David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…If we had a coy name for naming episodes, that's what we'd name this one. I think this is a big part of the question of what is Google want to be when it grows up? Actually, I think a relevant other acquisition clashing forward to today, Google recently acquired a company called Bebop which was founded by Diane Greene, who is the founder of VMware. Diane was on Google's board. Bebop was nominal. They hadn't released their product. It was still in stealth, but nominally making productivity software for the enterprise. Now, I don't think it was Word and Excel type productivity software, but it was software about helping enterprises build their applications. Diane is now taking over the entire cloud business for Google. Which includes all of Google apps and Google for work. Yeah, it's interesting. Two directions I want to go with this. The first one is, okay, maybe clearly they've been obsessed with big bets the whole time. Google itself, the core project back rub, the whole academic research project into organizing the world's information and releasing the best search engine and the one that's the most sustainable on an ongoing basis. That was an enormous bet. I think that now they're thinking totally crazy with these moonshot ideas. When they started with Google Docs in 2006, they weren't doing self-driving cars. They weren't doing balloons that deliver internet. They were doing a lot of these huge projects. Maybe this felt like a possible big bet to them for the future of their company, looking at Microsoft and seeing that productivity of that era was such a cash cow and is just now dwarfed by how big they're thinking with all their current big bets. This was an early on possible big bet that we're seeing that's legacy. I'm not sure Google would go into this space starting today.…

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