Hmm, What Is Apple Doing?

In that Ben Thompson article I linked to in another thread, he too noticed the similarities between Facebook and Apple. People never give credit to Facebook. Even to this day people bring up MySpace. C’mon, in 2018?

Ben Thompson in 2015:

I’m fond of saying that few companies are as underrated as Facebook is, especially in Silicon Valley. Admittedly, it seems strange to say such a thing about a $245 billion company with a trailing 12-month P/E ratio of 88, but that is Wall Street sentiment; in the tech bubble many seem to simply assume the company is ever on the brink of teetering “just like MySpace”, never mind the fact that the social network pioneer barely broke 100 million registered users, less than 10% of the number of active users Facebook attracted in a single day late last month. Or, as more sober minds may argue, sure, Facebook looks unstoppable today, but then again, Google looked unstoppable ten years ago when social seemingly came out of nowhere: surely the Facebook killer is imminent!

Two occasions of 30% decline from 2008-2018. 2012-2013 (9 months) and 2015-2016 (1.5 years)
Similar decline for FB would be down to $150s :cry: which is highly probable.
For buy n hold investors, no need to worry about 30% declines :slight_smile:

I have absolute faith in FB. I also have absolute faith in Apple. Why bother pick who’s better? Own both and be done with it. :wink:

Weightage? Equal?

Equal weight is good.

Zuckerberg is the closest to Jobs of any current CEO and Sandberg is his Cook. The laser like focus and execution is amazing. I still want to see Facebook do something big beyond ad revenue, but they are a young company. They also don’t throw billions a year at random stuff. I’m sure when the time is right they’ll make a bet and out execute everyone at it.

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What if google’s waymo is a blockbuster?

How many years is Waymo from being commercially viable? Trying everything to see if any of it works isn’t a strategy. It’s just admitting that you have no idea what to do, and you’re hoping to get lucky. If Waymo is the best idea, how much faster would it move if the other stuff was dumped and the focus was on Waymo?

Apple didn’t try to develop iPad and iPhone at the same time. They actually started with iPad, and Jobs realized a phone was a better application of the touch technology and a bigger market. Instead of developing both and hoping one worked, Apple put all the resources on making the best phone possible.

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Did you read google’s earnings?
Our advertising business has an unprecedented growth, same goes for mobile advertising in particular. Check it out :slight_smile:

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I think what this is saying is # of miles driven is becoming a hockeystick, meaning it’s coming closer than ever for commercial viability.
Watch, and see.

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How is google going to monetize Waymo?

I don’t read Google’s earnings. The ad business is the cash cow. The question is when the billions a year on other stuff will produce meaningful revenue.

Google is good with scale. Hate to say it, but google is less good at innovation, but very good at fast follow up & god-sized scale. Ride hail might be one of these cases.

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Ride hailing is a money losing business.

I think it’s much further from monetization than people think. Car development cycles are 5 years. Even if a car company decides to use it today, it won’t be in production for 5 years. These features always start out on luxury cars (low volume) and eventually become standard on all cars. That’s a 10-20 year road map to mass adoption. That’s if something else doesn’t totally disrupt the technology.

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Why is ride hailing a money losing business?

The biggest reason it’s so popular is price. Increase price to reach profitability and volume will decline. Even if you get rid of drivers, it’s a huge cost to cover vehicle maintenance and depreciation.

How much do you trust this:
http://www.mymoneydesign.com/personal-finance-2/savings-budgeting/what-is-the-real-cost-of-driving-per-mile/
It looked reasonable, but i am happy to take another source. Clearly self driving car will cost more, but…

What’s the math looking like?
= The true cost of driving per mile = $0.26

Uber charges 60$ to airport from here. it’s about 31 miles. 7.8$. Make it 15. There’s still plenty of profit?

Clearly this is back of a napkin, super rough estimation, but what am i missing?
Edit: It is missing insurance.

Uber loses money on every ride. They literally pay drivers more than what customers pay. I don’t see eliminating the driver even at $15/hr as enough of a change to make it suddenly profitable.

You’re comparing to a model where a company would own the fleet of cars. Now you need massive capital to buy cars to scale. Where are you going to park all those cars? You’ll need to rent a huge parking lot which is more costs.

You need to build an app which takes engineers. You need to update the app which takes engineers. Uber has thousands of corporate employees which add $5-10 of overhead cost to each ride.

I think you are overestimating the cost for parking. They can park in cheaper real estate areas, can optimize parking that way, use vertical parking spaces, most of the cars will be on the road most of the time except for night, and so on.

“You need to build an app which takes engineers. You need to update the app which takes engineers. Uber has thousands of corporate employees which add $5-10 of overhead cost to each ride.”

Wht’s the cost of an engineer or average work force for 1000 people? Uber did four billion rides in 2017. What does that number now look like per ride?

Uber has 12,000 employees. Why can you do it with 1/12th of that? Plus, you’d have all the Waymo employees, since you’re going to own the cars yourself.

Then you have the issue of utilization. If you want to handle the busiest peak, then you need to own that many cars in a city. However, what’s going to be the average percent utilization for your fleet? You’d be lucky to hit 40%, so you’re paying for a bunch of cars that only get used during peak hours and sit the rest of the time. That or you have a service that people can’t use during peak times when they most want it.

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Google doesnt need as many people as uber for its engineering. We have most of their problems solved. Waymos headcount - make a guess, how many? They are also growing and will grow, but i brt you it doesnt need that many :slight_smile:
Uber has food, delivry etc, a bunch of p3ople for infra, which we dont need.