You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the …

> You know how a chess player will say something like "mate in 6" because their experience of all the options left to their opponent are both easily countered and will not prevent them from losing? As a chess person, saying "Mate in _" means it's a calculated inevitability. There is no mathematical way out of it. It is not nearly equivalent to the outside judgement of a company with so many factors — it's just incomparable.

Chuck, curious if you have ever posted here on what happened to Sun Micro. Love to read your take on it.

With Google, I always feel like the side hustles (waymo, X, etc.) Really exist to be sold off in the future to prop up the add/search business and ensure future profitability. Everything not adds/search is on that list, and anything shut down despite being useful isn't seen as future-sellable. Google today is starting to smell of future financial engineering games, like when a car maker earns more through financing than selling core product.

fwiw, there are approximately 25,000 FTEs reporting up to Thomas Kurian, and I'm not sure how many thousands of TVCs. That's just for Cloud, and doesn't include the massive numbers of additional, relevant employees directly support Cloud from within TI. Part of Google's problem is that it's so big and so broad, and has always insisted on a monorepo for internal source code, and it's outsourced to vendors as much as possible, that it's nearly impossible to disentangle any one business unit from the next. I predict that if the FTC or the EU seriously try to break up the company, this will be there argument against it.