-updates and telemetry are the main things preventing me
from buying a Surface for my next machine. But I don't know how I'm going to
get off my iPhone - the CPU is just too fast.

Remember, you are the market. You can vote with your eyeballs and your
employment. Giving up salary is easier said than done, but no other profession
has more opportunities to choose a moral employer.

~~~
cheshireoctopus
> no other profession has more opportunities to choose a moral employer.

Interesting.

Curious how many people actually evaluate the morality of their prospective
employers.

~~~
nickserv
I do, to the extent that I won't work for a company that I believe is actively
harming.

I've also chosen a salary cut for working for companies that I believe are
actively helping.

Most of my IT friends think alike (which may be part of why we're friends ;-).
For example a friend quit his job after realizing some things his work was
enabling.

Purely anecdotal of course. But not nonexistent.

------
rch
> Alphabet reported that its revenue rose 20 percent to $40.5 billion for the
> third quarter, but that profit dropped to $7.07 billion. Profit ... was hurt
> by rising costs for research and development and marketing, the company
> said.

> Google is spending heavily to hire employees, invest in data centers and pay
> for marketing of new products like its Pixel smartphones.

> Alphabet said it added about 6,500 employees in the quarter, for a total
> work force of about 114,000 people.

> The company also said its tax rate doubled to 18 percent from 9 percent a
> year ago.

~~~
mywittyname
> The company also said its tax rate doubled to 18 percent from 9 percent a
> year ago.

The article should have expanded on this...why did their tax rate go up if R&D
and CapEx increased?

------
tudorw
Perhaps they should pay more attention to their core, I see their search
product as lacking vision, dated and misaligned with the needs of the user.

~~~
culot
Just recently all of the search projects seem to have gotten significantly
worse. Image search has been crippled with removal of the size options. Web
search seems like a parody or cheap imitation anymore, presenting even worse
result than usual, and instead of being able to customize the search to fix
that, you end up with Bing-like results giving you crap you explicitly tried
to exclude.

Then there's all those silly, frivolous overly-rounded corners mucking up the
GUI.

On the up side: I do look forward to competitors stepping forward to fill the
space that Google used to fill. That is inevitable.

~~~
maxwell
Duck keeps improving since I ditched GSearch. Duck feels more like the old
Google, the one I used for almost 20 years, the authoritative search engine.

Now when I hit a GSearch SERP (when in Chrome for a moment testing something),
it feels like spam, and I close it faster than a Pinterest tab.

~~~
iamnothere
I agree, but lately I've noticed that DDG's results have been trending in the
same direction. Maybe I'm just imagining things? (To be clear, I still find it
generally better than Google for day-to-day search.)

I long for the return of an Altavista-like "dumb" search engine with proper
"hard" boolean support. My brain is hardwired to think that way and I strongly
prefer it. I understand that this wouldn't be useful for everyone, but I don't
care. How on earth does it make sense to have only one kind of search engine
for all of humanity.

~~~
fileeditview
I could imagine that the future of search engines is more specialization in
different topics. As the content in the web keeps growing it only makes sense
to only "search in a specific corner".

Maybe it's a good time to be innovative here..

------
nestorD
"after a sharp increase in spending for research and development"

~~~
stelfer
It's important to understand that there's a difference between "R&D" as it
lives in most people's minds here, and "R&D" as it presents in financial
reporting. The former is associated with hiring PhD's and building labs. The
latter is everything not covered by cost of sales. Different companies balance
the buckets in different ways at different times. And there are many
activities that fall under the latter that most would not associate with the
former. Companies that make staples report R&D on their financials too. And
companies that fund AI also do a lot of R&D that looks the R&D that goes into
making staples.

~~~
dredmorbius
So are we talking more A/B testing and less qubit development (or other
moonshot projects)?

------
xorand
Wait, they spent extra $30 billions in a quarter for research, development and
marketing?

"Alphabet reported that its revenue rose 20 percent to $40.5 billion for the
third quarter, but that profit dropped to $7.07 billion. Profit, which missed
Wall Street forecasts, was hurt by rising costs for research and development
and marketing, the company said."

~~~
skinnymuch
They have many other expenses outside R&D. Their profit dropped 23% according
to article. They were never doing $37B in profit a quarter.

------
s3r3nity
They also wrote off > $1bn in losses in Uber & Lyft investments - which I was
surprised to hear that they were invested in both.

~~~
darkwizard42
I believe Google Capital invested in Uber and then CapitalG invested in Lyft.
So, still in the umbrella of Alphabet.

------
m23khan
well they have had an amazing run since 2001 - and during that time, they have
grown to be a huge enterprise comprising of all services under the Google
brand plus others such as Youtube. Extending into OS, some hardware, etc.

Still, 23% is a big decline so lets see how they fare from now onwards.

------
tanilama
Guess cost cutting is coming to the research sector.

Too bad Google's research sector is actually pretty inspiring.

------
jfoster
So, what exactly did they spend the gap on? Must be interesting.

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mattrp
And now we know the real reason for the quantum supremacy paper that wasn’t...

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ErikAugust
For the paywall:
[https://beta.trimread.com/articles/311](https://beta.trimread.com/articles/311)

------
ycombonator
Firefox is smooth as butter on Mac OS with their latest update. Add unlock
origin with default settings and privacy badger. It’s web the way it was
intended to be!

