Comment by ec109685
2 days ago
“Colloquially, there is an idea that autonomous vehicles are something that will erode driver jobs and put drivers at risk. And I think the irony of what we’ve seen is that it’s actually quite expensive to run an AV”
This seems like a temporary problem. Google is charging what the market will bear and doesn’t have ability to get more cars on the road.
The simpler explanation is that Google mismanages its pay-per-use consumer-facing products. Consider Google One and YouTube Premium are also overpriced, and everyone tells them so.
It's obviously a mistake to charge more than Uber or Lyft, it's crazy obvious, like mind meltingly obvious. Sometimes it's just the obvious thing. Google's problem is that its management is so bad, it doesn't understand: just because something happens (paying more for rides) doesn't mean it makes sense. After all taxis are more expensive sometimes, and people pay for them, and where's the article that litigates all the dumb reasons people give for doing that?
"One of the most valuable companies on the planet is mismanaging its products"
see the issue with that assertion?
Google mismanages an enormous number of things. Users, Customers, Products, Teams, Talent. You can observe this in your interactions with Google/Alphabet and in ex-googler post-mortems.
They are amazingly valuable as a stock, as a business and as a collection of talent. That doesn’t entirely excuse failures of vision and leadership, let alone pricing.
Edit: That said, I am inclined to believe that Alphabet pricing likely better reflects reality. The others have some bad habits.
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Yeah… on the other hand I don’t let the stock market do all my thinking for me. As an aside, I thought /r/superstonk was a parody subreddit.