Newsletter
Google is one of the biggest and most successful companies in the whole world; after being founded in 1998, the internet giant has evolved from a humble, yet innovating search engine to a huge multinational technology-based enterprise. This incredible growth has come from the numerous high-risk projects that the company is known to develop; some of these projects quickly became adopted by users as soon as they were announced, and were released as fully fledged products sometime later. Google has always been one to defend its own “moonshot” projects, as the company will always be fueled by innovation and helping the world become a simpler place. Projects like Loon, self-driving cars, optical head mounted displays, and even a more fantastic attempt at “curing death”.
Executive Chairman at Google, Eric Schmidt, recently held a meeting for the company’s shareholders, in which he defined and defended all the wild ideas Google is currently working on. Investors have always had a hard time accepting the numerous projects the internet giant wants to develop and pursue, but that’s only because shareholders might not completely understand the reasoning behind many of these financially uncertain products and services. Schmidt stated that this has never been an issue with the company’s search and ad networks, as investors completely understand both products’ goal, and more importantly for them, how they will serve as a stable source of income. During previous earning calls, analysts have questioned the sustainability of these upcoming projects, as they don’t believe these will provide a stable source of income that will ultimately create a profit for shareholders.
Investors don’t really have the same mentality that Google has as a company, they don’t care that much for innovation, they care about their investments paying off. Eric Schmidt guaranteed the ambitious projects will help Google keep growing into an even more successful company. Which means that all their investments will be completely paid off. Schmidt defined the path companies that ended up failing as becoming stuck doing the same thing, even if said companies were good at it, they must broaden their goal. Companies should aim to expand based on their initial platform, as Google is doing over its search engine.