Congrats to Ali. Been very impressed with Chariot's mastery of nitty gritty business & logistics fundamentals. That sounds like it should be obvious, but Leap and other competitors couldn't so much as file the right permits, let alone start what amounted to their own public transit network and get regular ridership. This is a hard, low margin, business to get right in a crowded space, and Ali managed to scale it to 40k+ riders per month and that's awesome. Well deserved!
40k+ riders per month? I've been trying to get ridership data for Chariot and couldn't get anything.
So it's around 2,000 riders per business day? For 30 lines?
It's really low ridership by any standard. Not even a dent in SF Muni ridership of 650,000+ daily rides. It's the equivalent of a local, infrequent Muni line you probably never heard of like the 36-Teresita or the 37-Corbett, both of which are moving around 2,000 riders a day. On a single, modest line.
Candy Crush, we're holding that up as a development that Apple is responsible that we want to be proud of, seriously? Regardless, an app store wasn't groundbreaking. They executed much better on what Blackberry was already doing with smartphones.
The point isn't necessarily what has come to pass yet, it's the focus on things that don't necessarily have a path to revenue yet. Everything Apple does is product and revenue focused. That is not the case with Google.
You are right that 95% of their revenue comes from Adwords . . . but 95% of their efforts aren't on optimizing Adwords, and that right there is my point: Apple is focused on executing where their revenue is, Google is definitely MORE focused on finding new revenue opportunities, and is more willing to look into unorthodox industries and ideas.
Yes, Candy Crush, especially when King is apply major pressure to Nintendo, a 30 year incumbent, on their home court[1]. I understand most people don't understand the video games industry.
Second, don't take execution lightly. Execution is everything. Again, the last few major tech products in silicon valley aren't moonshots. Most of the them are ideas that could have built 2001. Square could have been released on Windows Mobile 6.
What I'm simply trying to argue is that Google Research isn't inherently better than Apple's workshop. Moonshots are great yes, but its a bit too early to be sounding the bells. Microsoft Research had a similar position in the past and everyone thought they were ushering the new age, but it turned out to simply be PR. "The World of Tomorrow" at Disney Land (which probably hasn't been touched in 5-10 years) is chock full of a Microsoft Research moonshots that never caught on or weren't really practical. I see Google Glass heading a similar direction.
But thats the point. MS and Google are trying, Apple is more or less only making safe bets, combining existing technologies and executing extremely well on improving those. Thats great, i love my Apple products, but its still a different philosophy.
Again, you don't know that because Apple doesn't use Research as a PR platform. Apple tinkered with something like the Glass.[1] It would be naive to think Apple R&D isn't tinkering with similar ideas. However Apple's marketing approach is very different and Apple on recent doesn't try to sell you on ideas that are 5 years away. Which is entirely why I'm hesitant to say "Apple isn't doing anything and Google is flying to the moon." In reality both companies are looking into very interesting products, the difference is while Google is telling the world, Apple would crucify anyone who leaked a blurry photo.
Candy Crush is fundamentally built on Facebook's platform. If you want to say Apple are great for providing APIs that Candy Crush could use to produce its app (if it's native), why aren't Google great for providing APIs to allow the same for many more devices (if it's also native)?
> it's the focus on things that don't necessarily have a path to revenue yet. Everything Apple does is product and revenue focused.
You don't know that. It's widely reported that the iPad (tablet) project was started even before the iPhone project then shelved a few years. Of course the iPad is the past but it should serve as an example of what was developed in the early-mid 00' you only discovered its existence in the late 00' therefore it is not unreasonable to extrapolate that you will only able to tell the story of the current projects in a few years from now. Sorry to break your narrative. It's not because you don't see any press release that there is nothing going on in Cupertino.
Blackberry was going to do away with hardware keyboards and ship something with capacitive multitouch in 2007? They were going to use their massive economy of scale to rush out ultra-high-resolution displays in 2010?
New revenue opportunities? Google's #1 revenue source in 2000 was AdWords and their #1 revenue source in 2013 is AdWords. Apple's #1 revenue source in 2000 was Macintosh, in 2005 it was iPod, in 2010 it was iPhone. AppleTV is a "hobby", but by that standard, everything Google does other than AdWords is also a "hobby".
I judge what I see . . . can't speculate about other companies. The robotics acquisitions were kept secret for a long time as well. As were autonomous cars. Eventually they came out. I don't think there is some super secret lab at apple that is working on groundbreaking inventions, and not one thing has come out of it yet, bit of a tall tale in my eyes. . .
Don't be silly, all research done by companies has an ROI counter tied to it . . . the point is that some do much more forward thinking research into technologies that might not yet have a specific application quite yet, and others are focused 2-3 years in advance and that's it.
This is simply not true except perhaps in that any research center will have an aggregate ROI counter that some bureaucrats glance at annually. As somebody pointed out elsewhere, Bell Labs' ROI was capped. Much, and I would argue the best, corporate research is done with almost no consequential oversight from the host corporation. This was certainly the case with Bell Labs, XEROX Parc, and other great research centers of yore just as it is still the case to some extent at Microsoft, AT&T, IBM, and Intel today (between re-orgs).
At present, PARC (no longer under Xerox) operates on something of an agency model and Google runs research projects like startups. This appears to result in a higher rate of short-term commercial success, but at the cost of fundamental research. That said, I think we've done a tremendous amount of fundamental research since World War II and now that the conditions for producing more no longer exist, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit – new configurations of things that already exist – hence the prevalence of startups and the perceived excellence of hybrid research models.
Bell Labs was not setup like that, though. They were researching new materials to make their existing Monopoly run more efficiently. If ROI was the focus, IP would not have entered the public domain & people like Shannon & Shockley would have been shown the door before they changed the world.
I think credit is given . . . that's the past though, only so long you can rest on your laurels, and creating a snazzier phone and an app store doesn't really measure up to autonomous cars and robots in my opinion . . . its very nice don't get me wrong, but not in the same category of hard research into technologies where there isn't an obvious usecase yet, and thinking ahead 15 years.
The difference is that Apple doesn't advertise what they're working on until it's nearly ready to ship. They don't do vaporware. So they're always going to lose out on that comparison.
True. I'll admit that there is probably a fair amount of bias because Google has a better PR department. But I doubt it's that much better than these other guys . . . I think much of the research being done is around incremental improvements, and the point is that Google seems to be dreaming much bigger and thinking much more long term.
I got what the main thought was, but I'm not sure about much longer term or greater plans. Maybe broader appeal? Again, related to PR. IBM seems to be doing fine long term with their research, but not very PR active, and when they are you notice that - Watson?
Watson is actually sort of boring stock-in-trade stuff for IBM when looked at through a certain lens. (Not that it isn't noteworthy or anything.) The phrase "IBM researchers have..." used to be attached to things like atom-by-atom manipulation (the atomic IBM logo was the PR piece), superconductivity (Bednorz and Müller)... things that might one day mean a whole heck of a lot, but in the meantime amounted to allowing some very smart people to piddle around trying interesting stuff. There was always hope that some technology might fall sideways out of the work, but the IBM of the day was significantly less attached to success. Pre-PC Revolution, they were in a position to afford it; Gerstner's IBM could not.
Ok they have a computer and an operating system as well as a nice way to transfer files . . . big whoop. I think we can all agree that this isn't groundbreaking.
I think your premise is kind of flawed. That's not because you don't see what Apple is working on right now that there's nothing, that may just be their usual policy not to communicate about future products. Moreover I think a lot of people forget to credit Apple of their on-going effort on semi-conductors I think it's forward thinking, but hey that's less shiny than robots.
I think we can all agree that it's very important for some people/companies to focus on the short term, and for other people/companies on the long term.
Totally agree. I've been at demo days and I just tune out the foreigners who I can't understand. It's hard enough having to listen to 40+ startups in a day, and try to understand what someone is doing, why they are doing it, and how it can make money, throw in a thick accent and you are likely to give your brain a rest and just tune out. I notice that these founders are the ones with no one visiting their demo table, etc.
At the same time everyone of those google employees who lives in SF pays SF taxes, quite high taxes as a matter of fact, and that contributes to the community, 2-3x more than any of these hippy touchy-feely types who claim that SF is theirs and theirs alone.
I agree though that they should pay for the use of public land for their bus stops, as they are solving a problem they largely created by making it possible for their employees to live there in the first place.
SF already has pretty high taxes, so the creation of a lot of wealth is not google or anyone elses fault. If SF can't do anything to alleviate poverty with the vast amount of funds it collects then that is the problem.
And if it't not possible anymore because SF is just overall too expensive, then that's life, some cities are wealthier than others, you don't see people moving into Montecito, Bel Air or other rich neighborhoods and demanding affordable housing? Perhaps if the city has become that desirable it just isn't possible anymore.
>everyone of those google employees who lives in SF pays SF taxes, quite high taxes as a matter of fact
Not sure what this refers to but San Francisco funds come mainly from payroll tax, sales tax, property tax, and real estate transfer tax.
Payroll tax is levied on companies not people, and even then it's not being levied on the people using these buses as they work down in Mountain View (excepting the small number of SF Googlers who also use the bus, if they do).
Sales tax is going to impact Googlers roughly the same as others in SF. Maybe even less since days are spent in South Bay (if you use the bus and don't work in SF office) and you're likely doing a disproportionate amount of online shopping :)
Property tax is relaively low in San Francisco due to Prop 13, so if you're renting it's not hitting you hard as the property has been held likely for a long time and is held basically steady under prop 13. If you're buying a home in SF you may pay some higher than average property tax but this is held in check by the fact that a 2/3rds popular vote is required for any property tax hike under prop 13. So they're not that bad.
>2-3x more than any of these hippy touchy-feely types who claim that SF is theirs and theirs alone.
As a purely practical matter, payroll tax is levied on both sides of the employment transaction in the US [0]. Beyond that, diverse economic research in and out of the US suggests that the bulk of the tax incidence [1] of payroll taxes is on employees [2].
>> 2-3x more than any of these hippy touchy-feely types who claim that SF is theirs and theirs alone.
> Citation needed. This sounds pretty out of wack.
Here's some napkin analysis. [3] claims Google's average salary for a software engineer is 113k, and [4] claims that San Francisco / San Mateo's average salary is 64k. Since the 64k is dragged upward by the Google salaries, let's speculate that the Googlers on average make twice as much as the "touchy-feely" residents. It seems totally reasonable to think that someone making twice as much money will pay twice as much across the suite of payroll tax (they earn more), sales tax (they spend more), property tax (they own more property), and transfer tax (they exchange property more often). One would want to empirically corroborate this, but it doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
You missed that the vast majority of Google's workers, and an even higher percentage of those on the buses, are not paying SF payroll tax because they are not based in SF. (SF payroll tax cannot be levied on an employee in Mountain View, no matter where they live.)
Also, it doesn't make sense that Googlers would pay 2x property tax. Property tax does not scale with salary. You can make a ton of money but if you rent you pay (indirectly) the same property tax as your neighbor and the same as the tenant five years ago paying 1/2 the rent (since the same landlord has held the building the whole time and you can't re-appraise under prop 13).
If you buy, meanwhile, Googlers pay extra only to the extent property values rise. While they have gone up (~25% in a year), we have not seen anything close to a doubling. (And it's not clear that Googlers "own more property" as you suggest. While they tend to be wealthier, they also tend to be younger and more geographically mobile, which would encourage renting.)
As for sales tax, think about where that comes from. It doesn't apply to groceries or rent. We're talking about restaurants, bars, car dealerships, and discretionary retail. We're also talking about a population who can eat dinner and lunch and breakfast at work, and get free haircuts and laundry, who tend to order discretionary retail products online, and who live in SF and take a bus to work. Do we really expect them to spend 2-3x buying cars, patronizing local retail, and going out restaurants, and bars?
I do realize Googlers go out and spend big locally from time to time. My point is that the office perks, use of transit, and use of online retail are going to mitigate their contribution to the local sales tax base. They might still spend more on sales tax-able items than the typical San Franciscan, but 2x-3x?
> You can make a ton of money but if you rent you pay (indirectly) the same property tax as your neighbor and the same as the tenant five years ago paying 1/2 the rent (since the same landlord has held the building the whole time and you can't re-appraise under prop 13).
You seem to be confusing SF rent control with California property tax re-appraisal rules. Prop 13 limits on the increase in tax basis value of property don't affect landlords ability to raise rents.
> If you buy, meanwhile, Googlers pay extra only to the extent property values rise.
And, because of Prop 13, not more than 1% more for that reason per year, unless they buy new property or do something else that allows an unlimited move to full market value.
>You seem to be confusing SF rent control with California property tax re-appraisal rules. Prop 13 limits on the increase in tax basis value of property don't affect landlords ability to raise rents.
Not confused on that. My point is that the guy paying 2x rent than his predecessor in the unit — rents can rise freely on vacancy under Costa Hawkins, so rent control doesn't play into this as you point out — is not contributing one extra dime in property tax, since the property tax on the building hasn't changed.
Good point on for-sale property, I didn't realize 13 held down those taxes even at sale.
> Not confused on that. My point is that the guy paying 2x rent than his predecessor in the unit — rents can rise freely on vacancy under Costa Hawkins, so rent control doesn't play into this as you point out — is not contributing one extra dime in property tax, since the property tax on the building hasn't changed.
The property tax will change each year as the assessed value can change year to year (but only, absent a change of ownership, increase no more than 1%/year.) The only time it won't change is if the assessed value doesn't change.
