I'd argue that's what conventional companies do. And is also conventionally the source of their ultimate demise: can't compete with new actors on the market because talent has left the place, so the company has to resort to lawsuits and acquisition until its cash flow dries out with its last cash cow.
Arguably, Google still has a lot of in-house talent, but optimizing for the financial aspect usually ties talent down sooner or later.
It is not only about retaining talent. Big corps optimize for loss prevention, which adds red tape, which makes it hard for talented people to innovate. I'd say loss of talent is a side effect of this.
The issue is that looking from the outside, they have a lot of “smart people” (tm). But not people talented enough to bring products to market that people want. Despite years of trying - almost all of their profit comes from display ads.
There would be even greater antitrust concerns if Alphabet had a non-ads business that also brought in $100B/year.
Ads is down to 85% of their revenue - they have created vast non-ads businesses which are still dwarfed by their 20% YoY ads growth.
If Google Pay/Checkout/Wallet/etc had been as successful as Stripe, would anyone have noticed? Stripe is worth $35B - 3% of Alphabet. It would just be lumped in the above 15% non-ads business and people would still say that they can't do anything but ads.
Last time I checked - Apple’s Mac and iPad business alone is larger than McDonalds. Cook admitted before that the Watch business is larger than the iPod was at its peak and analyst believe that their headphone business is as well.
I’m not talking about market value. If market value was a good stand in first sound business model neither Netflix (with negative cash flow) nor Uber or Lyft would be worth as much as they are. I’m talking about profit.
Amazon didn’t concentrate on profit (standard disclaimer I work for AWS) they did concentrate on free cash flow. They didn’t have to keep borrowing money to grow.
Netflix is also borrowing money for an “asset” that is worth less over time - content.
If the hn consensus is that ideas have zero value, it should also be that a bulk of smart people also has zero value, in that it isn't the abstract but the concrete. Smart is mostly a bullshit term anyway, we need to be careful and precise in how we use it.
Every company has lots of smart people, it is how it utilizes them that concretely matters.
That only follows if smart is confined to pure ideas and none to implementation. The relevant "stable" of smart in that context are ones who can implement ideas successfully.
Like the difference between trying to use a bunch of dutch style windmills, lodestones, and copper wire to try to generate baseload power as opposed to modern escalatingly large wind turbines.
If you work at a for profit company, your “value” is measured by your contribution to the bottom line in how you help the company make money or save money.
Arguably, Google still has a lot of in-house talent, but optimizing for the financial aspect usually ties talent down sooner or later.