For anyone hoping for juicy details about Alphabet’s healthcare and life science interests, its fourth quarter earnings call offered slim pickings. But if you listened to the bigger picture, the push to reorganize Google’s cloud-based business offered plenty to think about. The company made frequent references to machine learning and apps in its Google for Work services, and the growth of mobile search.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai made a note of some milestones with its cloud business such as the hire of Diane Greene to run it in November. Greene joined Google when the company acquired her enterprise development platform business, Bebop, in a $380 million deal. Under Greene’s leadership, Google is reorganizing its cloud businesses — Google Apps, Google for Work and Google Cloud platform — under one division. Pichai also noted that healthcare organizations were among the groups that had taken an interest in this business. He cast a spotlight on Catholic Health Initiatives, the second largest nonprofit healthcare business with more than 100,000 employees, which had adopted Google Apps for Work towards the end of last year.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
In a blog post over the weekend, Google for Work President Ami Singh noted that it had added new tools to the service that were powered by machine learning. One provides instant data analytics and visualization.
We added Smart Reply to Inbox, which helps you respond to messages by generating short contextual responses to your emails, based on your typical responses. And we open-sourced TensorFlow, our fast and scalable machine learning system, to accelerate advances within the wider community.
The area of machine learning in healthcare is becoming an increasingly competitive area for Google and it will be interesting to see how it and the likes of IBM Watson will compete, despite the skepticism on how much of a profit IBM will be able to produce from its collaborations with life science and healthcare companies.
Although Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat made a passing reference to Verily, with its pharmaceutical partnerships, that was as specific as she got in the field of healthcare and life sciences. For all the lip service on how separating Alphabet would provide more transparency between Google and its “moonshots” it seems like the separation just offers more wiggle room to explain why the company can shrug its shoulders when “other bets” had operating losses for last year of more than $3 billion on revenues of $448 million for the same period.
“Other bets” includes so many different areas. In addition to Verily, it also includes incubation activities, Google Fiber, and its push for self driving cars. With that level of diversity, it’s impossible to develop any insights on the progress or shortcomings of any of these projects beyond the fleeting details Google offers up. It attributed the losses to the impact of project milestones, but for how many projects and milestones and which caused the biggest losses, who knows?
One area that is sure to get more attention this year is mobile search. Porat noted that mobile search is a huge area of growth for the company as well as the advertising and marketing revenue tied to it.
