Alphabet's Moonshot X Lab Cuts Staff (bloomberg.com) 15
Alphabet's lab for pioneering technology is laying off dozens of employees as it turns to outside investors to help fund its ventures. From a report: The division, known as X, has in recent months ramped up discussions on funding with venture capitalists and other investors, according to people with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named as it is private. The lab is adopting a new structure that'll enable its projects to more easily spin out of X as independent startups with support from Alphabet and outside backers, according to one of the people and an email to staff obtained by Bloomberg. X seeks bold approaches to major challenges like climate change and connectivity, but its efforts have yielded few durable businesses thus far.
maybe (Score:2)
if they renamed it to twitter...
Long game is better game -Kim Jong Bling (Score:2)
Nah, "Twitter" is still taken, but "Twatter" is available. "One moment, I'll send you details in a twat..."
Oh a serious note, long-term R&D is cheaper during a (tech) recession, as you can get top staff at a discount. Play the long card. The new ideas may come online just as a boom hits and then you suck in big profits while competition is playing catchup and hiring more expensive. It's the "buy low sell high" version of R&D. But it does require savings.
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if they renamed it to twitter...
Or, as they're cutting staff, simply cut the name too from "X" to either ">", "<", "\/" or "/\". :-)
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if a new company which resembles Google in its early days comes around, Google could become the new Yahoo!
That new company would need $100B in pre-existing data centers to challenge Google.
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if a new company which resembles Google in its early days comes around, Google could become the new Yahoo!
More like the next IBM (and I mean that pejoratively). (What company twenty five years ago was the monopolistic monster of the computer tech industry, and today literally did not grow value as a company???)
Looks like the Alphabet board really needs a managerial shakeup, while nuking Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai; he is no Satya Nadella.
It is mindboggling how Google went from being an industry leader in cloud computing to like #3, behind Amazon and Microsoft. Google's nowhere to be found on the AI front. If
Google's done. It's an entropy pool. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Google's done. It's an entropy pool. (Score:4, Interesting)
If they were smart, they'd allow the divisions to spin themselves off as an alternative to internal reshuffling/layoffs.
"We can give you a severance, or we can use that money to capitalize you as a startup in exchange for equity, and then it's up to you to find your own funding. You pick."
I suspect part of the problem are the employees themselves. If you're aiming for FIRE, and you're within a year or two of cashing out, you're not in the mindset to take risks. Multiply that across the entire company, and you've basically got the equivalent of a bunch of C-suite earners right before they get their gold watch.
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If they were smart, they'd allow the divisions to spin themselves off as an alternative to internal reshuffling/layoffs.
From the summary they're doing almost exactly that.
I think part of the problem is they're looking for "big problem" ideas when most successful startups are something like "ridesharing for dogs" or "a slightly more advanced messaging app". Heck, Google's one big post-search novel idea was "better webmail" which grew into "office, but on the cloud". Useful, but hardly a revolutionary concept.
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I was under the impression that Google itself was just a big infrastructure company for Alphabet; Google just was a custodian for its hugely profitable established divisions (cloud, youtube, advertising backoffice), and a staff pool for Alphabet's startups. But wow, Sundar Pichai does not look like the CEO who can squeeze operating efficiency from established industry behemoths, and he sure as hell is no Satya Nadella. Google's probably the first case where a company needs to be broken up for its sharehol
Division is NOT known as X (Score:2)
Nope. Not what is claimed (Score:2)