
Larry Page is making huge bets on new technology - charlie_vill
http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/googles-larry-page-the-most-ambitious-ceo-in-the-universe/
======
AndrewKemendo
_But while the company still earns the majority of its revenue from
advertising, during his tenure Page has helped to diversify the business.
Notably, YouTube is expected to generate nearly $6 billion in revenue this
year_

Maybe I am being pedantic but aren't revenues from Youtube also based on
advertising?

To the broader point though, why aren't more investors also putting money
toward these "moonshots?" Is it because they don't have the liquidity to do
it? Do they cost too much for the risk? If that were true then the Google's
investments would be widely panned rather than held up as "making the right
bets" as this article mentions.

It seems like these "singularity" technologies are the types of things that
valley investors would be all over.

~~~
melling
That probably should have said 'search advertising'. YouTube is a different
type of advertising. Google needs to plan for a day when search advertising
comes under attack from the next big thing. Maybe traditional search fades
away, etc.

~~~
waterlesscloud
The interesting thing is that neither YouTube nor Google search have much user
lock-in.

YouTube has content producer lock-in, which is tremendously helpful. And it
may be that there's just no room for improvement massive enough to pull people
away, that video delivery is close enough to its peak to not leave any room
for real competition.

But if content was elsewhere, YouTube revenue would vanish very quickly
indeed.

Search, on the other hand, still has massive room for improvement. Someone,
somewhere will eventually do it. And there's nothing that would keep users on
Google search when they do.

It's not like Facebook where's there's a huge network effect. Once there's a
notably better search option, it wins very very quickly.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
> Search, on the other hand, still has massive room for improvement.

This is true, but it's also a really hard problem and most likely any
improvements will require enormous scale to implement (because they'll be
based on statistical analysis of prior search queries), which only Google and
a handful of others have. So no network effects, but huge economies of scale.

Plus, having used some other search engines (DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Bing, etc.),
I feel that Google still has a comfortable lead than the competition.

~~~
Retric
I suspect you could go a rediculusly long way with crated searches. Basically
page rank with ~10-100x the hand tuning to more or less kill off SEO.

~~~
mehwoot
[http://searchengineland.com/google-25-of-queries-are-new-
add...](http://searchengineland.com/google-25-of-queries-are-new-adding-
question-engine-11535)

25% of google searches are unique. I bet another 25% would be so rare and
numerous you couldn't possibly have time to tune them. In fact, when you think
about how much revenue a single search brings, a search is going to have to
happen on the order of 1,000 times (at least?) before you can have a human
hand tuning them.

~~~
zaroth
That's from 2007. I wonder how much Google's autocomplete has changed that
statistic. Even still, 25% of searches may be unique strings, but I doubt 25%
of searches are meaningfully/semantically unique.

------
kurtle
Disney is a classic example of a company that made huge leaps and transformed
itself from a single revenue stream to a very diverse one.

Can you think of what the board of Disney said to Walt when he decided to open
a brick and mortar theme park when their only product to date had been a few
animated films? Or how what they said when he unveiled the original vision of
EPCOT as a real city with a theme park bolted on.

I don't have a strong opinion in Google doing their moonshots but it's
happened before.

~~~
grecy
> * you think of what the board of Disney said to Walt when he decided to open
> a brick and mortar theme park when their only product to date had been a few
> animated films?*

I read an article on Walt once that covered this.. he went to all his friends
and family and told them his plan. Every single person told him he was nuts
and it would never work.

That was how he knew he was on to something - the fact it had never been
attempted before only made him more certain it was going to work.

~~~
afro88
> he went to all his friends and family and told them his plan. Every single
> person told him he was nuts and it would never work.

> the fact it had never been attempted before only made him more certain it
> was going to work.

Those are interesting reasons for being certain it will work. The combination
of all the people you cherish the most telling you it's a bad idea and the
fact that no one had tried it before. I mean, sure, I understand the romance
of it and these reasons giving someone the drive to try it and succeed. But
making you certain it's going to work? That I don't understand.

~~~
adventured
If people are universal in their opinions that something isn't going to work,
you then have to assess their credibility.

If you decide that the problem is they lack some specific insight that you
possess (and you're really sure about that fact), then in combination with
their universal negative position, I believe you can be confident that you're
on to something. There's a tendency for strikingly new things to be laughed
at, or otherwise denounced as absurd; once you notice that effect at play by
people, and you can reasonably confirm your own thesis that you know something
they don't, it's a great indicator.

------
ChuckMcM
_" As Google’s core business continues to thrive, Larry Page is making huge
bets on new technology"_

I am one of the folks who doesn't believe that Search Advertising is
"continuing to thrive", rather I think if you look at the steady erosion of
CPC and the growing cost of paid distribution you will see that Google's
search advertising business is dying (or at least no longer organically
growing). Google can pump those tires with additional inventory, cutting off
partners to keep more of the revenue, and buying more traffic, but the bottom
line is that if you just ran the business as usual search advertising revenues
would be flat to down over the last 8 quarters. In that context their only
choice is to find another Golden Goose quickly before the momentum flips.

That said, I've been saying this for several years and they keep pumping and
boosting the top line revenue. So it is entirely possible they consider this
the normal evolution of their business. Maybe its just advertisers who are
pickier or want a better return on their advertising dollar. I don't know, but
I do know search advertising is losing profit margin faster than the market is
growing.

------
goshx
Musk wants to colonize and live in Mars and Page is the most ambitious CEO of
the universe?

~~~
mfisher87
Yeah, in the _universe_. More ambitious even than Glorblax, creator of the
monoliths.

Why does _anyone_ ever continue reading an article after a headline like that?
Nothing can follow except a thoughtless a puff piece.

~~~
graycat
I nearly posted my standard view of _Fortune_ but relented. But with your
comment, here goes! My view of _Fortune_ is that they have a _formula_ for
such articles.

First glance, the article seems to be to provide _information_ to the readers,
say, as in "this is what this really successful guy does that you, the reader,
might learn from and find useful in your work in business". But my view is
that this first glance is nearly totally wrong.

Instead the _formula_ for the articles is not to provide useful, or even very
solid, information at all. Instead, the _formula_ is a manipulation of the
reader: The reader is made to feel good about themselves.

How? The article makes the subject's work look simple, definitely like the
reader can easily see themselves doing the same. Then the reader feels like
they are on the right track, that is, already doing as well as the subject of
the article. So, the article passes out a lot of simplistic _insights_ ,
cliches, trivialities, etc. that any reader can agree that they could have
done.

Really it is best for the formula if the reader comes away learning nothing at
all; that is, part of the formula is to make the reader conclude that they are
already on the right track, already know as much as the subject in the
article, could easily do just what the subject does, and, thus, are on the way
also to being worth billions. So, a main goal is that the reader learn
nothing!

So, are making the reader feel good by confirming that the simplistic thoughts
that they can easily already have really are the right stuff.

Or, such an article is _vicarious, escapist, fantasy, emotional experience
entertainment_ (VEFEEE).

And that's the article. The formula is to manipulate the reader into coming
back for more, thinking that, "I'm reading _Fortune_ and, thus, learning from
the best Captains of Business; oh, oh, oh, I'm learning so much; and, since
these guys are worth billions, I can be, too.".

I concluded all this long ago. I am surprised to see _Fortune_ still following
the same old formula. Heck, I kept reading to the end just to see if they had
any significant content beyond their old formula -- they didn't.

So, net, I gave up on _Fortune_ for years, and now I'll give up on the Web
version for more years! What a big pile of nutten, deliberately, very
carefully crafted, total nutten!

"Thoughtless" you say! How kind you are!

------
jxjdjr
Seriously end the hero worship.

------
wmeredith
"A brainiac who works in the lab walks into Page’s office one day wielding his
latest world-changing invention—a time machine. As the scientist reaches for
the power cord to begin a demo, Page fires off a dismissive question: “Why do
you need to plug it in?”

It’s a tall tale that is repeated affectionately by the whizzes inside the
futuristic lab because it captures the urgency and aspiration of their boss to
move technology forward."

Is this really repeated affectionately? (If at all.) That sounds like a bug,
not a feature.

~~~
mahyarm
It sounds like the typical strategy of just asking for something more when
it's presented to you, to get more results. It's easier to ask than to make.

~~~
mkm416
The joke is that it's a _time machine._ Someone brings a working one of those
to office and I wouldn't care if it's powered by a butter churn.

~~~
bronson
You'll care if it's powered by something with a little more kick, like
plutonium.

~~~
daniel-cussen
I think it being a time machine trumps its being powered by plutonium: go to
future for cure to cancer, come back, and just like that, the plutonium is
irrelevant.

------
jayvanguard
Fluff piece.

~~~
psbp
I've seen a lot of these about Page recently. I wonder if we're going to see a
more aggressive shakeup.

------
chuckcode
It would be great to see google diversify their business model as well as
their technology so they weren't getting most of their profit from
advertising.

~~~
jeffreyrogers
Sometimes doing one thing well is good enough. Like Gillette or Coca-Cola.

~~~
saryant
Gillette is part of Proctor and Gamble. Coca-Cola makes hundreds (thousands?)
of products.

------
hyp0
Looks like Xerox PARC to me: one fantastic business funding great research
projects.

They are protecting that business well, by seeing and acting on mobile early,
by acquiring Android and developing it.

I think heads-up displays (eventually) will be the next big thing, because
they remove hardware size-limitation (cf. watches), and Google is at least
_ready_ for that, with Glass.

------
comrade1
I'm glad that Google has enough money to take on risky projects. So much of
what they do fails - they essentially only have advertising. But to be honest
nothing in that article seemed that world-changing or interesting. Even the
nanoparticles are mundane and not much more of an extension of the work that's
been going on since the 90s on bio-chips for detection.

But nanoparticles for drug deliver is interesting but they've been doing
something similar with bio-engineered antibodies since the early 2000s. (in
fact, if you're rich enough you can get a tailored cancer treatment with
antibodies specific to your own specific cancer - this has been around for
awhile)

I've long hoped that self-aware AI would come out of Google, but perhaps not.

In comparison, Elon Musk seems like the true visionary.

~~~
rattray
You may be giving up too soon here. None of the fruits of Google X's labors
have hit mainstream production yet. You'll be able to judge them once they
have.

~~~
jacobkranz
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Google Glass come out of X?

~~~
Igglyboo
Is Glass considered mainstream yet? I thought it was still for developers
mainly.

~~~
adventured
As a product, it's not even a beta yet realistically. It's nowhere near being
a fully launched product. Maybe in three to five years.

