[HN Gopher] Google's problems are bigger than just the antitrust...
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Google's problems are bigger than just the antitrust case
Author : martincmartin
Score : 247 points
Date : 2020-07-30 16:21 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| binarymax wrote:
| Has google meet come up in antitrust allegations? Google has been
| forcing it on me everywhere. That nonsense is egregious.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| > the company is now run by a different triumvirate. Besides Mr
| Pichai it includes Kent Walker, senior vice-president of global
| affairs, and Ruth Porat, the finance chief
|
| Google leadership in 2001: 2 engineers and an eng manager. In
| 2020: 1 eng manager, 1 lawyer, 1 banker.
|
| No wonder!
| pb7 wrote:
| That's not optional when you are running a company of this
| size.
| curiousDog wrote:
| Pichai was never a SWE. He's an MBA with an undergrad in
| metallurgy.
| actuator wrote:
| Pichai was a PM actually.
| [deleted]
| nova22033 wrote:
| It's a public company. It has a CFO. Nothing unusual about
| that.
| lokar wrote:
| The difference is that Ruth is much more involved in the
| direction and strategy of the company (then the previous
| CFO).
| three_seagrass wrote:
| Clever of the Economist to drop this on the day of Google's
| earnings.
| jorams wrote:
| I'm still reading the article, but this stood out to me:
|
| > More than 300bn emails are said to be sent every day and if
| only one-third originate on Gmail--a conservative estimate--then
| a stack of print-outs would be 10,000km high.
|
| I don't think that's a conservative estimate at all. In fact, I'd
| say it's a massive over-estimation.
|
| Only one type of email is dominated by Gmail: personal email. I
| don't know about everyone, but I don't see many personal emails
| being sent.
|
| Lots of those emails are for work, and there Gmail is not
| dominant at all. It's not insignificant, but Microsoft is a
| significantly larger part of the pile.
|
| Another very large part of the total is automated emails, which
| are not sent through Gmail either.
|
| Since Google Cloud doesn't include an email service, I'd go so
| far as to guess that more email originates from Amazon (SES) than
| from Google.
| stock_toaster wrote:
| > Only one type of email is dominated by Gmail: personal email
|
| Don't forget that GoogleApps/Gmail (and google classroom) is
| also rather popular in education.
| jedimastert wrote:
| I do wonder how many emails they _receive_ though...
| kaesar14 wrote:
| https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23
|
| Seems like 1/3rd is more or less right. I think you're
| underestimating how big enterprise buy-in for the G-Suite is,
| Docs and Sheets are both widely used at this point.
| jorams wrote:
| Very interesting! Looks like my perspective is very Western
| Europe-centric, where the data matches what I expected. Gmail
| is bigger than I expected in the US, and also in Eastern
| Europe.
|
| I do wonder what "market share" means here, and how the
| domains are selected. The massive market share of GoDaddy
| seems off, especially since from their website they seem to
| be reselling Microsoft Office 365, but could be explained by
| default email MX records on domains registered there (do they
| do that?).
| kaesar14 wrote:
| FWIW, I've worked at two companies in my career so far,
| both could be described as tech unicorns turned public in
| the last decade, and both used G-Suite for all enterprise
| use-cases where applicable. Absolutely no adoption of MSFT
| products. That being said it also means I'm somewhat in the
| SV company bubble and I'm not sure how this picture looks
| throughout the industry.
| bogdan314 wrote:
| London based here, my company is on G suit as well.
| onion2k wrote:
| Why would Gmail's market share correlate with the number of
| emails sent? 99% of the 300bn sent daily will originate from
| bulk senders. Thats not Gmail.
| xirbeosbwo1234 wrote:
| Anecdotally, I just glanced at my inbox and found that I
| received no emails from individuals within my 20 most recent
| emails.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I can't remember the last time I got a personal email outside
| of work.
| wtracy wrote:
| I can't actually argue numbers with you, but an awful lot of
| owner-operated small businesses use Gmail. (And Yahoo email,
| for that matter!)
| stx wrote:
| >> More than 300bn emails are said to be sent every day and if
| only one-third originate on Gmail--a conservative estimate--
| then a stack of print-outs would be 10,000km high.
|
| Given: thickness of paper 0.0039 inches Lets say each email is
| at least a page
|
| 0.0039 inches * 300*10^9 pages to km = 29,718 (km)
|
| Maybe if some emails are more than a page its not too far off.
| stx wrote:
| But do 300*10^9 emails really get sent through gmail every
| day or is that in general?
| ehvatum wrote:
| > To keep hierarchies flat, Mr Brin and Mr Page briefly went so
| far as to abolish managers altogether, though the experiment had
| to be dialled back. A compromise was to give managers a minimum
| of seven direct reports to limit the time they have to loom over
| each underling.
|
| In my experience, so many direct reports changes a manager's job
| from "managing people" to "facilitating people". It's the same
| for engineers and laborers, scientists and shit-scrapers. There
| is time enough to defend your team from HR terrorism, advocate
| for your team's technical perspective, and fight for resources -
| and that's it. Except at the big-big overly-titanic
| conglomerates, who trade behemoth economy of scale for total
| dysfunction, so as to barely break even. IE, Google's future.
| BeetleB wrote:
| In my experience, when a manager has a lot of reports, it
| usually ends up with team members playing all kinds of
| pathological controlling behavior (e.g mild to not-so-mild
| bullying). Conflicts arise, and team members who are the
| loudest usually win. The manager simply is too stretched to
| understand enough to manage these situations. He will usually
| cede to the people who he thinks are the "experts" in the team.
|
| Essentially, you now have unofficial managers in the team. It's
| no longer de facto a flat hierarchy. And worse, there is little
| to no accountability.
|
| People will try to "seize power" and carve out their niche.
| This is usually not intentional on the part of said people, but
| I think it is more or less the "natural" dynamic that arises.
|
| I'm sure there are exceptions.
|
| Having a manager who can assert authority and make decisions in
| conflict situations is great. He/she shouldn't do it often
| (i.e. micromanage), but a manager who has lots of reports (e.g.
| > 10) rarely makes good decisions in such situations.
| freedomben wrote:
| I tend to agree. Philosophically I really, really wanted to
| do away with managers but after working in a company that
| basically did that, it was the loud and forceful
| personalities that became the de facto bosses/decision
| makers. It created several monsters that I could not wait to
| get away from.
|
| Having good managers is my goal now rather than having little
| to no managers.
| quercusa wrote:
| Bad/weak/over-stretched managers make the best case for
| good managers!
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Military hierarchy has been pretty similar for a very long
| time because it works conceptually.
| Section/Squad/Platoon/Company/Battalion/etc.
|
| 10 direct reports don't work from a management sense unless
| some folks are expected to operate very independently or if
| the reports themselves are second level managers, or the
| manager is only nominally "managing" a time card or whatever.
|
| Management to me means you are accountable for output. I
| can't be aware enough of what 10 different people/teams are
| doing to be meaningfully accountable for a longer period of
| time. It's not fair to me and certainly not fair to the
| people not getting the support they need.
|
| In my professional life, I'm responsible for a team of ~200,
| with 5 direct reports. It's a mix of engineering and
| product/service teams. We aim for teams of 4-5 with two
| functions each. The secret is to be as honest as you can,
| have high standards, and be flexible.
| jjwilliamson wrote:
| Google's ads revenue is down a lot, but they will try to make
| people not pay attention to it by focusing on other stuff. The
| reality is that Google's almost all revenue is from ads, period.
| johnyzee wrote:
| So have Larry and Sergei completely checked out? It seems a
| little weird that they would just turn their back completely on
| the company they created with their own hands. Particularly since
| they still have the controlling interest, and could do pretty
| much whatever they feel like with the company. That's a lot of
| power to not use.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| They don't want to be the ones hauled in front of Congress.
| Every other company testifying yesterday's actual head of the
| company was there, but Google's was merely a lackey. Larry and
| Sergey have just slid themselves out of the official structure,
| but their share voting power keeps them squarely in charge.
|
| You don't hear about what they're up to because they can afford
| what they've taken from everyone else: Privacy.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Sure, but say you're a crazy rich billionaire and you've found
| you kind of hate being a CEO. What I think a lot of crazy rich
| CEOs don't understand, which Larry Page did understand, is that
| you can just stop. You don't need to give away your control,
| you don't need to give away your fortune, you can just point to
| somebody nearby and say "you're in charge now," then just go
| live on an island in the middle of nowhere and watch old movies
| or build ships in a bottle or whatever it is you like to do.
| Why is it a problem for you that you have a lot of power that
| you're not using? It'd be a hassle to figure out who to give
| away the power to, so just keep it.
|
| It always weirds me out when I see these 75 year old CEOs with
| massive wealth spending their retirement years trying to get
| Walgreens to grow an extra 5% this quarter or something. Why
| are you doing this? Are you that invested in the future of
| Walgreens? You're got $8 billion, maybe take a break or try and
| fix the world or do something that will bring you joy.
| ngngngng wrote:
| > Why are you doing this?
|
| I can't stop laughing at this line.
|
| Honestly though 75 is a few years away from death for the
| average person. Go throw a baseball with your offspring.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Because they find enjoyment in it. Neither Larry nor Sergey
| probably set out to be CEOs of megacorps when they started.
| But many do, and many love it. Nothing wrong with that.
| Retirement is boring. Different strokes for different folks.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Maybe managing a multi billion dollar organization is what's
| bringing joy to them? I mean, it kinda has to do that for
| them to build such an org in the first place. There is a
| difference between building something that's your, and
| working for someone else for a wage. Your argument is like
| asking why don't people take a break from being involved in
| their children's lives once their adult and settled in lives
| on their own.
| johnyzee wrote:
| > maybe take a break or try and fix the world
|
| That's kind of what I was thinking. You have full control
| over one of the world's largest corporations and war chests,
| what better chance will anyone ever get to try to fix the
| world?
|
| I appreciate that some may just decide that they'd rather do
| something else, but I feel that's a little sad. There's
| really no small things you want to do, small positive changes
| you could make, with all that power?
| searchableguy wrote:
| At that point, they enjoy green uplifting lines more than
| anything else. I know my grandpa loves some pointless things
| as a habit. Maybe they have forgotten how to enjoy life
| through other means.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| Thisoght be one of my favorite hacker news comments I've ever
| read.
| alderz wrote:
| http://archive.is/Oyn47
| johnyzee wrote:
| Thanks, was looking for non-paywall version.
| cooljacob204 wrote:
| Search Engines should punish sits that do this.
|
| They put up a paywall a second after loading so bots can scrape
| the data and advertise their site as providing answers when
| really they hide it behind a paywall.
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| > Search Engines should punish sits that do this.
|
| Google won't do that. They're already in trouble for stealing
| content from the sites they crawl, especially news sites.
| Google goes out of their way to enable paywalls so they don't
| look like they're anti-copyright or out to destroy news and
| content sites.
| RobertSmith wrote:
| Google's ad revenue had declined 8% in the second quarter.
| Revenue and profit also dropped year-over-year.
| https://news.alphastreet.com/alphabet-goog-googl-q2-2020-ear...
| monadic2 wrote:
| I'm fairly certain a conventional company was the plan all along.
| Why else bring in Eric Schmidt?
|
| Any perception that it was not is marketing to push down
| engineering salaries.
| qaz_plm wrote:
| https://outline.com/zHVV66
| Animats wrote:
| _About 60% of product searches now start on Amazon_
|
| Now that's a big problem for Google. Product searches are
| Google's money machine.
|
| Google's other big problem is being terrible at anything which
| needs repair or customer support. Their various attempts at
| becoming an internet service provider, via WiFi, fiber, or
| balloons, have not been successful. Buying up all the good
| robotics startups and running them into the ground benefited
| nobody. The self-driving car thing is a huge money drain that
| still hasn't produced a product. Anyone remember the Google
| Search Appliance?
|
| Two other engineering-first companies blew it - Hewlett-Packard,
| and Westinghouse. Both were successful, profitable, and renowned
| for excellent engineering. It's useful to study what they did
| wrong.
| bsder wrote:
| Westinghouse is easy.
|
| Just like GE, they ventured into _finance_ in order to chase
| returns. While that arm was returning scads of money, everybody
| turned a blind eye.
|
| Of course, at some point your finance arm crashes.
|
| In Westinghouse's case, it effectively killed the company by
| draining it of cash. At that point, Westinghouse had to start
| selling off portions of the company to fund itself. And thus
| began the downward spiral.
| galeos wrote:
| While I wouldn't deny the Google has a poor reputation for
| customer support across their product range, I can report a
| notable exception - my Google Pixel (1) phone purchased from
| the Google Store in 2016. Every time I have had an issue I have
| utilized the phone's support chat service. I have always been
| connected to a live support agent in less than a minute.
| Whenever I have had any issues, I have been sent a replacement
| handset next-day, including _twice_ after my 2 year warranty
| expired. The most recent of these episodes was last month.
| autokad wrote:
| although, I have had my iphone since 2016 and haven't had any
| issues. In fairness though, I am just an N = 1.
| gundmc wrote:
| Google Fi was widely praised for excellent customer service
| when they first launched, but I think that reputation was lost
| as they scaled out in the last few years.
|
| Edited to make past tense more clear.
| rainyMammoth wrote:
| Do we live on a different planet? Google Fi is well known to
| be one of the worst customer services. I used it for a couple
| of months and most obvious queries are automated. Anything
| that requires an human barely gets any attention. The
| subreddit for Google Fi is very telling.
| bronco21016 wrote:
| I think the parent is referring to when it initially rolled
| out. I was among the first customers when it came out and
| the customer service was indeed excellent. I was always
| able to quickly get through to talk to a native English
| speaker in the US. The support staff were always very
| knowledgeable and friendly as well.
|
| I didn't last long on the service though. I just couldn't
| live without my iPhone in those early days of the service.
|
| No idea how things are now.
|
| EDIT: My bad, I see parent is referring to present day.
| Experience from the early days still stands though.
| OkGoDoIt wrote:
| I can't speak to their email or chat support, but I had to
| call them a few weeks ago and got through to a human nearly
| immediately with no frustrating phone tree or hold or any
| issues. Perhaps their support is inconsistent, but I've
| never heard anything but praise about Google Fi customer
| support. Especially compared to literally any of their
| competitors.
| murgindrag wrote:
| There were threads on the internet about thousands of
| people permanently losing their phone numbers to Google
| Fi, and having no way to get them back, ever. Google
| didn't do a thing. Automated systems and disempowered
| minimum wage drones all the way down.
|
| Basic outline was that Google Pay would mark something as
| suspicious, and refuse to take payments. Payments would
| stop to Google Fi, resulting in the number / service
| being frozen. At that point, the whole thing would grind
| to a halt:
|
| * No way to pay Google
|
| * Overdue payments and accumulating problems
|
| * No way to port number out with overdue account
|
| All based on Google's automated systems falsely
| triggering suspicious activity detection.
|
| It didn't happen to me, but I would never, ever, ever
| even consider Google Fi. I have T-Mobile. Not very
| competent, but I talk to a human being every time, and if
| there are problems, they escalate to people empowered to
| fix them.
| OkGoDoIt wrote:
| I had to contact Google Fi recently and was pleasantly
| surprised with how easy they were to get a hold of when every
| other service provider is using the pandemic as an excuse to
| drop their phone support quality or remove it entirely.
|
| Compared to my experience trying to get support from any
| other utility, from T-Mobile to Comcast to my power company,
| or any other company no matter how modern (Amazon has been
| especially bad since the pandemic started, I literally can't
| get them on the phone no matter how much I try), Google Fi
| has been a breath of fresh air.
|
| That being said, it's only a matter of time before they lose
| focus and that goes away. If there's one thing Google does
| consistently, it's take something good and abandon it or kill
| it outright. I have no doubt I will be switching back to a
| traditional phone carrier eventually, but for now I'm a happy
| customer.
| posguy wrote:
| The Prohject Fi data pricing model made more sense 7 years
| ago, and with no domestic roaming outside US Cellular,
| middling customer service and no exclusive phones, consumers
| are not driven to the service.
|
| Sprint & T-Mobile merging also eliminates the core novelty of
| the service, leaving you with something worse than Ting or
| T-Mobile prepaid that permits more domestic roaming.
| littlepinkpill wrote:
| >from the article: "This enviable track record justifies Mr
| Pichai's rich compensation package over several years, of $2m
| annual salary plus $240m in shares and stock options"
|
| ==It does not.== Consider this tidbit against today's discussion
| about UBI (Universal Basic Income)[#39 on the HN hit parade:
| article=<https://timjrobinson.com/universal-basic-income-is-
| capitalis... comment thread=
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23993259>]. No. Body. Is
| worth that kind of annual salary. And calling it "enviable"
| reveals a content-free value system. We've become an absurdist
| economy.
| DoctorNick wrote:
| Remember when we all were happy that Google was finally starting
| to break down the Microsoft monopoly? And then they ended up
| becoming a way, way worse monopoly? Good times.
| jefftk wrote:
| How is Google a way, way worse monopoly than Microsoft was?
|
| (Disclosure: I work for Google now, and I think I would not
| have worked for Microsoft 20 years ago)
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| Microsoft just wanted to be paid its OS and apps, not so
| different from anyone else selling a product. Sure, they
| wanted dominance but who doesn't? Google certainly can't
| credibly claim that.
|
| Google is inserting itself into every aspect of communication
| and information retrieval on the Internet to build a profile
| of people so that it can better cram targeted ads into their
| faces. Both the privacy aspect and the advertising aspect are
| troubling.
| jefftk wrote:
| Microsoft went well beyond just trying to get paid: https:/
| /en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
|
| I work on ads at Google and "inserting itself into every
| aspect of communication and information retrieval on the
| Internet to build a profile of people so that it can better
| cram targeted ads into their faces" is not a good model.
| For example, Gmail data is not used for targeting ads:
| https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-
| in...
|
| (speaking only for myself)
| deleuze wrote:
| You work on _ads_ at Google, and are concerned about the
| ethics of working at Microsoft in the 90s? Sure, anti-
| competitive business practices might be unethical, but
| how can you possibly in good conscience suggest that
| bundling IE is more ethically problematic than building
| massive surveillance applications to sell ads? Just the
| implications of the data collection alone should be
| enough for you to quit your job before even considering
| any business angle.
|
| Hope you enjoy the stock grants!
| iphone_elegance wrote:
| I'd say they are about equal, the current croup has gone
| unchecked way longer though
|
| way too big way too consolidated and suffocating to
| innovation and progress;
|
| now this sounds like gibberish but at the end of the day
| things are a lot less 'dynamic', 'fluid' and 'creative'
| because of their current positions.. yeah there are still
| alternatives but they are vanishing and almost just allowed
| exist at the whims of the current leaders; fuck most of our
| current 'technology' is what it is because it's what serves
| amazon,google,facebook,apple,microsoft the best
|
| it's great for them and their businesses bad for the nation
| and we really should be thinking about the nation
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Windows was a far more liberal and fair platform than Android
| is. Once you have your software installed, it could do with
| the system all it needed, if the user gave it enough rights.
| On Android, you can't really run your app in the background
| (trust me, we develop an app that depends on being constantly
| in the background), so the developers are forced to use
| proprietary push notifications, which are _fully controlled_
| by Google.
|
| ... And each new version of Android puts more and more
| restrictions on things. For example, in Android 6 I could
| record incoming calls easily. Not so much on Android 9, "you
| are forbidden to do that because it is illegal in some
| jurisdictions" (not in mine, btw!)
| missedthecue wrote:
| the great thing about tech monopolies is that there are so many
| of them
| scarface74 wrote:
| You mean like in 2000 when Microsoft dominated the operating
| system and office productivity market and when they were one of
| the top five most valuable companies in the US?
|
| How things have changed thanks to government intervention and
| Google....
| criddell wrote:
| You aren't going to lay any of the blame at Ballmer's feet?
| scarface74 wrote:
| I was being sarcastic. Microsoft still has about the same
| dominance in two of the areas where antitrust was concerned
| - computer operating systems and productivity.
|
| The third was the browser. No one cares about browser
| dominance except for Google because of advertising.
| criddell wrote:
| I think your statement is right. Things really have
| changed.
| Shivetya wrote:
| I was under the impression that having all these separate subs
| within Alphabet. As for the changes at the Cloud division then
| simply having Alphabet management put up a firewall between
| groups that dissuades that type of structure moving across the
| company is necessary, by firewall I mean come out with a policy
| denoting it. Perhaps more autonomy for each within Alphabet is
| needed. You can get back to the "small" feeling and still be part
| of a larger family; the only family reunion setup where you only
| meed the relatives on occasion but you know you are all part of a
| larger whole.
| saberience wrote:
| Paywall on this, can someone provide the text?
| hinkley wrote:
| In the Evil Empire days of Microsoft, a few different people
| explained to me that there's a lot of populism in antitrust
| cases.
|
| That through history, the monopolist really only loses once their
| list of friends and allies grows thin. Microsoft beat every case
| until a couple years after the crowd had turned on them. I don't
| think the crowd has turned on Google yet.
|
| What has changed in this time is that the EU has gotten sharp
| teeth and quite a lot of backbone, so they end up winning cases
| that help us a little bit here in the States long before we get
| around to the same sort of conclusions.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/Oyn47
| known wrote:
| One President/Prime Minister cannot lead/manage 7 billion people;
|
| Google should be split into separate companies;
|
| http://archive.li/WOJje
| Proven wrote:
| Or perhaps you should stop minding other people's business.
|
| If the CEO can't manage it will lose market share so why should
| that bother anyone but their shareholders?
| s1t5 wrote:
| > Mr Pichai's foremost challenge is to prevent Alphabet from
| becoming what Mr Brin and Mr Page were so bent on avoiding--a
| "conventional company" that dies a slow death from lack of
| innovation and declining growth.
|
| I don't think that he's succeeding at the innovation part but
| that won't matter as long as their financials look good.
| lalos wrote:
| That and the fact that the financials that look good come from
| a single faucet (around ~90 percent was ads last time I
| checked). Sounds like a "conventional company" with a strong
| cash cow.
| shazow wrote:
| 70% as revenue by Alphabet in 2019, 60% of that from Google
| and 10% from YouTube. https://dashboards.trefis.com/no-login-
| required/HMtQjcWW/Alp...
| lalos wrote:
| + 12.5% with Google Network, isn't that ads or am I
| misreading?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| From the article -- _After The Economist went to press Alphabet
| was expected to report the first year-on-year decline in
| quarterly revenues in its history, hurt by the pandemic-induced
| tightening of marketing budgets._
|
| I think it is convenient here to blame the pandemic but it will
| be interesting to see how it plays out.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| > I think it is convenient
|
| Did you intend to imply that the revenues would have declined
| without the pandemic? That seems unlikely.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/507742/alphabet-
| annual-g...
|
| Sorry if I've read you wrong but that is the typical meaning
| of "convenient" in a sentence like the one you wrote.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Yes, I did mean to imply that Alphabet's revenues would
| have declined anyway.
|
| I've been watching Google's financials fairly close from
| when I joined the company in 2006 onward (I left in 2010).
| The driver of Google's profits has always been search
| advertising, nothing else in their portfolio has the
| margins that search ads had at one time. At the time of
| Bing's introduction (2011) Google's search advertising
| _margin_ started to fall just as Bing 's was increasing.
| That has continued to this day.
|
| To counter that, Google first started taking revenue away
| from their AdSense sites, then they started adding more
| paid placement and ads on their own sites, then they
| started "pre-showing" content in the search results that
| kept people from going to a web page that might be showing
| ads[1]. They introduced additional "taxes" (really fees)
| for people selling things to insure that they appeared in
| the top third of Google's search results even if they were
| the best organic result for the product being sold.
|
| All of these moves have kept the revenue growing at the
| cost of increasing user dissatisfaction with the quality of
| the service. Left to their own devices, users would migrate
| to other services but here Google has been aggressively
| paying for search portals (whether explicit "web search"
| pages, or implicit like a search bar on your phone) to send
| them traffic rather than send it to Bing. They have spent a
| record amount of money over the last year buying this sort
| of traffic.
|
| They can't keep paying more for traffic, eventually that
| gives them negative margins on search ads. While as Bing's
| cost per click grows they can pay more for traffic and
| still make their numbers. Google is having a harder and
| harder time squeezing more ads onto their pages without
| completely destroying the user experience.
|
| This trend means that eventually, they are going to run out
| of options, and their revenues are going to go down. Look
| at their financials and they don't have another business
| unit that can pick up the slack.
|
| There hasn't be a particularly novel improvement to search
| engine ranking over the last 10 years at least, and
| existing patents on maximizing ad revenues are reaching
| their expiration date.
|
| If Google doesn't find a way to re-invent itself it will go
| the way of tech giants before it, build a shiny
| headquarters monument to itself and then expire in a slow
| and painful death.
|
| I used to remind people when I was there that the "plex"
| was the headquarters for SGI, a Tech Giant before it was
| dead :-). It will be sadly poetic if Google has to sell off
| their shiny new headquarters to stay alive another couple
| of years down the road.
|
| [1] Since Google gets paid significantly less for ads on
| third party pages, even if they supply them, it is a win
| for them to keep people on Google's internal sites.
| draw_down wrote:
| Nice analysis, thanks.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| I'm sure Google's revenues would have gone down someday
| without the pandemic. But it would be a very surprising
| thing for them to suddenly go from record growth one year
| to down the next without any exogenous events.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| As I see it, it sort of hinges on the constraint of what
| is exogenous. Clearly the privacy initiatives in Europe
| and California have cost them data revenue, the various
| fines they have been paying have cost them revenue. Is it
| still exogenous if it is indirectly a result of what they
| are doing? (this is actually a serious question on how to
| draw the line there)
|
| They also have a history of burning through money (both
| opex and capex) which makes them very very susceptible to
| revenue dips.
|
| So my expectation has always been they would post some
| record revenue one quarter, and then the gas would run
| out of their various tricks and they would post flat to
| down revenue the next. That it went from record to year
| over year down in a single quarter, sure. But during the
| "Great Recession" in 2009 they didn't even go flat, so
| perhaps a more accurate statement is that their
| resiliency has been removed.
|
| I'll put a prediction here we can come back and look at
| and see how wrong I was :-). If they have more than two
| quarters that are down year over year, they will have a
| significant cost restructuring activity of either a
| layoff, or selling off one of their sub-businesses, or
| both.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| They write this as if that hasn't already happened. To put it
| bluntly, Pichai is no Nadella.
| MisterPea wrote:
| I agree that it's already happened, but I disagree it's
| Pichai's fault. A lot of the company direction/culture that
| was put in place before Pichai was the cause of G to
| seemingly be behind other tech companies in innovation.
| Pichai was left with one of the hardest companies to manage
| imo.
|
| On the other hand, I truly believe Nadella was left with a
| golden basket. A lot of what Ballmer and Muglia left behind
| actually paved the path for what MSFT is today. Nadella has
| been excellent in executing the strategy, but in general I
| feel many people give him a lot more credit than he was
| responsible for.
| mav3rick wrote:
| Every company at that level has the resources to execute.
| The CEO decides what to execute on, what to nurture.
| Ballmer got Mobile so wrong. Ballmer didn't push this much
| on cloud. Ballmer didn't get game streaming as an idea.
| Nadella is a god send for Microsoft. He's the best tech CEO
| and he's in house so knows how to get the ship moving.
| emsal wrote:
| I'm definitely not as savvy - can you expound on how the
| decisions that Ballmer and Muglia made paved the way for
| Nadella's success?
| Spartan-S63 wrote:
| Definitely not. This might be revisionist or not correct, but
| my impression is that Google after Eric Schmidt pivoted from
| seeing ads as the way to keep the lights on to ads being the
| core of the business with brief forays into other
| products/technologies that were analogous to dipping your toe
| in the water. They've jumped in feet first on very few
| ventures outside of their core business (ad tech) but they
| still have this air of innovation despite not actually
| contributing meaningfully to much of anything.
| 1024core wrote:
| > as long as their financials look good.
|
| He's a McKinsey guy. That's all he knows: to make the
| financials "look good".
|
| Look at the Google search results page. It's chock full of ads
| if the query even remotely looks commercial. Gone are the days
| of the "10 blue links" and "get you out of here as quickly as
| possible". Now they want to keep you on Google's O&O
| properties, so they can sell you more stuff, as each pageview
| is looked at as an opportunity to show more ads to you.
| MayeulC wrote:
| I'd argue that's what conventional companies do. And is also
| conventionally the source of their ultimate demise: can't
| compete with new actors on the market because talent has left
| the place, so the company has to resort to lawsuits and
| acquisition until its cash flow dries out with its last cash
| cow.
|
| Arguably, Google still has a lot of in-house talent, but
| optimizing for the financial aspect usually ties talent down
| sooner or later.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The issue is that looking from the outside, they have a lot
| of "smart people" (tm). But not people talented enough to
| bring products to market that people want. Despite years of
| trying - almost all of their profit comes from display ads.
| Jabbles wrote:
| There would be even greater antitrust concerns if Alphabet
| had a non-ads business that _also_ brought in $100B /year.
|
| Ads is down to 85% of their revenue - they have created
| vast non-ads businesses which are still dwarfed by their
| 20% YoY ads growth.
|
| If Google Pay/Checkout/Wallet/etc had been as successful as
| Stripe, would anyone have noticed? Stripe is worth $35B -
| 3% of Alphabet. It would just be lumped in the above 15%
| non-ads business and people would still say that they can't
| do anything but ads.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Last time I checked - Apple's Mac and iPad business alone
| is larger than McDonalds. Cook admitted before that the
| Watch business is larger than the iPod was at its peak
| and analyst believe that their headphone business is as
| well.
|
| I'm not talking about market value. If market value was a
| good stand in first sound business model neither Netflix
| (with negative cash flow) nor Uber or Lyft would be worth
| as much as they are. I'm talking about profit.
| Jabbles wrote:
| Not concentrating on profit seems to have served Amazon
| rather well.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Amazon didn't concentrate on profit (standard disclaimer
| I work for AWS) they did concentrate on free cash flow.
| They didn't have to keep borrowing money to grow.
|
| Netflix is also borrowing money for an "asset" that is
| worth less over time - content.
| mattmanser wrote:
| I'd argue that a lot of the products _could_ make money are
| instead geared up to protect their search income instead.
| Android, Youtube, Gmail, etc.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| If the hn consensus is that ideas have zero value, it
| should also be that a bulk of smart people also has zero
| value, in that it isn't the abstract but the concrete.
| Smart is mostly a bullshit term anyway, we need to be
| careful and precise in how we use it.
|
| Every company has lots of smart people, it is how it
| utilizes them that concretely matters.
| scarface74 wrote:
| If you work at a for profit company, your "value" is
| measured by your contribution to the bottom line in how
| you help the company make money or save money.
| praptak wrote:
| It is not only about retaining talent. Big corps optimize for
| loss prevention, which adds red tape, which makes it hard for
| talented people to innovate. I'd say loss of talent is a side
| effect of this.
|
| See also the Innovator's Dilemma.
| jayd16 wrote:
| >I don't think that he's succeeding at the innovation part
|
| Why do you say this? Recent innovations include work in machine
| learning, Deepmind, a self driving car program, K8s, Go,
| Flutter, quantum computing chips, and more. Are these too old
| to count as recent?
| Fiveplus wrote:
| >In fact, it is a herd of ponies, some of which look rather more
| like full-grown Shires. Nine have more than a billion users
| globally. Every day people make an estimated 6bn search queries
| on Google and upload more than 49 years' worth of video to
| YouTube. More than 300bn emails are said to be sent every day.
|
| The absolute scale of Alphabet and its services sometimes boggles
| my mind.
|
| In particular - YouTube where one can't help but ponder about
| content moderation at this scale being impossible without highly
| sophisticated algorithms(which also face the heat every once in a
| while).
| komali2 wrote:
| One the one hand it's sad that it'll be impossible, practically
| and perhaps even physically, to archive all of Youtube should
| Google ever decide to axe it, on the other hand even though I'm
| fanatically a datahoarder, the thought of archiving youtube
| just seems... exhausting? Pointless? Haha I'm not sure.
|
| Then again just imagine how fantastically useful 40 years worth
| of video a day could be to a historian 200 years from now. I
| think the most important technology going forward will be
| analysis and indexing software, to make searching videos like
| this possible. Ted Chiang wrote a short story about that, where
| you could search like "that time I got in a fight with my wife
| about the toilet seat being up," and you'd get a video from the
| incident.
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| It's crazy to think that 40 years worth of video can be
| uploaded daily, and yet that only captures a minuscule amount
| of everything that goes on in the world in a given day.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| On any given day approximately 23.37 million years of
| _human_ experience occurs.
| kortilla wrote:
| Yeah, that's only a ratio of 14600 days per day. That's 21
| million 1 minute videos a day, which is a tiny slice of the
| population of the planet giving a brief glimpse.
| AnHonestComment wrote:
| There's ~21,000,000 years of human life lived a day. At 40
| years per day uploaded, that's 0.000002 of the human
| experience for that day.
|
| It's interesting to think that YouTube content is only a
| "two in a million" reflection of human life. Averaged out,
| that's about 1 minute per person per year.
| pythonaut_16 wrote:
| Apply a similar comparison to the past and it's humbling
| to realize just how little we know about history, and how
| quickly we collectively forget the farther back you go.
| Fiveplus wrote:
| Given we are living in 2020, there have to have been efforts
| or thought-experiments dedicated to archiving YouTube (would
| love to read about them if they exist). It seems 'almost'
| impossible like you said, even if we disregard, say channels
| with less than 100 subscribers (just as an example).
| gumby wrote:
| I was at a conference at IBM around 1993 at which a very
| smart person pointed out that we had reached peak
| "knowledge", in the sense that the new explosion of data on
| the Internet, including the the new "www" meant indexing
| would soon be impossible. "You'd need to keep a copy of
| every host". We all nodded because this seemed pretty
| obviously true.
|
| It also wasn't an urgent problem as experiments like http
| were unlikely to reach broad usage due to critical failures
| like the one way links.
|
| I mention this not to mock your "'almost' impossible"
| statement but to point out that you're in good company
| jschwartzi wrote:
| From an indexing/search perspective it's already
| impossible to find some of the more obscure videos I saw
| in 2013 because of the relentless crap flood of "things
| sort of like what you searched for that are newer."
| metiscus wrote:
| Well that and the growing penchant for revising history
| by destroying dissent, blacking out unpleasant thoughts
| and facts, and the onslaught of ridiculous copyright
| strikes against fair use content.
| gumby wrote:
| Doesn't that suggest a market need for another search
| engine for this purpose?
| Avicebron wrote:
| Meta-search? Searching the search engine..I like it.
| boogies wrote:
| Metasearch engines are a thing:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasearch_engine
|
| Here's a nice one with many public instances you can try:
| https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
| Arelius wrote:
| I constantly have trouble trying to find "that one tweet"
| from yesterday, a much less intimidating problem.
| flancian wrote:
| Twitter has notoriously flaky search in my experience; it
| is clearly geared towards discovering new content and not
| towards finding content you engaged with previously. This
| misses the point often, as more and more people use
| Twitter as a sort of social note taking tool.
|
| I think this is one area where general purpose search
| engines are failing users currently. We should be able to
| tell Google "that one tweet from yesterday" and have it
| return something meaningful to us. Of course I understand
| that this is hard and becoming harder as social media
| companies hold on to their walled gardens, but clearly
| (to me anyway) the status quo is to the detriment of the
| user.
| paulmd wrote:
| use the "before:YYYY-MM-dd" search parameter
| gniv wrote:
| ... which you can combine with after:YYYY-MM-dd
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| It's not impossible. It's merely a matter of resources and
| will. Google not only has to store all that video they also
| need to transmit it over and over again. An archivist would
| only have to write to store the video. If humanity makes it
| to the year 3000 we're going to be pretty disappointed that
| all that video was lost due to a lack of foresight.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I bet the number of times the typical youtube upload is
| watched is zero. I think YouTube itself already fills the
| archival, non-transmitting role here.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Average views per video is around 10k. I don't know what
| the mode (most frequent number of views) is, but I'm
| almost certain it's not zero, since the uploader checking
| if the video uploaded correctly already counts as a view.
|
| Anyway, for archival purposes you don't need to save the
| plethora of formats Youtube keeps at hand for each video,
| you just need one size in one codec, and it probably
| doesn't have to be 4K or 8K, which probably reduces the
| storage requirements by one order of magnitude or so.
| komali2 wrote:
| Is the average as relevant as some other statistical
| measure that I'm not knowledgeable enough to know about?
| For example if the vast majority of views are on 10% of
| the videos, the other 90% could be stored on less
| expensive hardware that has less bandwidth maybe?
|
| edit: for example the average net worth of an American is
| 76,000$ but toss a couple billionaires in the mix, whose
| net worth is larger by such an enormous factor, that the
| "average" is misleading
| doersino wrote:
| You're thinking of the median (the value that ends up in
| the middle after sorting), which is indeed more useful in
| such cases.
|
| (Of course, boiling a wide distribution of values down to
| a single value, no matter by which process, is fraught
| with problems.)
| [deleted]
| 3pt14159 wrote:
| I'm the highly downvoted parent that said this is
| possible.
|
| It's only 45 years of video per day. That is very, very
| possible to save. That's roughly 600 terabytes of storage
| space a day. Which means that per month you're generating
| a long term storage bill that is about $18k more per
| month.
|
| So after a decade of operation your monthly bill is about
| $2.1m which is far, far, far cheaper than what we spend
| on plenty of things. Like I said above: This is not
| impossible. In fact, I bet the NSA is probably already
| doing it. At least for public videos. This truly is
| peanuts.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Well, to show the video to the person who uploaded it you
| don't need to reencode it or push it to the edge or any
| of that. And I see no reason to believe that most videos
| are even watched by their creators.
| op03 wrote:
| We get time travel by 2034 so no issues -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor
| marta_morena_25 wrote:
| There is nothing impossible about it. We barely scratched the
| surface of data storage mechanisms. All it takes is another
| few breakthroughs and we likely can store all of Youtube of
| all times in a block the size of an ice cube.
| K2h wrote:
| The Sandisk microSD card SDSQXCZ-1T00 rated at 1TB for MSRP
| of $400 is listed at sdcard.org as physical dimensions of
| 11 x 15 x 1.0 mm, Approx 0.5g. That is 165 mm^2. If a
| medium ice cube is 25 x 25 x 32 mm for a volume of 20,000
| mm^2 - then today an 'ice cube' could hold 20,000 / 165 =
| 121 TB with normal off the shelf accessible technology for
| $48K USD.
| ranma42 wrote:
| Given that ~1 hour of video is uploaded to youtube per
| second and assuming 5mbit/s for the video data, then you
| can store under a days worth of youtube videos on that
| current-day ice cube (it will be full in about ~15 hours
| worth of uploads (if I didn't miscalculate)).
| gibolt wrote:
| Don't forget that Google stores probably at least 3
| copies of each for redundancy and multiple sizes.
|
| Wouldn't want your only ice cube to melt
| boogies wrote:
| What makes you so confident? SSD tech is experiencing
| scaling challenges1. IIRC DNA's supposed to be incredibly
| dense and last long, but too expensive for much more than
| wedding photos2. Do you have a more promising emerging tech
| in mind?
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393293
|
| 2: I think I heard this use case predicted on some NPR
| thing I can't find, but this one
| https://www.npr.org/2013/01/24/170082404/shall-i-encode-
| thee... says "Agilent waived the cost of DNA synthesis for
| this project, but the researchers estimate it would
| normally cost about $12,400 per megabyte.
|
| "It's an unthinkably large amount of money ... at the
| moment," Goldman says."
| AndrewUnmuted wrote:
| > YouTube where one can't help but ponder about content
| moderation at this scale being impossible
|
| That's precisely why YouTube cares so much about content
| moderation. They need to figure out some way to not hemorrhage
| money with all the hosting, transcode, and CDN costs for low-
| effort, spammy, and controversial content that cannot be
| monetized. Their actions taken to address content moderation
| sent the world into a tailspin as a result, proving Google both
| understands their scale and cares very little about the way
| their policies disrupt societies.
|
| In 2018 YouTube went on a deletion/censorship spree in the name
| of racism, deleting 50mil videos in the process. But it was
| clear that they only scapegoated racism as the reason, because
| only 1% of the video they deleted was racist. [0] The reason
| for this scapegoating was to avoid culpability in the mistaken
| business model of being the world's largest beer bong for
| internet video.
|
| [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/13/youtube-removed-
| nearly-2-mil...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| A lot of that low-effort, spammy content could be deleted
| simply for being, yknow, spammy. Or even for promoting
| outright scams. Political videos are a rather small niche
| ultimately, there's a _lot_ on there that 's just crap.
| dkdk8283 wrote:
| YouTube was amazing back in the day but with censorship it
| has become a mediocre content dumpster fire. I haven't been
| interested in anything on trending in a long time.
| SirLuxuryYacht wrote:
| That could be because the massive viewership driving the
| trending videos, e.g. music, make up and dood perfect, seem
| to be younger than those who might be browsing HN.
|
| I've had the app on my phone for over a decade and I share
| your sentiment with trending vids, but there is a lot of
| excellent content that would not exist without youtube. The
| recommendation algo is pretty good these days.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| That might not last, the younger crowd seems to be going
| for TikTok these days.
| AndrewUnmuted wrote:
| Like every other startup, they pursued "growth at all
| costs," got acquired by a business that could eat all the
| red ink, but now over a decade later, that business is sick
| of it and looking for the mouth wash. It's just too bad
| they got pretty much the entire first world addicted to it
| before they decided to ban anti-war content as "racist" and
| alternative approaches to medicine as "dangerous."
|
| Why is YouTube so insistent that we not use our own minds
| to decide for ourselves? Perhaps because they really would
| find it more preferable if you didn't do any of that
| thinking for yourself. That's not how advertising works.
| [0]
|
| [0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/781798-universal-
| literacy-w...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Pre-acquisition YT was nowhere near as large or popular.
| Videos used to be tiny resolution, heavily compressed and
| limited to a few minutes in length. Which is to say, most
| of their pursuit of "growth at all costs" was well after
| they were acquired and became part of Google/Alphabet.
| ajzinsbwbs wrote:
| There's still a ton of interesting content on YouTube. They
| have taken down stuff that didn't deserve to be taken down,
| but it's a very small portion of overall content. Other
| than people who are only interested in watching borderline
| material, I don't think it affected the average user much.
| I can still watch a guy marvel in an endearing Canadian
| accent as he inspects the manufacturing of a $500 toaster.
|
| And YouTube continued to grow quickly last year, so in the
| empirical sense it is doing well. The nature of the
| platform is that it is full of content producers with
| massive followings. If a small portion of those producers
| get dinged, they can make a lot of noise, but it doesn't
| necessarily amount to much compared to YouTube as a whole.
| Covzire wrote:
| I think GP's point might have been specific to Trending.
| Youtube's algo is pretty good at throwing me interesting
| content from my own subs, but I agree with the GP that
| the trending list is garbage.
|
| Also, attempting to do broad searches for most news
| topics simply returns CNN, ABC, etc like clockwork now,
| and they're not at all the type of content that got
| Youtube where it is today. It's become more and more
| MegaCorpTube in recent years.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _In 2018 YouTube went on a deletion /censorship spree in
| the name of racism, deleting 50mil videos in the process. But
| it was clear that they only scapegoated racism as the reason,
| because only 1% of the video they deleted was racist. [0]_
|
| Huh? "In the name of racism", but the source in that story is
| Youtube itself, and _they 're_ the ones giving the breakdown
| of why videos were deleted:
|
| > _YouTube says that most of the videos it removed -- 79.6
| percent -- violated its policies on spam, misleading content
| or scams, while 12.6 percent were removed for nudity or
| sexual content. Only about 1 percent of channels were removed
| for promotion of violence, violent extremism, harassment or
| hateful or abusive content, although videos of that nature
| have attracted the most scrutiny in the past year._
|
| The source seems to be
| https://transparencyreport.google.com/youtube-
| policy/removal...
| krick wrote:
| I don't know how these estimates are made or if they are even
| close to being true, but it always surprises me that there is
| claimed to be 50x daily emails than daily google searches. I've
| seen these numbers several times before (never sourced,
| ironically), and this one always seems weird. People don't even
| open any websites other way than googling the name, and most
| people don't send dozens of emails daily. I think the only way
| you can get 300B daily emails is if you multiply every
| automatically sent email by the number of recipients.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > and most people don't send dozens of emails daily.
|
| What you're missing is that the vast majority of emails
| aren't sent individually from one person to another; they're
| sent by programs. In addition to spam, we're talking about
| stuff like newsletters, promotions, notifications, updates,
| mailing lists, etc. Looking through my emails now I have an
| incredible volume of GitHub notifications and various other
| auto-generated emails. In total I definitely receive hundreds
| of emails per day.
|
| And I don't actually do _that_ many Google searches per day
| (maybe only a couple dozen) mainly because I tend to go back
| to the same websites over and over again, and the browser URL
| bar autocompletes the name rather than performing a Google
| search on the name of the site. You really have to go out of
| your way these days to perform a Google search on the name of
| a site rather than just go to the site directly.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > In addition to spam, we're talking about stuff like
| newsletters, promotions, notifications, updates, mailing
| lists, etc.
|
| Much of that flow could be replaced by RSS-based
| notifications and the like. E-mail might be justified when
| you want your stuff to be auto-archived, but perhaps any
| message you would delete immediately after skimming it
| should just not be sent in the first place.
| thephyber wrote:
| A side effect of Moore's Law is that as computing gets
| more powerful, the things humans do with computing can
| afford to get sloppier.
|
| Bill Gates famously said "640K is more memory than anyone
| will ever need on a computer" in the 1980s. We could
| probably do most of what modern computers do with far
| less than 32GB of RAM, but that assumes that our software
| is much more optimized for compact runtime than they are.
| [deleted]
| huac wrote:
| probably includes spam emails too
| foobiekr wrote:
| I think we give google too much credit by assuming
| sophisticated moderation _algorithms_.
| pvarangot wrote:
| There's algorithms for sure, but the sophisticated part is
| the scale at which they run. And by sophisticated I mean it
| was sophisticated five years ago.
| actuator wrote:
| Way before than that. It sounds easy in theory but it was
| amazing how their platform auto moderated content. People
| used to go around finding new ways like clipping the video
| frame and adding unrelated content. Slowing down video,
| audio etc.
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| They still do that.
| Avicebron wrote:
| And it still actually works, the algorithms are
| sophisticated, but the heavy reliance on them leads to
| some serious blind spots.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| The obfuscation techniques are getting more and more
| intrusive. Google hasn't won, but they seem to be gaining
| ground against an enormous number of clever and lively
| human adversaries. That's impressive.
| pvarangot wrote:
| More than not won I think Google already lost. They
| wanted to empower individual creators but their automatic
| moderation algorithms are already at a level where they
| flag fair use and legal use of user generated content in
| a way that usually backfires on them with small PR fires
| within internet communities.
|
| But I guess that's the price to pay to be able to be
| "friends" with big media.
| fsociety wrote:
| With content moderation at scale.. having leeway can allow you
| to prioritize on trending videos, which removes a large subset
| of things required to moderate
| ericmcer wrote:
| That was one big takeaway from watching the antitrust case.
| They definitely view these tech giants as having infinite power
| over technology with little regard for the complexity and scale
| of what is going on. I am in favor of breaking up some of these
| giants, but at the same time how can people with no concept of
| technology legislate it. They could very easily make a policy
| that is difficult for google to enforce, and completely
| impossible for a smaller player to even contemplate.
|
| I'm always reminded of the Louis CK bit where a person is
| introduced to WiFi in an airplane and then is complaining about
| it not working 15 minutes later.
| ysavir wrote:
| > They could very easily make a policy that is difficult for
| google to enforce, and completely impossible for a smaller
| player to even contemplate.
|
| You can't fight fire with fire and you can't fight scale with
| scale. The solution to these problems lies in eliminating the
| advantages of scale so that operating on a national or
| international level becomes an expensive liability, but
| competing on a local market is affordable and practical.
|
| Companies in the US and China, for example, can scale
| immensely because they have such huge, single markets in
| which to mature. They pay a one-time cost per entry and then
| have no real obstacles from expanding to the full capacity of
| that market.
|
| I don't know much about how the EU works in this regard, but
| I imagine it's much more difficult for a European company to
| reach the full European market. Aside from legal obstacles,
| they have to face barriers from language, culture, history,
| and other things, I'm sure. It's an ideal setup for a
| collection of small-scale operations in a healthy market...
| Or it would be, if US and Chinese companies weren't able to
| scale so easily and then expand out of their own borders into
| the EU.
|
| I tend to wonder if there are ways to bring similar barriers
| to the US. There aren't enough natural barriers, but perhaps
| we could create artificial barriers that will re-enable
| competition.
| simonh wrote:
| As a consumer I don't necessarily want competition in say
| video. I want to be able to go to one place to find a user
| created video, search once and find all the videos on that
| topic. I want to learn one UI for that and I want to know
| that the vast majority of video content will be there.
| YouTube's scale grants me, as a consumer, huge advantages.
| The same goes for content creators.
|
| That doesn't mean I dont want oversight. I think there may
| be a role for regulation in the public interest, but
| blindly chopping YouTube up into a hundred geographically
| separated chunks would be unbelievably dumb. Is
| 'competition' really going to compensate for the loss of
| convenience? There have always been competing video upload
| sites, but people go where the scale is because they like
| the scale. They want the scale. It has value to them.
|
| The same goes for the App Store. I'm a happy Apple
| customer. I like the App Store and I think it works well,
| but I'm not entirely against government scrutiny of how it
| operates, in principle. Yes I'm concerned Apple could abuse
| its power, but killing the App Store or mandating by law
| that Apple has to implement policies that will tear the App
| Store into bits benefits me how? Will it make it easier for
| me to find and install Apps? Will it improve their quality?
| Will fragmented app stores make it easier for developers to
| connect with customers and earn revenue? I'm not convinced.
| DabbyDabberson wrote:
| It seems like adding in these artificial domestic barriers
| would negatively affect the total stock market in
| aggregate, by making business less efficient overall.
| (scale == efficiency).
|
| Therefore, I highly doubt any legislation would ever be
| passed for this. (even though it may end up being much
| better for the consumer)
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Unfortunately it being an utter stupid or terrible idea
| is no guarantee to stop a law from being passed. Reality
| always takes it toll however much they insist that it
| isn't their fault and nobody could have known exactly
| what they were warned about happening.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > You can't fight fire with fire and you can't fight scale
| with scale. The solution to these problems lies in
| eliminating the advantages of scale so that operating on a
| national or international level becomes an expensive
| liability, but competing on a local market is affordable
| and practical.
|
| The problem was never the scale of the _company_. If
| YouTube was instead 100 different companies, there would
| still be a total of 49 years worth of video being uploaded
| every day which nobody would have the resources to review.
| Each company would have 1% of the video but also 1% of the
| revenue and the cost would be just as insurmountable.
| simonh wrote:
| And creators would either upload their videos to 100
| different services, or users would only be able to find
| 1% as much content.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| That one is the easiest to solve -- separate discovery
| from hosting. You want to find a video, you go to a
| search engine. Any search engine you like. They all index
| all the videos everywhere. Some may even be dedicated to
| video or make recommendations etc.
|
| The biggest problem there is that all the hosts want you
| to use their search and do what they can to get in the
| way of any third party turning them into a dumb pipe. But
| this is where some kind of P2P service could really have
| an advantage, because it doesn't have to care about that
| -- let it be a dumb pipe on purpose and it wins, because
| there are a thousand companies who would love to be in
| the video search/discovery business and not have to pay
| the cost of hosting the videos or worry about a
| centralized third party host locking them out next week.
| Avicebron wrote:
| I'm not sure why you brought up reviewing the videos. I
| couldn't find it as I glanced through this thread. If YT
| was 100 different companies competing against each other,
| then there would be positive effects as each on tried to
| out-innovate each other. They wouldn't just be 100 static
| mini YT's..and if some of them did that they wouldn't
| make it.
|
| The scale of the company prevents meaningful competition,
| that's the issue, not necessarily that they can't
| affordably review the 49 years worth of video.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| This whole debate originated in some people noticing that
| there was a lot of wrongthink on the internet and then
| starting to yell at tech companies for not fixing it. But
| it turns out that problem is legitimately hard and the
| tech companies don't have a magic wand, so all their
| attempts have been ham-fisted disasters that trample all
| over everything like a frightened elephant.
|
| That problem in particular isn't really one that
| competition would solve, because it's fundamentally a
| demand for censorship, and more competition would make
| censorship _harder_. Which is maybe a good thing anyway.
| [deleted]
| gabrielfv wrote:
| You raise a very interesting point there. I do wonder,
| however, how having such boundaries in place would affect
| exchange of information somehow. That's something I can
| sense in practice by living in a country where a large
| portion of the population don't speak english, however most
| of the tech material is made available in english.
|
| I feel like for that to happen a much deeper cultural
| transformation in how we share information and global
| inequalities would have to come as well. The reason there's
| so much content in english is not because it's been
| constructed solely by authors who speak english natively
| (albeit probably the most common native language amongst
| blog authors, etc), but because many authors feel like they
| have to write it in english in order to speak to a broader,
| global audience.
| thephyber wrote:
| > I tend to wonder if there are ways to bring similar
| barriers to the US
|
| The Constitution of the USA prevents states from erecting
| barriers to inter-state commerce, so I suspect if there
| were legal barriers, they would have to be at the national
| level.
| slg wrote:
| There are ways to do the above without specifically
| restricting inter-state commerce. The CCPA is one example
| of a state raising the barrier to entry that a business
| can either comply with or leave the market. I wouldn't
| exactly call it an ideal situation, but if each
| individual state created their own version there would
| certainly be businesses that refuse to do business in
| certain states rather than dealing with the regulatory
| headaches.
| dwighttk wrote:
| And let China be the only one with scale advantage?
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| > how can people with no concept of technology legislate it
|
| Here's how I would counter: What many of these Congresspeople
| understand is _business_. And these are technology companies,
| but ultimately, they 're _companies using illegal business
| strategies_. Congresswoman Jayapal explained for instance,
| how Google 's ad market is effectively an example of insider
| trading, because Google controlled the buyer side, seller
| side, and the exchange itself, drawing on her experience with
| Wall Street. Technology didn't matter there, but business
| did.
|
| And more intriguingly, the most common response from the tech
| CEOs there was "I don't know". If there's one really good
| case for breaking up big tech, it's that nobody running them
| understands the details of the operation well enough to be
| responsible for it. Their business models have bad effects on
| society that their CEOs don't know about. Their businesses
| make illegal decisions that their CEOs can't vouch for.
|
| Big tech is a runaway train.
| class4behavior wrote:
| They legislate all walks of life. It is their job to
| comprehend the abstraction of each issue and seek advice in
| the right places, not to be knowledgeable in all professions
| and subjects of interest.
| dantheman wrote:
| I'd argue that job is impossible - the most heavily
| legislated areas are the most dysfunctional -- because they
| don't understand.
| pedrosbmartins wrote:
| I don't believe that's true. For instance, banking and
| electricity are highly regulated markets, and rightly so.
| In this cases, I think it is obviously critical for the
| government to draw expertise from the right sources
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > For instance, banking and electricity are highly
| regulated markets, and rightly so.
|
| You don't think banking is dysfunctional? Banking is one
| of the most privacy-invasive industries in existence, the
| rules are the reason the internet runs on advertising
| because they make it nigh impossible to make a
| functioning anonymous micropayments system and companies
| that try to innovate with e.g. a debit card that keeps
| your account balance invested in securities get booed off
| the stage by incumbents who don't want the competition.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| It is a matter of "less dysfunctional with regulation" as
| opposed to not being dysfunctional with regulation
| unfortunately.
|
| There are a lot of legitimate things to complain about
| with banking and its regulations but despite the many
| misconduct scandals in banking they are still better than
| unregulated parabanks. The scandals haven't been in the
| form of "and the head ran off with all of the money and
| nobody can find it or them".
|
| Regulations certainly could be improved in multiple
| directions but dysfunction is not a binary.
| thephyber wrote:
| Your examples are probably pretty good for explaining the
| depth of 2 regulated industries (except PG&E is a black
| eye for regulatory success), but perhaps they were
| talking about the breadth of all of the industries that
| Congress chooses to regulate, which is quite extensive.
| I'd argue that Congress critters and their staff aren't
| great at finding those "right sources" with enough
| consistency.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| This is why "we've had enough of experts" is such a
| dangerous mindset.
| kyran_adept wrote:
| Piling over your comment regarding YouTube - what is worse?
| Google owning YouTube and the search engine plus everything
| else or the fact that YouTube has probably more than 30-40%
| of the market? One is a problem of monopoly, the second is a
| problem of choice.
|
| I think for tech, "monopolies" are natural and they stem from
| the lack of investment needed by the consumer which allows us
| to choose the best/coolest product at every moment.
|
| For tech it makes more sense to have 1 search engine, 1
| social platform, 1 video sharing platform. If cars were easy
| to change as you wish, I think everyone will gravitate
| towards a single car brand.
| thephyber wrote:
| So much this.
|
| There was a memory etched in my mind of a clueless
| Congressman questioning the General Counsel of
| Alphabet/Google in a committee hearing (perhaps during the
| SOPA fiasco). The congressman said something to the effect of
| "Google can do anything! They store a copy of the entire
| internet. Why can't you just identify all of the copyrighted
| material and not show it without approval?"
|
| I was dumbfounded by how this grown man seemed to think
| Google basically ran on "tech magic" and how little
| comprehension he seemed to have for what intellectual
| property is and how it's registered/identified.
| __s wrote:
| Louis CK bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4
| mdoms wrote:
| Google does not have an absolute right to operate at their
| current scale. If legislation around content moderation or
| consumer protection made their business untenable at its
| current scale then so be it. Their business will have to
| change to adapt to the society in which it is a participant.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I see that talking point everywhere about "too much
| scale/too big" but never have I heard an answer as to how
| the hell scale can be regulated let alone an answer that
| shows even a minutae of understanding let alone
| implementability.
|
| Even my deliberately stupid as possible answers like "Turn
| away visitors once they get above 200 million connections
| with a landing screen" and "register Youtubes A-Z with
| seperate data bins and watch traffic migrate in a daft
| social experiment" are better answers than any I have seen
| from users of the talking point.
| lalos wrote:
| This is scary to think about given that you need rare earth
| elements to build those chips powering all those machines.
| Makes sense why some countries are ensuring to have a supply on
| this in the long term, feels like the new oil.
| mc32 wrote:
| At least they are recoverable and recyclable, oil not so
| much.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| Are they? If you have a pile of 1,000,000 chips, can you
| really get any of the elements out at reasonable (by almost
| any metric) cost?
| SpaceRaccoon wrote:
| Why would it be more difficult than to extract from ore?
| You can smelt them, that will burn away the plastic, and
| then you can separate the metals.
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| I'm honestly having a bit of trouble putting my misgiving
| into thoughts (which if anything demonstrates I haven't
| thought this all through), but if you throw together say
| 10 materials, how likely are you to be able to separate
| out those 10 materials again? Or will you only be able to
| separate a couple metals with certain convenient melting
| points?
|
| I do see what you're saying though. Maybe the easy
| question is, what actually happens when electronics are
| recycled today? How much of the original material is
| retrieved? Maybe I'm just entirely wrong even given the
| state of the art today?
| rurp wrote:
| I only know a bit about this but from what I understand
| this is similar to how most modern mining works. Many
| minerals are mined in very low concentrations, which
| means they then need to be extracted out of the host
| material. Part of that process often involves multiple
| steps where the ore is soaked in various chemical
| solutions, which separate certain materials. It can be a
| very complicated process involving a lot of toxic
| chemicals.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Gold is recovered in significant quantities from
| e-waste[1]
|
| 1: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/electronic-devices-
| source-of-m...
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| Once the gold has been recovered, are they still able to
| recover other metals? I don't mean this antagonistically,
| this is a serious question (in case you know).
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Good question, but I don't know the answer - my sense is
| the bigger problem is the recycling tends to happen at
| low rates, and often involve nasty
| pollution/byproducts[1]
|
| 1:
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/02/10bn-
| pre...
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Commercial chips still use gold bond wires (except flip
| chips), but that's fairly little. Apart from that it's
| just copper or aluminium for the metal layers, a bunch of
| silicon and a bunch of silica dust bound with some epoxy
| resin. Most of this isn't worth anything to reuse.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| It sounds like you may hold a common misconception about
| rare-earth minerals.
|
| IIUC, they're not (extremely) rare in the traditional sense;
| it's more that it's hard to economically extract them from
| ore. [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-
| earth_element#:~:text=The....
| lalos wrote:
| Not worried about them running out (it sounds like you
| assumed that). I was more worried about geopolitical
| factors and having a huge online usage (companies want to
| make money and keep growing) be a forcing function to keep
| extracting them in a non-sustainable way.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| > Not worried about them running out (it sounds like you
| assumed that).
|
| Sorry, my mistake. The point your were trying to make is
| very interesting too.
| pydry wrote:
| Even harder and even more expensive to extract if you give
| a damn about the environment.
| paulcole wrote:
| This is an unpopular opinion here on HN but essentially
| everything the largest nations have done show that they
| don't give a damn about the environment at all.
|
| Like my dad said, "when someone shows you who they are,
| believe them."
| clairity wrote:
| your two sentences led to some cognitive dissonance...
|
| yes, institutions like governments can be amoral/immoral
| on longer timescales (in fact, i'd posit institutions are
| employed specifically for this purpose), but people
| rarely exhibit such attributes statically, as your dad's
| quote alludes. it's at best "believe them in the moment".
|
| rare is the "bad" person; more common is the "bad"
| institution. expect the best of people (which is not the
| same as "be naive").
| paulcole wrote:
| It doesn't matter if the people are bad or the
| institution is bad. The end result is the same:
|
| > everything the largest nations have done show that they
| don't give a damn about the environment at all.
|
| I do expect the best of people. It's just been shown that
| the "best" a very large group of people can do re:
| climate change is pretty fucking pathetic.
| wtracy wrote:
| One of the arguments for thorium-based nuclear power is
| that we're already digging up tons of thorium as a
| byproduct of rare earth mining. This is radioactive
| material that currently we're just dumping.
| DoofusOfDeath wrote:
| Good point! Your comment has made me curious about the
| _total_ lifecycle of the waste products from these
| processes.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You need rare earth elements to make chips? Name one. And it
| had better be a rare earth, not something that is just rare
| and comes from the Earth.
|
| (slight amounts of REEs are used in amplifiers in optical
| fibers, and also in permanent magnets, but those aren't what
| you were talking about)
| boogies wrote:
| Not as scary as the fact that Alphabet pressures local
| governments to let them drain aquifers to cool the machines1,
| and powers them using vast swaths of bulldozed former
| habitats of endangered desert tortoises and focused beams of
| light that literally burn alive thousands of birds, including
| threatened predators2.
|
| 1: https://www.postandcourier.com/news/google-s-
| controversial-g...
|
| 2: https://www.sbsun.com/2014/08/18/emerging-solar-plants-in-
| mo...
|
| "Once built, U.S. government biologists found the plant's
| superheated mirrors were killing birds. In April, biologists
| working for the state estimated that 3,500 birds died at
| Ivanpah in the span of a year, many of them burned alive
| while flying through a part of the solar installment where
| air temperatures can reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit." --
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-tech-solar-projects-
| fail-t...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#B.
| ..
| robotnikman wrote:
| Thats just one of their datacenters?! Thats huge!
| boogies wrote:
| The aquifer draining article linked is about one in South
| Carolina, the Ivanpah plant is in California's Mojave
| Desert, and IIUC is the largest bird incinerator in the
| world, burning a bird out of the sky every other minute.
| From the Sun article:
|
| _Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave
| Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant's
| concentrated sun rays -- "streamers," for the smoke plume
| that comes from birds that ignite in midair.
|
| Federal wildlife investigators who visited the
| BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds
| burned and fell, reporting an average of one "streamer"
| every two minutes, are urging California officials to
| halt the operator's application to build a still-bigger
| version._
|
| They do seem to have reduced some of the more dramatic
| deaths by unfocusing the beams when the plant is idle and
| clearing even more land around it to keep birds away,
| although there were still thousands of deaths every year
| afterwards.
| cpeterso wrote:
| Seems like Bright Energy could do more to prevent bird
| deaths, such as nets or active scarecrows or audio
| deterrents.
| konfusinomicon wrote:
| This strangely seems like the outcome of a successful
| dwarf fortress
| SkyBelow wrote:
| For YouTube moderation, I wonder if they can track bad users
| for discovering new user created content. Effectively
| categorize the different sort of content that isn't allowed.
| When ever content is flagged as being in one of these
| categories, track the users that viewed it. Keep repeating this
| until you have users that seem to prefer this sort of rule
| breaking content.
|
| Then, begin tracking what new content those "bad viewers" view
| while also identifying new users who follow a similar viewing
| pattern and categorizing them as bad viewers. Once you get a
| large enough data set, you can begin to things based on what
| percentage of bad users view new content. If some new account
| uploads a few videos and 75%+ of views are from bad users all
| in the same category of not allowed material, what is the
| chance the material belongs in that category? And what I'm
| describing is the version 0.0.0.1 variant. You would also track
| things like length of view, timing of views, sentiment analysis
| of any comments made on the video (and potentially of any
| speech in the video), etc.
| coliveira wrote:
| I don't understand what is the big problem in just splitting
| Google into separate companies. This will be great for everyone,
| including shareholders. It is not a secret that one of methods to
| unleash value in a stock is to split the company. See for example
| the case of Ebay and Paypal.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| Can you provide more evidence of this?
| guyzero wrote:
| "It is not a secret that one of methods to unleash value in a
| stock is to split the company"
|
| Yes, and it's not a secret that the other way to unleash value
| is to merge companies. See for example AT&T or Exxon & Mobil.
| gph wrote:
| But you'll notice the companies that successfully gain value
| through merging are typically competitors that are able to
| generate more value together instead of fighting for the same
| profits.
|
| The same does not seem to be true for any of the Alphabet
| companies, except in the sense of being able to leverage
| shared user data for better targeted ads. Perhaps that does
| make it worth it to remain one company, but it's debatable,
| especially for something like Waymo which likely won't
| benefit from having access to search data.
| guyzero wrote:
| There are tons of industrial conglomerates, from GE to
| Samsung to Siemens and there's not really any universal
| agreement that they're any worse than more focussed
| companies.
|
| This goes all the way back to the most basic theories of
| organization - why do companies even exist? Why is everyone
| not effectively a contractor? Why do companies not
| outsource every non-core function? And there are good
| reasons why companies exist - see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm External
| transaction costs are real and breaking Google up could
| significantly increase those.
|
| Someone from Siemens once told me "Siemens is an investment
| bank that happens to own all of the companies it has
| invested in." I'm not sure whether that's true or not, but
| it's a good description of conglomerates in general.
| coliveira wrote:
| > "Siemens is an investment bank that happens to own
|
| All conglomerates are like this, the clearest example is
| Berkshire Hathaway.
| guyzero wrote:
| Exactly. Why not break up Berkshire?
| martin_bech wrote:
| Berkshire is for all intents broken up, everything
| operates independently.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| What would be the parts though?
|
| There is one profitable part (ads). The other parts are
| supported by that part or at least require deep integration
| with that part.
|
| Maybe you could split of Google Cloud, but I bet it would just
| become a digital REIT.
| rosywoozlechan wrote:
| The separate companies would be:
|
| Google (Search), YouTube, Doubleclick (Ads), Android
| (Android, gmail, docs, google drive, Meet, google cloud,
| Stadia), maps and business listings (a Yelp competitor).
|
| I don't think Google Cloud should be its own thing. I see the
| business software, Android, Stadia and Google Cloud all part
| of the same company. It's basically a Microsoft clone. I
| could even see Microsoft buying that part of the business
| from Google.
| wadkar wrote:
| Wouldn't this severely hamper the use of shared single mega
| repo at Google and also very easy and effective sharing of
| all kinds of data across products and services?
| samename wrote:
| Wouldn't this give other companies in other countries (who
| thereby can't be split up) more power and prominence?
| Avicebron wrote:
| This is the classic argument, "we need our big guy to fight
| their big guy", it's not true. Nimble smaller companies can
| work, and it's not like we don't have a government to
| negotiate how we address large foreign companies. What this
| is arguing is ceding national power to a private corporation
| because we have given up on the govt. It's a weak
| smokescreen.....
|
| Besides. They. Dont. Pay. Taxes. In. The. Country. They.
| Claim. To. Be. Protecting.
| rrdharan wrote:
| > Besides. They. Dont. Pay. Taxes. In. The. Country. They.
| Claim. To. Be. Protecting.
|
| Besides being an incredibly annoying way to state your
| point (leave the hand-claps on Twitter, please), note that
| their very highly paid employees pay a ton of tax.
|
| Abolishing the corporate income tax entirely is something
| I'm in favor of and it has its proponents across the
| political spectrum:
|
| https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/the-progressive-
| case-f...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| only if the split up companies do worse in their split up
| form, which I don't really see happening for a lot of them.
| Why would AWS be a worse company if it oeprated on its own?
|
| If size was the only thing that mattered you'd never see
| small companies beat big companies, in countries or across
| them. This is generally not the case. Healthy ecosystems seem
| to be more important long term than short-term dominance.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Or even Standard Oil:
|
| "Rockefeller ran the company as its chairman, until his
| retirement in 1897. He remained the major shareholder, and in
| 1911, with the dissolution of the Standard Oil trust into 34
| smaller companies, Rockefeller became the richest person in
| modern history, as the initial income of these individual
| enterprises proved to be much bigger than that of a single
| larger company."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil
| guyzero wrote:
| Some of the Standard Oil companies have been re-merged into
| Exxon-Mobil and they'd gladly do more mergers if they were
| allowed to.
| coliveira wrote:
| But this is to the benefit of the executives. It doesn't
| mean that shareholders and consumers wouldn't be better
| with a split of the companies. This is a clear case when
| the greedy of a few trump the interest of many. The right
| thing to do is to block consolidation of companies.
| guyzero wrote:
| Why would oil companies not benefit from economies of
| scale? These aren't Bain-style leveraged buyouts.
|
| It's true that once a company gets a lot of market power,
| either as a buyer or a seller, it causes problems. But by
| this logic, why not breakup Walmart first? There's lots
| of documentation on how they push supplier cost so low
| that suppliers are practically going out of business
| selling to WalMart. Google seems less problematic than
| lots of companies.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Really, in the age of Amazon you're arguing for Wal-Mart
| to be broken up?
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Across all retail in the US Amazon makes up 5%. Walmart
| makes up 15%. Shouldn't the burden of the question be
| reversed in light of this? While online retail is growing
| relative to brick and mortar it is either premature to
| call it "too big" in absolute terms when a largely brick
| and mortar competitor is triple the size and not a
| monopoly seems farcical gun-jumping until it exceeds a
| max non-monopoly. Whatever the legal standards they
| should be consistent.
|
| Age of Amazon is just a narrative which is no way to
| decide monopoly.
| guyzero wrote:
| Not really. My point is that every time someone brings up
| a reason to break up any given company that the same
| reason applies to many other companies equally well.
| People seem to be basing these calls on feelings and not
| on any underlying principle.
| zozin wrote:
| Out of the four companies questioned by Congress Google seems to
| be the most poorly/inefficiently run, as well as the most likely
| to be broken up due to its products monopolizing the spaces they
| compete in. If Congress does act and if Google does indeed get
| split up or negatively affected by antitrust regs, doesn't it
| stand to reason that the other three also face the same fate?
|
| Weakening AdWords would be a boon to Facebook; making Android
| independent might help out iPhone sales and increase Apple's
| walled garden; spinning off YouTube would probably help Facebook,
| Prime Video and YouTube TV; Google Shopping ceasing to be
| subsidized by AdWords would be great for Bezos' bottomline, etc.
| It seems to me that if Congress weakens one of the four, the
| others will only grow in size/influence.
| jeffbee wrote:
| You really think Google is the inefficient of those four? Apple
| runs a hot/spare datacenter strategy. Their overhead has to be
| ridiculous.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Hardware doesn't cost that much. Think about the number of
| new projects or products Google just starts without a
| coherent strategy and then shuts down without monetizing
| them, pissing off both users and the original developers.
| Think about the wasted engineering time. That's why Google is
| inefficiently run.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| There are a couple of ways a startup can become a conventional
| company. Some of them are good things that Google probably should
| do.
|
| For example, big companies have quality expectations that
| startups don't need to honor (because everyone kind of
| understands the whole undertaking is a risk and if it fails, oh
| well). They also have more impact on culture and people (in
| multiple countries, often), and the nature of that impact has to
| be considered (because there's no such thing, really, as
| "neutral;" one person's neutrality is another's adherence to
| status quo, and the status quo is not always good. If it was,
| we'd never need new companies).
|
| This results in some loss of velocity (quality takes time;
| consideration of outsized effects takes time). But it's loss of
| velocity for the right reasons, as a company moves from 1,000
| users to 1 billion.
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