Google’s problems are bigger than just the antitrust case(economist.com)
economist.com
Google’s problems are bigger than just the antitrust case
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/07/30/googles-problems-are-bigger-than-just-the-antitrust-case
376 comments
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.
I'm a paying gsuite customer. Just a single account not some corp with many accounts. Every time I've had an issue I had the same experience. Quick access to a live support agent via chat.
Only in US. I had a Google Pixel phone that went had a bad microphone. Google issued a compensation for everyone who purchased the phone in US and maybe Europe I think but left out the rest of the world. Pretty shitty behavior I think. I've had issues with Apple hardware and they've never bothered about where you are located, things get fixed equally.
Not sure about elsewhere, but in the US, the compensation wasn't voluntary. It was the result of a class action law suit against Google.
although, I have had my iphone since 2016 and haven't had any issues. In fairness though, I am just an N = 1.
Same here, I'd rather a phone that works so well it doesn't need a dedicated support agent app...
So your sample set means iPhone's don't have issues ?
I think everyone has been very upfront that they're discussing their personal experiences here.
Honestly they’re a pretty stable product (minus, of course, the infamous planned obsolescence via battery incident). My iPhones have worked as intended since my first (4s).
I've been using iPhones since the 3GS, then 4S the SE, and now an iPhone 7.
Every single one of them, out of the box, has had terrible battery life.
The iPhone 7 has a 1960mAh, that's just insufficient. Full. Stop. No matter how you slice it, a 2000mAh batter is never going to get you through a day on an iPhone if you actually use it.
I've recently seen Android 10 phones available with 10,000mAh batteries. That sounds like it might at least get me through till lunch time.
Every single one of them, out of the box, has had terrible battery life.
The iPhone 7 has a 1960mAh, that's just insufficient. Full. Stop. No matter how you slice it, a 2000mAh batter is never going to get you through a day on an iPhone if you actually use it.
I've recently seen Android 10 phones available with 10,000mAh batteries. That sounds like it might at least get me through till lunch time.
Except battery life is energy/consumption. Androids have huge battery but a crappy power hungry CPU.
It’s sad to be reminded of that.
For a moment there I had genuine hope.
For a moment there I had genuine hope.
Good news is iPhone 11, XR, and {XS, 11Pro} Max have great battery lives (XS not so much and I'd be vary of 11 Pro but don't know personally)
Google pixel and google fi service does lead to excellent customer service. Everything else is terrible.
Are you living in fantasy land?
There have been many documented cases of horrible support for both the Pixel series and Fi, with many articles appearing here.
I have the original Pixel beside me and I get frustrated at the piss poor pure Android experience. Dark mode GMail should have been released when Android supported dark mode instead of several months later. Maps still doesn't have a dark mode. At least they finally fixed the bottom navigation buttons on Maps which were white on white with a light grey shadow. In fact, many apps from Google don't have a dark mode.
The Pixel has trouble with gestures which started happening after Android 10 was installed. The biggest problem is sliding the keypad to unlock. Google support has no clue how to fix it. It is the same stupidity you get from the Idiot Bar at Apple.
My account used for Fi (and Android) isn't the account I use for mail. Gmail used to allow disabling accounts, but not anymore. Years ago Google added a unified inbox, but last year they regressed by defaulting to the primary account inbox. Even though there is an All Inboxes selection at the top of the folder menu, that is not the default.
I have location services turned off, including the Fi app. I have notification turned off for the Fi app as well. Yet, every hour I get a notification from Fi telling me to turn on location services. I had to disable the Fi app.
A recent update to Android Message keeps sending Fi carrier verification codes for RCS even though I don't want this enabled. Google has no clue why it is happening or how to stop it.
If you ever have a problem with a payment method used to pay for any Google service or product, Google may disable your account. Worse of all, there is nothing the Fi people can do about it because payments is a separate part of the company.
I could go on about inconsistent sync/autosync behavior but what is the point. Android and the Google apps are mess and every month it gets worse. The Pixel experience encompasses crappy hardware that is sold at a premium and runs crappy software.
Every Pixel has bad batches coming out of manufacturing and Google often replaces defective phones with defective phones. It is like Apple, when they replace the butterfly keyboard with another butterfly keyboard.
There have been many documented cases of horrible support for both the Pixel series and Fi, with many articles appearing here.
I have the original Pixel beside me and I get frustrated at the piss poor pure Android experience. Dark mode GMail should have been released when Android supported dark mode instead of several months later. Maps still doesn't have a dark mode. At least they finally fixed the bottom navigation buttons on Maps which were white on white with a light grey shadow. In fact, many apps from Google don't have a dark mode.
The Pixel has trouble with gestures which started happening after Android 10 was installed. The biggest problem is sliding the keypad to unlock. Google support has no clue how to fix it. It is the same stupidity you get from the Idiot Bar at Apple.
My account used for Fi (and Android) isn't the account I use for mail. Gmail used to allow disabling accounts, but not anymore. Years ago Google added a unified inbox, but last year they regressed by defaulting to the primary account inbox. Even though there is an All Inboxes selection at the top of the folder menu, that is not the default.
I have location services turned off, including the Fi app. I have notification turned off for the Fi app as well. Yet, every hour I get a notification from Fi telling me to turn on location services. I had to disable the Fi app.
A recent update to Android Message keeps sending Fi carrier verification codes for RCS even though I don't want this enabled. Google has no clue why it is happening or how to stop it.
If you ever have a problem with a payment method used to pay for any Google service or product, Google may disable your account. Worse of all, there is nothing the Fi people can do about it because payments is a separate part of the company.
I could go on about inconsistent sync/autosync behavior but what is the point. Android and the Google apps are mess and every month it gets worse. The Pixel experience encompasses crappy hardware that is sold at a premium and runs crappy software.
Every Pixel has bad batches coming out of manufacturing and Google often replaces defective phones with defective phones. It is like Apple, when they replace the butterfly keyboard with another butterfly keyboard.
I still have my iPhone 4s from 2012 that still works great with 60fps stutter animations.
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> Google's other big problem is being terrible at anything which needs repair or customer support.
This is the direct result of the pervasive 10x/moonshot thinking. Anything that doesn't immediately sound like it can reach a billion users from the outset starts with a massive handicap when getting churned through the decision-making process. Anything that sounds like it requires a human in the loop, anything that has a manual step, anything that requires tech support, documentation, long-term stabilization....not even up for consideration. It's not just the launch-based performance review and promotion process, a problem which has at least penetrated the internal consciousness and is considered now in the whole perf process. It's not just the obvious product cancelations.
Fundamentally, Google is not willing to do anything that doesn't scale. They aren't willing to hold users' hands. They aren't willing to be there when something breaks, when something goes wrong, when someone is in a bind because some automated system locked them out, when all those messy unforeseeable situations occur. Putting users first is Orwellian doublespeak, because it's the thing Google hardly ever does--unless you are a corporate advertiser. Users--people like you and me--are the unwashed masses that Google believes it can wall off and keep as far away from its employees as possible. One user? Roundoff error. Ten users? Roundoff error. At Google scale, even a million users is a roundoff error.
Is there a 10,000 strong workforce dedicated to users' tech support? No. But there is a 10,000 strong workforce dedicated to sales, marketing, and partner relationships. Those people pull in the billions and billions of ad revenue, so absolutely they have 10,000 people hammering away at that goldmine. And if you are spending money on Google advertising, they will support your ass off.
Google is an ad business. Duh.
This is the direct result of the pervasive 10x/moonshot thinking. Anything that doesn't immediately sound like it can reach a billion users from the outset starts with a massive handicap when getting churned through the decision-making process. Anything that sounds like it requires a human in the loop, anything that has a manual step, anything that requires tech support, documentation, long-term stabilization....not even up for consideration. It's not just the launch-based performance review and promotion process, a problem which has at least penetrated the internal consciousness and is considered now in the whole perf process. It's not just the obvious product cancelations.
Fundamentally, Google is not willing to do anything that doesn't scale. They aren't willing to hold users' hands. They aren't willing to be there when something breaks, when something goes wrong, when someone is in a bind because some automated system locked them out, when all those messy unforeseeable situations occur. Putting users first is Orwellian doublespeak, because it's the thing Google hardly ever does--unless you are a corporate advertiser. Users--people like you and me--are the unwashed masses that Google believes it can wall off and keep as far away from its employees as possible. One user? Roundoff error. Ten users? Roundoff error. At Google scale, even a million users is a roundoff error.
Is there a 10,000 strong workforce dedicated to users' tech support? No. But there is a 10,000 strong workforce dedicated to sales, marketing, and partner relationships. Those people pull in the billions and billions of ad revenue, so absolutely they have 10,000 people hammering away at that goldmine. And if you are spending money on Google advertising, they will support your ass off.
Google is an ad business. Duh.
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.
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.
I think their main problem is going to far on advertising. For instance mentioned amazon...
Google search is lately getting so much noise that it is hard to find anything relevant.
Even if you actually search for some product, you are flooded with pages and pages of products and it is just too much to do any informed decision.
So I will rather use amazon.
Regarding what went wrong: same as always - stocks. Immediately when you allow people who have no interest in company but are only money oriented, "enter" the company by buying stocks, you will get huge pressure to earn money for them and what you actually do is second to profit. Then the slow dying of thousand cuts begins. Product quality goes down, everything that can be monetized will be, manager bonuses for yearly results doesnt help either.
Google has lost identity. They are just a huge ads bussiness now (if you look structure of their profit). Everything is second to that. And aws and azure surely doesnt help them. Or search that is becoming useless.
I really hope it wont go down as something like private data of people that google stockpiled for years might get on sale - and no one wants that to happen.
Google search is lately getting so much noise that it is hard to find anything relevant.
Even if you actually search for some product, you are flooded with pages and pages of products and it is just too much to do any informed decision.
So I will rather use amazon.
Regarding what went wrong: same as always - stocks. Immediately when you allow people who have no interest in company but are only money oriented, "enter" the company by buying stocks, you will get huge pressure to earn money for them and what you actually do is second to profit. Then the slow dying of thousand cuts begins. Product quality goes down, everything that can be monetized will be, manager bonuses for yearly results doesnt help either.
Google has lost identity. They are just a huge ads bussiness now (if you look structure of their profit). Everything is second to that. And aws and azure surely doesnt help them. Or search that is becoming useless.
I really hope it wont go down as something like private data of people that google stockpiled for years might get on sale - and no one wants that to happen.
Here's a great example of their shit support: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/35889152
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.
Edited to make past tense more clear.
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.
The one time I needed Fi customer service, I only got my issue (which had left my phone unable to make calls) fixed after months by abusing my Google employee privileges and complaining directly to Fi engineers.
EDIT: I absolutely love Fi. I've had no issues except that one time, and it was years ago. I show up in any random foreign country and every just works. My phone bill for me and my wife both is less than $50 a month these days, which I'm pretty sure is less than a lot of people pay for just one line. But I have this nagging fear that one day my account will stop working and I'll have to call up friends who are still Google and see if they can intercede.
EDIT: I absolutely love Fi. I've had no issues except that one time, and it was years ago. I show up in any random foreign country and every just works. My phone bill for me and my wife both is less than $50 a month these days, which I'm pretty sure is less than a lot of people pay for just one line. But I have this nagging fear that one day my account will stop working and I'll have to call up friends who are still Google and see if they can intercede.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I use Fi and the customer service is just OK, but the baseline comparison is Verizon where the customer service was easily reached but worse than terrible. More than once after talking to them I had seemingly compelling arbitrary fees added or removed, and once the caller ID entirely stop functioning on all phones on our family plan based on actions from CSRs.
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.
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.
I've had mixed experiences. Sometimes they fix stuff quickly or are helpful about service changes or questions. Other times it feels like beating your own hand with a hammer.
The worst was when we last switched phones we traded our old phones in. My new phone arrived and my wife's just...didn't.
It took weeks to make them believe we didn't steal her phone for some reason and they wouldn't give us the photo from the Fedex delivery receipt (in case it just went to one of our neighbors). It turns out that yes, it did go to our neighbor's house right when they had moved in and it took a couple months for them to even get to the package. In the meanwhile we escalated, escalated, escalated, and so on for weeks until somebody finally just shipped my wife another phone.
It could have all been solved in maybe 10 seconds with the delivery photo.
Despite that, our phone bill is almost free with all the rebates and data usage refunds and we've traveled all over the planet with the service and it works fantastically.
The worst was when we last switched phones we traded our old phones in. My new phone arrived and my wife's just...didn't.
It took weeks to make them believe we didn't steal her phone for some reason and they wouldn't give us the photo from the Fedex delivery receipt (in case it just went to one of our neighbors). It turns out that yes, it did go to our neighbor's house right when they had moved in and it took a couple months for them to even get to the package. In the meanwhile we escalated, escalated, escalated, and so on for weeks until somebody finally just shipped my wife another phone.
It could have all been solved in maybe 10 seconds with the delivery photo.
Despite that, our phone bill is almost free with all the rebates and data usage refunds and we've traveled all over the planet with the service and it works fantastically.
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.
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.
Put another way, Google has a blindspot. It can't figure out what it can't figure out.
I'd argue a corollary would be to learn from Microsoft or Northrop Grumman, two engineering first companies that are still going strong.
> Product searches are Google's money machine.
Google has something that Amazon doesn't, though: services search. You cannot go on Amazon to buy concert tickets, change phone contracts, or get to a social network.
Google has something that Amazon doesn't, though: services search. You cannot go on Amazon to buy concert tickets, change phone contracts, or get to a social network.
Yet...
OOOOoooooo snap. One word, but it's so true. And that's exactly how Amazon thinks.
I got my Amazon Fresh grocery order last weekend, sourced from the Whole Foods up the road. The delivery was cheaper than every alternative (Instacart, etc), the produce was great, and the process was painless.
If 5 years ago you told me I'd be ordering fresh produce from Amazon with same day delivery, I wouldn't have believed you. Which do you think is more difficult for them logistically? Delivering perishable goods or digital services? Lol.
I got my Amazon Fresh grocery order last weekend, sourced from the Whole Foods up the road. The delivery was cheaper than every alternative (Instacart, etc), the produce was great, and the process was painless.
If 5 years ago you told me I'd be ordering fresh produce from Amazon with same day delivery, I wouldn't have believed you. Which do you think is more difficult for them logistically? Delivering perishable goods or digital services? Lol.
They can deliver a subset of services. Unless they have a general-purpose search engine ready to go, they'll likely always lag Google on that side.
A couple of years ago, Google used to have a program called "Shopping Actions" where retailers could pay a fee and get priority placement in product search results. Google, the middleman, then took a cut if there was a purchase.
They still have this. In fact it just got new features and is free.
https://blog.google/products/shopping/buy-on-google-is-zero-...
https://blog.google/products/shopping/buy-on-google-is-zero-...
100% of my product searches start on Google.
80% of first link I click through is to Amazon.
Means 20% I might buy from somewhere else if I buy.
80% of first link I click through is to Amazon.
Means 20% I might buy from somewhere else if I buy.
100% of my product searches start on amazon. Only after something isn't coming up (or I'm searching a name brand) do I exit amazon.
After a couple of disastrous shipping problems outside of amazon (lost money, no recourse), I've come to trust amazon.
Recently a USPS package (from amazon) showed up 1 month late, with most of the contents missing (DVDs all gone). Called amazon, quickly resolved and reshipped. No lingering bad feelings, no drama, no extra work, no litigation - amazon just resolved it and I am good.
I had amazon prime, but I asked to cancel before the year was up post-covid since I definitely wasn't getting 2-day shipping. Instead they refunded my entire year of prime service.
Amazon is not perfect, but I give them my money, they give me value and I have a good relationship with them.
After a couple of disastrous shipping problems outside of amazon (lost money, no recourse), I've come to trust amazon.
Recently a USPS package (from amazon) showed up 1 month late, with most of the contents missing (DVDs all gone). Called amazon, quickly resolved and reshipped. No lingering bad feelings, no drama, no extra work, no litigation - amazon just resolved it and I am good.
I had amazon prime, but I asked to cancel before the year was up post-covid since I definitely wasn't getting 2-day shipping. Instead they refunded my entire year of prime service.
Amazon is not perfect, but I give them my money, they give me value and I have a good relationship with them.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by the last sentence? Sounds interesting
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.
Having good managers is my goal now rather than having little to no managers.
Bad/weak/over-stretched managers make the best case for good managers!
> A compromise was to give managers a minimum of seven direct reports
This might be dumb but what is the industry standard here?
I mostly see teams of up to 5 people under "tech lead" who spends >50% coding and maybe ~20 people under a "manager" who spends almost no time coding.
Maybe what this policy means is >= 7 people under a lead? Because 7 people per manager does not sound very flat.
This might be dumb but what is the industry standard here?
I mostly see teams of up to 5 people under "tech lead" who spends >50% coding and maybe ~20 people under a "manager" who spends almost no time coding.
Maybe what this policy means is >= 7 people under a lead? Because 7 people per manager does not sound very flat.
Coding time will start nose diving at 2 direct reports. Providing proper support to 4-5 direct reports will effectively drop coding time below 25%, at which point you might as well go to 0% for the impact 25% coding time will provide.
There are exceptions to the above depending on how independent the team is, or how stringent the deadlines are.
There are exceptions to the above depending on how independent the team is, or how stringent the deadlines are.
There's a ton of organizational and management study around teh number of direct reports. Seven is certainly not an accident. As I recall most IT work has an effective range of 5-10, with optimal outcomes around 6-7.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control
If you watched the hearing, you will have noticed many of the congressmen and women, after asking their questions in a harsh, accusatory manner, sometimes speaking over the witnesses, turn down to their laps to look at their Apple or Google phones, Google search something, post it to Twitter and or Facebook, and maybe purchase something on Amazon for good measure.
That kind of illustrates the point that these companies just might be too big, but what I don't hear anyone discussing are the potential consequences of breaking these companies up--they are a hard dependency in some way for most of the American populace if not the world's day to day operations and the quality of their services is largely reliant on their scale--I don't think the analogy to Standard Oil does justice to the complexity of the situation. We're not talking about a simple consumer product here, we're talking about complicated data-driven services, services that all rely on access to massive pools of information collected over years at this point, once you fragment the access to that data, the services will no longer perform as they currently do--then what will happen to the little guy we're trying to protect from the big boys who relies on Facebook and Google to advertise, Amazon to feed part of his supply chain, and Apple hardware? How might his business look if you suddenly swap out all of these behemoth quality services he depends on for disjointed shadows of their former selves, many of which will no longer be able to justify the gratis offerings and free tiers they currently can?
Not saying it these giants shouldn't be broken up, just saying it's a process that will require a lot of incredibly careful thought and to be honest I'm not confident those with the power to make the decisions in this case have all the tools they need to ensure such a transition happens without having catastrophic side-effects.
That kind of illustrates the point that these companies just might be too big, but what I don't hear anyone discussing are the potential consequences of breaking these companies up--they are a hard dependency in some way for most of the American populace if not the world's day to day operations and the quality of their services is largely reliant on their scale--I don't think the analogy to Standard Oil does justice to the complexity of the situation. We're not talking about a simple consumer product here, we're talking about complicated data-driven services, services that all rely on access to massive pools of information collected over years at this point, once you fragment the access to that data, the services will no longer perform as they currently do--then what will happen to the little guy we're trying to protect from the big boys who relies on Facebook and Google to advertise, Amazon to feed part of his supply chain, and Apple hardware? How might his business look if you suddenly swap out all of these behemoth quality services he depends on for disjointed shadows of their former selves, many of which will no longer be able to justify the gratis offerings and free tiers they currently can?
Not saying it these giants shouldn't be broken up, just saying it's a process that will require a lot of incredibly careful thought and to be honest I'm not confident those with the power to make the decisions in this case have all the tools they need to ensure such a transition happens without having catastrophic side-effects.
>That kind of illustrates the point that these companies just might be too big
While these companies are big in every sense, they are not load bearing structures of the economy.
What I mean is that they are big, but say Google fails overnight. None of the phones work, none of their services work. There will be short term pain, losses and perhaps some economic impact too. However, the world will move on relatively quickly. There will be another tech company, or a bunch of companies to replace it. There will be new areas of economy opening up to competing products and services. Youtubers will move to platforms like Twitch, email gets moved to Hey (perhaps?), communication moves to platforms like Zoom and what not.
In a few months or perhaps a year, hardware makers will pivot to a new OS, new services, new products. Business will go on, with or without whatsapp / gmail / what not. Credit flow will not stop, businesses will not stop producing goods and services. If a business depends on Google for distribution of it's services, it will eventually find other ways to do it, perhaps through twitter, or email marketing or SMS or what not.
Coming to data collected over the years. Lets say all the data google ever collected gets deleted this instant. The most hurt people are the advertisers, who will start buying generic, non targeted ads for some time and then slowly move to other platforms.
However on the flip side, a company like Google has very real power to influence public thought, manufacture consent, hide facism, nudge elections, lobby congress for unfair playing grounds, etc.
Companies like Google, Facebook & Apple are big, but in a lopsided way. Too much power to do harm, but not really a 'catastrophic' effect on daily lives of people, in the long term. They are important, but not structural. They provide jobs, but are not irreplaceable. Their power to do good is substantial, but their goal to increase shareholder value comes first.
In my view, big tech companies ought to be churned, by force if necessary, to prevent monopolistic or oligopolistic entities.
Imagine what havoc Facebook can wreak with society, if it actively starts promoting one political spectrum, and suppresses the other. The sad part is, it may already be doing that and we just can't damn know.
While these companies are big in every sense, they are not load bearing structures of the economy.
What I mean is that they are big, but say Google fails overnight. None of the phones work, none of their services work. There will be short term pain, losses and perhaps some economic impact too. However, the world will move on relatively quickly. There will be another tech company, or a bunch of companies to replace it. There will be new areas of economy opening up to competing products and services. Youtubers will move to platforms like Twitch, email gets moved to Hey (perhaps?), communication moves to platforms like Zoom and what not.
In a few months or perhaps a year, hardware makers will pivot to a new OS, new services, new products. Business will go on, with or without whatsapp / gmail / what not. Credit flow will not stop, businesses will not stop producing goods and services. If a business depends on Google for distribution of it's services, it will eventually find other ways to do it, perhaps through twitter, or email marketing or SMS or what not.
Coming to data collected over the years. Lets say all the data google ever collected gets deleted this instant. The most hurt people are the advertisers, who will start buying generic, non targeted ads for some time and then slowly move to other platforms.
However on the flip side, a company like Google has very real power to influence public thought, manufacture consent, hide facism, nudge elections, lobby congress for unfair playing grounds, etc.
Companies like Google, Facebook & Apple are big, but in a lopsided way. Too much power to do harm, but not really a 'catastrophic' effect on daily lives of people, in the long term. They are important, but not structural. They provide jobs, but are not irreplaceable. Their power to do good is substantial, but their goal to increase shareholder value comes first.
In my view, big tech companies ought to be churned, by force if necessary, to prevent monopolistic or oligopolistic entities.
Imagine what havoc Facebook can wreak with society, if it actively starts promoting one political spectrum, and suppresses the other. The sad part is, it may already be doing that and we just can't damn know.
There isn't a company in the world (except maybe Microsoft, with Outlook, and Azure to build on) who are in a position to even think about stepping in to replace Google's biggest services, and the businesses that are built on, and integrate with, them. Even with a year's notice, let alone overnight.
I think you're drastically underestimating the scale (and number - you missed Google Maps, which is bordering on an essential service) of these systems, the degree to which people rely on them - both businesses and individuals - and the difficulty of replacing them.
If Google failed overnight it would be a macro-economically significant event.
I think you're drastically underestimating the scale (and number - you missed Google Maps, which is bordering on an essential service) of these systems, the degree to which people rely on them - both businesses and individuals - and the difficulty of replacing them.
If Google failed overnight it would be a macro-economically significant event.
I would not consider GMaps as an "essential" service. One, I can find my way around my city well. Two, I can find my way around my country well too, even with offline maps.
Also, you seem to forget that there are other mapping companies out there. Google Maps itself came into picture after crushing Satnav systems like Garmin, and Nokia Maps.
If Google Maps were to be dead today, again, it is inconvenience, but people would move on.
As to stepping into the most biggest services? What are they? Google search? I am sure venture capital would flow into other companies that are technically capable to provide internet search. You have Bing, DDG, etc. Sure, they are crap, but they are not end of the world. And they will improve. Google Mail? I can live without it. I can choose other providers. There are hundreds out there. Heck, I will setup my own mail server.
People do rely on many Google services, but people can also get by without any of that.
In an event of Google failing right now, it would sure be a macro-economically significant event, but for a very tiny section of the population. And they too would move on.
Until it fails, people will talk and talk and talk about big, size, impact, and other nonsense.
Just see when it fails. It's going to be a collective shrug from 99% of the population.
Also, you seem to forget that there are other mapping companies out there. Google Maps itself came into picture after crushing Satnav systems like Garmin, and Nokia Maps.
If Google Maps were to be dead today, again, it is inconvenience, but people would move on.
As to stepping into the most biggest services? What are they? Google search? I am sure venture capital would flow into other companies that are technically capable to provide internet search. You have Bing, DDG, etc. Sure, they are crap, but they are not end of the world. And they will improve. Google Mail? I can live without it. I can choose other providers. There are hundreds out there. Heck, I will setup my own mail server.
People do rely on many Google services, but people can also get by without any of that.
In an event of Google failing right now, it would sure be a macro-economically significant event, but for a very tiny section of the population. And they too would move on.
Until it fails, people will talk and talk and talk about big, size, impact, and other nonsense.
Just see when it fails. It's going to be a collective shrug from 99% of the population.
> You have Bing, DDG, etc. Sure, they are crap, but they are not end of the world.
They aren't, though. Google's search is no longer the undisputed best by any fair and comprehensive assessment.
Here's a recent search I actually made:
https://i.imgur.com/9A4ORwo.png
Google's page might be better-looking and have more sophisticated features than DuckDuckGo, but in terms of the quality of the service I am trying to use? Google is unquestionably inferior to DDG.
Fun fact, on my android device, Google has ZERO results visible at first. I have to scroll past an ad to get to the results. (Often, there are multiple ads that must be scrolled past to get to the content).
Maybe only dinosaurs like me actually use web search to search for web pages rather than to have a guided AI-driven experience, but that's the product I'm looking for. DDG delivers that, Google does not.
This is all outside the greater issue of the web in general and searched-web especially becoming massively clogged with low-quality, overly ad-laden content. If anyone remembers the state of the web when Google first came onto the scene, the problems were similar. Most advertising was obnoxious, intrusive, and costly in an era when bandwidth was scarce. Google came on the scene offering (a) the best search product and (b) discreet, polite, often relevant ads that didn't trigger all sane people to install ad-blockers.
The difference is that in 2000, the internet ad market was tiny compared to today. The audiences were different, also.
They aren't, though. Google's search is no longer the undisputed best by any fair and comprehensive assessment.
Here's a recent search I actually made:
https://i.imgur.com/9A4ORwo.png
Google's page might be better-looking and have more sophisticated features than DuckDuckGo, but in terms of the quality of the service I am trying to use? Google is unquestionably inferior to DDG.
Fun fact, on my android device, Google has ZERO results visible at first. I have to scroll past an ad to get to the results. (Often, there are multiple ads that must be scrolled past to get to the content).
Maybe only dinosaurs like me actually use web search to search for web pages rather than to have a guided AI-driven experience, but that's the product I'm looking for. DDG delivers that, Google does not.
This is all outside the greater issue of the web in general and searched-web especially becoming massively clogged with low-quality, overly ad-laden content. If anyone remembers the state of the web when Google first came onto the scene, the problems were similar. Most advertising was obnoxious, intrusive, and costly in an era when bandwidth was scarce. Google came on the scene offering (a) the best search product and (b) discreet, polite, often relevant ads that didn't trigger all sane people to install ad-blockers.
The difference is that in 2000, the internet ad market was tiny compared to today. The audiences were different, also.
I think you're drastically underestimating the scale (and number - you missed Google Maps, which is bordering on an essential service) of these systems, the degree to which people rely on them - both businesses and individuals - and the difficulty of replacing them.
I don't know how old you are but I suspect this is an age thing. I remember the world before Google, before smartphones, before mobile phones even. It actually worked pretty well. People had jobs, traveled, communicated over long distances, read the news, invested in shares, organised events with friends, bought products, and everything else. Google at vast cost has made some of those things marginally more convenient, as well as introducing a whole raft of new problems. They could go away and it would be a blip nothing more. As for Google Maps I also remember when everyone owned an "A-Z" and found their way around cities with it, and that was OK too, and there was very little misleading information in an A-Z nor squabbles over who "owned" which business and could write about it!
If Google failed overnight it would be a macro-economically significant event.
Other than their shareholders and a bunch of sleazy adtech merchants without which the world would be better off anyway, very few would be negatively impacted beyond a minor inconvenience for a few weeks.
I don't know how old you are but I suspect this is an age thing. I remember the world before Google, before smartphones, before mobile phones even. It actually worked pretty well. People had jobs, traveled, communicated over long distances, read the news, invested in shares, organised events with friends, bought products, and everything else. Google at vast cost has made some of those things marginally more convenient, as well as introducing a whole raft of new problems. They could go away and it would be a blip nothing more. As for Google Maps I also remember when everyone owned an "A-Z" and found their way around cities with it, and that was OK too, and there was very little misleading information in an A-Z nor squabbles over who "owned" which business and could write about it!
If Google failed overnight it would be a macro-economically significant event.
Other than their shareholders and a bunch of sleazy adtech merchants without which the world would be better off anyway, very few would be negatively impacted beyond a minor inconvenience for a few weeks.
I’m old enough to remember all of these things you’ve condescendingly assumed I must be ignorant of, including trying to find my way around LA freeways, during my first hours in America, at night, with a paper map unfolded on my lap, trying to work my way backwards from the address of our motel to our current location, as that changed constantly at 60 mph.
Google Maps is much better.
But you’re missing my point, and also the specific thing I was replying to. My point was not that things didn’t work before Google, obviously they did - we’re here, now. The universe didn’t start with Google. My point is that so many businesses and people today are directly, constantly, relying on the multitude of Google services that if Google went away overnight it would be a catastrophe for them. Google going away overnight is the thing that was posited in the post I replied to.
I also made no assertion about whether Google is a net good or not, so again you’re replying to something I didn’t say.
(For the record I do believe sum of the services provided by Google and the cost at which they provide them is a net good for the world. No, In not interested in debating that)
Google Maps is much better.
But you’re missing my point, and also the specific thing I was replying to. My point was not that things didn’t work before Google, obviously they did - we’re here, now. The universe didn’t start with Google. My point is that so many businesses and people today are directly, constantly, relying on the multitude of Google services that if Google went away overnight it would be a catastrophe for them. Google going away overnight is the thing that was posited in the post I replied to.
I also made no assertion about whether Google is a net good or not, so again you’re replying to something I didn’t say.
(For the record I do believe sum of the services provided by Google and the cost at which they provide them is a net good for the world. No, In not interested in debating that)
Losing YouTube would be like the sacking of the Great Library
If you are talking about videos that teach something, for most of youtubers out there that churn out quality content, they will have a library of videos that they will upload to an alternate site. Things will be back up in no time.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. What's the worst that could happen in YT is dead now, people go back to not wasting time on YT Binges.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. What's the worst that could happen in YT is dead now, people go back to not wasting time on YT Binges.
When I think of situations like that, I think it's an ecosystem and if youtube would be limited or disappear lots of other services would spring up.
I’m in full agreement with the social and political concerns you raise, and I think it’s the strongest argument for breaking up these companies, but I don’t think the economy is as flexible or pliable as you assume—especially when the small companies that would try to replace some of the services the big guys offer often rely on a subset of these very services (e.g. cloud services).
I’m not convinced a start up can get to the same level of quality as these big four within a year or so—and that dip in quality will have palpable economic effects, sure it may not cause a collapse, but you’d experience a slow down of the economic engine for sure, and it'd last longer than a year—basically it’d last as long as it took for some other company to reach monopoly size—concentration of wealth and economic power is a flaw internal to the structure of capitalism itself and is the inevitable telos of capitalistic structure.
I think a better way to place limits on the social and political power of these companies is to put in greater data protections. Make these companies pay for user data, make it incredibly difficult for them to abuse data or users, that would help restrict their influence and open up avenues for competition—a smaller company may not have as great of a service but if they offer users greater compensation for their data they can draw in customers.
I’m not convinced a start up can get to the same level of quality as these big four within a year or so—and that dip in quality will have palpable economic effects, sure it may not cause a collapse, but you’d experience a slow down of the economic engine for sure, and it'd last longer than a year—basically it’d last as long as it took for some other company to reach monopoly size—concentration of wealth and economic power is a flaw internal to the structure of capitalism itself and is the inevitable telos of capitalistic structure.
I think a better way to place limits on the social and political power of these companies is to put in greater data protections. Make these companies pay for user data, make it incredibly difficult for them to abuse data or users, that would help restrict their influence and open up avenues for competition—a smaller company may not have as great of a service but if they offer users greater compensation for their data they can draw in customers.
If Google search vanished overnight the world would turn to DDG within a day. Ok, that would probably crash their servers but I'm sure they and other search engines could scale up quickly.
DuckDuckGo "most commonly" uses Bing for link search results, so it would mostly be redirecting queries to Microsoft: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
You're trivializing search. DDG only works because for the hard stuff it's grandfathered into an old Bing API. DDG is small and scrappy but it's built on the shoulders of a giant investing billions of dollars.
Nonetheless, they have customers because a need (for privacy) hasn't been met by others. They're also probably making microsoft money.
(I just wonder if microsoft has some sort of method of identifying or matching queries with actual people)
(I just wonder if microsoft has some sort of method of identifying or matching queries with actual people)
Right, but the average person doesn't know about DDG--sure word would catch on, but the initial break would cause major friction for the vast majority of people.
Also, what happens to all that data in stowed away in other services? What happens, with Gmail if it's separated from the ads division? Do they suddenly start charging everyone to use it? Can they still run ads in Gmail? Would they have access to the infra serving those ads? If they flame out completely do we lose all our data? Will they give us a chance to export it? In what format?....
I just can't help but feel these sorts of breaks would be extremely difficult to get right.
Also, what happens to all that data in stowed away in other services? What happens, with Gmail if it's separated from the ads division? Do they suddenly start charging everyone to use it? Can they still run ads in Gmail? Would they have access to the infra serving those ads? If they flame out completely do we lose all our data? Will they give us a chance to export it? In what format?....
I just can't help but feel these sorts of breaks would be extremely difficult to get right.
Swapping one monopoly for another really isn't the answer we want.
Speaking as one who worked with many who'd cheared Microsoft over IBM, who myself once saw Google, and later Apple, as just deserts for Microsoft's own monopoly abuses, and presently relies principally on DDG for Web search, and acknowledges that it too relies heavily, though not exclusively, on Microsoft's Bing.
Providing a useful tech capacity without winner-take-all monopolies should be the goal. And result.
Speaking as one who worked with many who'd cheared Microsoft over IBM, who myself once saw Google, and later Apple, as just deserts for Microsoft's own monopoly abuses, and presently relies principally on DDG for Web search, and acknowledges that it too relies heavily, though not exclusively, on Microsoft's Bing.
Providing a useful tech capacity without winner-take-all monopolies should be the goal. And result.
Search naturally tends towards monopoly; nobody wants to navigate to half a dozen separate sites to and parse through the results of each individually to find what they want.
All of them would be ad supported too, thanks to the fact that we in the software industry have conditioned users to expect things for "free" and advertisers would also want to put the bulk of their ad dollars toward the most effective search engine to get the most bang for the buck, again reinforcing the trend toward monopoly.
The only alternative that comes to mind is to make search a government run public utility but, as I'm sure a number of you are thinking rather loudly right now, that comes with its own set of problems.
All of them would be ad supported too, thanks to the fact that we in the software industry have conditioned users to expect things for "free" and advertisers would also want to put the bulk of their ad dollars toward the most effective search engine to get the most bang for the buck, again reinforcing the trend toward monopoly.
The only alternative that comes to mind is to make search a government run public utility but, as I'm sure a number of you are thinking rather loudly right now, that comes with its own set of problems.
How does one address monopoly in similar circumstances?
I mean, honestly, it would just be a massive surge of users to Bing. I don't think any of the other competitors have the existing public name recognition.
After switching to DDG (and recently, Bing after switching to Edge), I don't think Google's stock web-search is that much better. Not saying it's not better - it is - but if it disappeared from the face of the Earth, we'd all survive perfectly well on the alternatives.
Google Maps, though, is still unquestionably king. It is ludicrous how poor the alternatives are.
Google Maps, though, is still unquestionably king. It is ludicrous how poor the alternatives are.
In the west there's just two full search engines backing all the others anyways. None of the others have the infrastructure to index the internet
> ... turn down to their laps to look at their Apple or Google phones, Google search something, ...
This reminds me of the article where the newspapers know when a senator or congressman is reading their article. Maybe these are seasoned politicians, but I wonder how much subtle influence will wend its way into government going forward.
This reminds me of the article where the newspapers know when a senator or congressman is reading their article. Maybe these are seasoned politicians, but I wonder how much subtle influence will wend its way into government going forward.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I was responding to the part of OP's comment that alleges that Gmail is only big for personal email, and there's not a lot of that being sent. Gmail is clearly massive for enterprise email. I'm also not sure why this wouldn't correspond to market share in number of emails sent. All of those enterprises using Gmail are sending tons of emails internally.
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?).
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?).
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.
Same. But I got a glimpse when I spent some time working at an established east coast company how much Microsoft is used for absolutely everything. I hadn't even heard of SharePoint but it is a whole massive universe unto itself.
Microsoft is huge for legacy companies. It integrates really well now with Office and while it was worse a few years back, it definitely seems to have improved now.
Among my cohort (20s-30s), I'd say it's 99% gmail. Is there something equally hegemonic for West Europe? A lot of my german friends use GMX but I don't see as much from other countries.
For personal email of people in The Netherlands that I know it's a mix of Gmail, hotmail.com (so Outlook.com, but old accounts) and ISP-provided email. Older people being disproportionately more likely to use their ISP, and younger people being more likely to use Gmail. The Hotmail accounts all seem to be from the time that MSN Messenger was incredibly popular, forming essentially the first social network. Those people are in their mid-20s. I'm not sure about the overall distribution.
London based here, my company is on G suit as well.
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!)
> 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.
Don't forget that GoogleApps/Gmail (and google classroom) is also rather popular in education.
I do wonder how many emails they receive though...
>> 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.
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.
But do 300*10^9 emails really get sent through gmail every day or is that in general?
Sorry lots of folks use their own domain name with google, gmail.com is just some of the email.
I assume everybody would understand that the overall numbers are a combination of gmail.com and GSuite.
Anecdotally, I just glanced at my inbox and found that I received no emails from individuals within my 20 most recent emails.
I can’t remember the last time I got a personal email outside of work.
I doubt I've broken triple digits on how many personal e-mails I've sent/received, and that's on a beta-era account.
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.
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.
Google is quickly becoming the Evil Empire of Microsoft of the Nineties (who, in turn, has managed to pull a 180). The soul left with Larry/Sergei/Eric, and we have corporate drones at the top seeking to maximize shareholder value.
It's only a matter of time before reputation catches up.
At the same time, Google is much less suited to weather a storm:
1) This quote struck me: “You can paper over a lot of problems by throwing money at it and hiring more bodies,” says a long-time Googler, who previously worked for Microsoft. Google went from a small, elite team of the smartest guys in the room, to just bringing in bodies with a pulse. The screening processes are, as has been mentioned many times, simply random.
2) The old culture carried elitism and arrogance, which kind of works if you're competent, but much less so when mixed in with incompetence. Cultural problems are tough to clean up. Wrong and arrogant about it is very poor.
3) Short-term profits are up, and they'll rise for a while yet, but the fundamentals seem to be increasingly evaporating. Switching from Google has a lot less friction than switching from Microsoft. Goodwill was a fundamental for Google. Even when Google tries to be good, it doesn't follow universal values. It's all grounded in a left-wing ideology that resonates with a tiny fraction of its customer base. We can all agree with helping the poor. A lot of people don't agree with identity politics.
It takes 5 minutes to switch search from Google to DDG, so I don't think there's the same stickiness as having Microsoft file formats and APIs.
It's only a matter of time before reputation catches up.
At the same time, Google is much less suited to weather a storm:
1) This quote struck me: “You can paper over a lot of problems by throwing money at it and hiring more bodies,” says a long-time Googler, who previously worked for Microsoft. Google went from a small, elite team of the smartest guys in the room, to just bringing in bodies with a pulse. The screening processes are, as has been mentioned many times, simply random.
2) The old culture carried elitism and arrogance, which kind of works if you're competent, but much less so when mixed in with incompetence. Cultural problems are tough to clean up. Wrong and arrogant about it is very poor.
3) Short-term profits are up, and they'll rise for a while yet, but the fundamentals seem to be increasingly evaporating. Switching from Google has a lot less friction than switching from Microsoft. Goodwill was a fundamental for Google. Even when Google tries to be good, it doesn't follow universal values. It's all grounded in a left-wing ideology that resonates with a tiny fraction of its customer base. We can all agree with helping the poor. A lot of people don't agree with identity politics.
It takes 5 minutes to switch search from Google to DDG, so I don't think there's the same stickiness as having Microsoft file formats and APIs.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Thanks, was looking for non-paywall version.
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.
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
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Really, in the age of Amazon you're arguing for Wal-Mart to be broken up?
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.
Age of Amazon is just a narrative which is no way to decide monopoly.
"15% of total retail sales in Grocery, Home furnishings, Electronics, Apparel, Sporting goods, General merchandise and Office supplies"
That's not all of retail. It's certain categories in retail. It's significant, but Amazon has a much broader selection of products and competes in far more sectors of the retail industry than Walmart does. Also, looking forward, over the next 10-20 years and given the changes in the marketplace, who do you think is best poised to dominate retail for the foreseeable future: Walmart or Amazon?
https://blog.pipecandy.com/walmart-market-share-story/
As Peter Thiel said in Zero to One, monopolies seek to define their sectors in the broadest terms possible in order to avoid being classified as such.
That's not all of retail. It's certain categories in retail. It's significant, but Amazon has a much broader selection of products and competes in far more sectors of the retail industry than Walmart does. Also, looking forward, over the next 10-20 years and given the changes in the marketplace, who do you think is best poised to dominate retail for the foreseeable future: Walmart or Amazon?
https://blog.pipecandy.com/walmart-market-share-story/
As Peter Thiel said in Zero to One, monopolies seek to define their sectors in the broadest terms possible in order to avoid being classified as such.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So there was this thinking in the 60s that the key skill of a firm is management, and so if one firm was a market leader in manufacturing pipes, they could buy up a struggling auto rental or accountancy firm and with their superior management skills they would make those better as well. This at least was the justification for a wave of conglomerates buying up smaller firms.
Others might say a better justification was the cheap corporate credit available to some (but not all) firms, and thus the competitive advantage of conglomerates was access to credit, rather than management. The smaller firms and individuals did not have the same access to credit.
But in the 80s, the pendulum began to swing the other way. The problem from the perspective of the credit markets -- whether shareholders or bondholders -- was the difficulty in obtaining detailed operational information from these large conglomerates. They became very opaque, as they could use the losses of one firm to subsidize another, and it was hard to drill down and figure out what was happening by looking at the financial statements. So then began a wave of slicing these companies up and selling off the pieces.
Or from a completely different perspective, it was the extension of new types of credit such as junk bonds that allowed insiders to do leveraged buyouts, which tipped the scales away from the conglomerates and led to a lot of asset sales that "unlocked value" while other operations were shutdown.
Not saying who is right, just offering some perspective that these arguments have been engaged with 60 years ago, and ended up with mixed results.
Others might say a better justification was the cheap corporate credit available to some (but not all) firms, and thus the competitive advantage of conglomerates was access to credit, rather than management. The smaller firms and individuals did not have the same access to credit.
But in the 80s, the pendulum began to swing the other way. The problem from the perspective of the credit markets -- whether shareholders or bondholders -- was the difficulty in obtaining detailed operational information from these large conglomerates. They became very opaque, as they could use the losses of one firm to subsidize another, and it was hard to drill down and figure out what was happening by looking at the financial statements. So then began a wave of slicing these companies up and selling off the pieces.
Or from a completely different perspective, it was the extension of new types of credit such as junk bonds that allowed insiders to do leveraged buyouts, which tipped the scales away from the conglomerates and led to a lot of asset sales that "unlocked value" while other operations were shutdown.
Not saying who is right, just offering some perspective that these arguments have been engaged with 60 years ago, and ended up with mixed results.
Yes, exactly. The notion that there's clear evidence that breaking up firms unlocks value is simply not true. What is true is that not all firms are well-run and when you change the corporate structure or management style you sometimes make a huge improvement. But it's certainly not universally true.
> "Siemens is an investment bank that happens to own
All conglomerates are like this, the clearest example is Berkshire Hathaway.
All conglomerates are like this, the clearest example is Berkshire Hathaway.
Exactly. Why not break up Berkshire?
I vaguely think people have written how having the insurance business attached to the others is a useful/complementary structure, compared to a regular mutual fund or something.
Maybe you could ask from the opposite perspective, why aren't all mutual funds organized like BRK?
Maybe you could ask from the opposite perspective, why aren't all mutual funds organized like BRK?
Berkshire is for all intents broken up, everything operates independently.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can't separate Doubleclick/Ads business of Alphabet into its own company in a good faith anti-trust breakup of the conglomerate, most of the other facets would likely tank within 18 months without (specifically, the ones dependent on ad revenue to remain solvent). You'd have breakup the ads business and give a piece to various resulting companies, otherwise most offshoots wouldn't have a viable positive revenue model to save themselves from immediate financial collapse.
> You can't separate Doubleclick/Ads business of Alphabet into its own company in a good faith anti-trust breakup of the conglomerate
Yes you can.
> most of the other facets would likely tank within 18 months without (specifically, the ones dependent on ad revenue to remain solvent).
Business models don't have a right to exist just because they "work" for the moment.
> You'd have breakup the ads business and give a piece to various resulting companies, otherwise most offshoots wouldn't have a viable positive revenue model to save themselves from immediate financial collapse.
I think there's an argument to be made that anything that "must" exist could be paid for by taxes (and likewise open sourced and publicly owned). However, I honestly don't see much of Google's business model that "must" exist. Not Gmail, not Meet, and certainly not Ads. Possibly Chrome.
Yes you can.
> most of the other facets would likely tank within 18 months without (specifically, the ones dependent on ad revenue to remain solvent).
Business models don't have a right to exist just because they "work" for the moment.
> You'd have breakup the ads business and give a piece to various resulting companies, otherwise most offshoots wouldn't have a viable positive revenue model to save themselves from immediate financial collapse.
I think there's an argument to be made that anything that "must" exist could be paid for by taxes (and likewise open sourced and publicly owned). However, I honestly don't see much of Google's business model that "must" exist. Not Gmail, not Meet, and certainly not Ads. Possibly Chrome.
Sure, you want the government to step in and outlaw Google. That’s doesn’t have much to do with the topic of an anti-trust breakup and is exactly what the parent meant when they said the proposal is not in good faith.
> Sure, you want the government to step in and outlaw Google.
No. I want the government to step in and break up Google into distinct business units. That doesn't mean outlawing Google at all.
No. I want the government to step in and break up Google into distinct business units. That doesn't mean outlawing Google at all.
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?
Also, who gets the datacenters? The existing traffic peering agreements? The subsea cables? Google’s core technical infrastructure can’t be “divvied up” without destroying it. It would have to look something like Google’s entire technical infrastructure going to Google Cloud and the all of the existing products becoming customers of that company.
Maybe the data centers are a separate off-shoot and all the other services "license" from it. Who knows what smart individuals could come up with in that regard. It's like untangling a giant code-base at the end of the day. Right now, the data centers (and other google properties/capabilities) are kinda like a bunch of global variables/state/functions. By splitting google up, you have to identify interfaces and contracts between large silos and make sure all interactions go across those boundaries instead of being "deeply" intertwined and reliant with each other.
Who knows, this might even make Google more competitive at the end of the day. If anything, it could make the "ROI" and financial metrics of their individual products more explicit instead of nebulous "cross-subsidizing" centers.
Who knows, this might even make Google more competitive at the end of the day. If anything, it could make the "ROI" and financial metrics of their individual products more explicit instead of nebulous "cross-subsidizing" centers.
Wouldn't this give other companies in other countries (who thereby can't be split up) more power and prominence?
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.
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.
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.
Besides. They. Dont. Pay. Taxes. In. The. Country. They. Claim. To. Be. Protecting.
> 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...
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...
Can you provide more evidence of this?
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.
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.
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.
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.
To be fair, many children have asked that question of their own parents.
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.
> 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.
Doing things you’re really good at brings lots of people joy. Those people are really good at running companies. A 75 year old artist or novelist who keeps working doesn’t get too many people asking why, not does anyone ask Arnold why he’s still on the steroids, steak and gym plan. Overwhelmingly the people who are the best on the world at something enjoy it.
Doing things you’re really good at brings lots of people joy. Those people are really good at running companies. A 75 year old artist or novelist who keeps working doesn’t get too many people asking why, not does anyone ask Arnold why he’s still on the steroids, steak and gym plan. Overwhelmingly the people who are the best on the world at something enjoy it.
> 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.
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.
> Why are you doing this?
No offence but if you ask such questions you probably wont become a billionaire. These guys have a different drive and ambition, you dont just lose it when you become old (and still be healthy)
No offence but if you ask such questions you probably wont become a billionaire. These guys have a different drive and ambition, you dont just lose it when you become old (and still be healthy)
> 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?
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?
Thisoght be one of my favorite hacker news comments I've ever read.
Yeah, I think the OP is spot on; this is exactly the sort of thing that spurs i.e. Bill Gates. He basically won the omega-lottery, and then was like "okay, now that I've rubbed the genie's lamp and have a bajillion dollars - what do I actually want to do with my life? Someone else can run the helm and keep the money machine churning, but is there a better purpose for me, personally?"
I think in the case of microsoft, there was also an angle that, yeah, on some level microsoft itself had been a changing-the-world-for-the-better venture in and of itself, but Gates' own agency within that was no longer important, because the core part of it was already done.
Sometimes the job of a "visionary CEO" is just to bring the horse to water; to riff on Netscape, for example, someone had to build the first mass-market web browser, and it was very technically hard, and had to be done well enough on the first go to dodge the nintendo virtual-boy trap, which meant that for a while, it had to be a really successful business. But once someone made a really well-made web browser, and accultured a large number of people that "a web browser and a a world-wide-web" are important things for humanity to have - after that, it was likely that the building of web browsers would become a self-sustaining reaction constantly pulling in really smart people, much better qualified than the original developers.
At that point the original guys could choose to die at the chalkboard, but they can practically just sit back and watch, and sometimes even if you stay involved, its smart to take a backseat role and let the folks who will be your successors get used to the role (in fact, a lot of times, it's much better to focus on training them, and make sure lots of the intangibles you may have only done "incidentally" are also getting passed on).
I think in the case of microsoft, there was also an angle that, yeah, on some level microsoft itself had been a changing-the-world-for-the-better venture in and of itself, but Gates' own agency within that was no longer important, because the core part of it was already done.
Sometimes the job of a "visionary CEO" is just to bring the horse to water; to riff on Netscape, for example, someone had to build the first mass-market web browser, and it was very technically hard, and had to be done well enough on the first go to dodge the nintendo virtual-boy trap, which meant that for a while, it had to be a really successful business. But once someone made a really well-made web browser, and accultured a large number of people that "a web browser and a a world-wide-web" are important things for humanity to have - after that, it was likely that the building of web browsers would become a self-sustaining reaction constantly pulling in really smart people, much better qualified than the original developers.
At that point the original guys could choose to die at the chalkboard, but they can practically just sit back and watch, and sometimes even if you stay involved, its smart to take a backseat role and let the folks who will be your successors get used to the role (in fact, a lot of times, it's much better to focus on training them, and make sure lots of the intangibles you may have only done "incidentally" are also getting passed on).
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.
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.
You don't hear about what they're up to because they can afford what they've taken from everyone else: Privacy.
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.
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.
Since the article is login-walled I can only generally comment. The hard part of competing against Google is they have seemingly infinite discretionary money and computing power to throw at a problem. Normal businesses have to be profitable to survive, but Google can subsidize loss leaders with their advertising/search profits and still win in the end because it all feeds into their data collection and strengthens their core business. Meanwhile competitors in this areas get squeezed out.
Take Google Flights for example. They purchased ITA and eventually closed external API access. The expensive computations are likely done via GCP for a cheaper rate. Travel sites pay billions of dollars to Google for ad rankings, yet Google can still promote their travel tools (search "Flights to San Francisco" to see a custom UI that links to Google Flights) in search results, and once you book a flight it creates a trip for you in Gmail.
See: https://www.pymnts.com/antitrust/2020/google-under-fire-alle...
Disclaimer: I do work for a competitor but this is just my own personal observation.
Take Google Flights for example. They purchased ITA and eventually closed external API access. The expensive computations are likely done via GCP for a cheaper rate. Travel sites pay billions of dollars to Google for ad rankings, yet Google can still promote their travel tools (search "Flights to San Francisco" to see a custom UI that links to Google Flights) in search results, and once you book a flight it creates a trip for you in Gmail.
See: https://www.pymnts.com/antitrust/2020/google-under-fire-alle...
Disclaimer: I do work for a competitor but this is just my own personal observation.
The Achilles heel of Google is stricter privacy laws. Every other threat pales in comparison.
Apple can survive, and in fact thrives in an environment where privacy takes paramount importance.
Google cannot. Even FB may swim through, as it is driven by user actions. People post on it, share articles, chat on it, etc.
Google has a big moat now, and that moat will vanish if people start getting serious about privacy.
Apple can survive, and in fact thrives in an environment where privacy takes paramount importance.
Google cannot. Even FB may swim through, as it is driven by user actions. People post on it, share articles, chat on it, etc.
Google has a big moat now, and that moat will vanish if people start getting serious about privacy.
Really? I'd say it's the exact opposite between Facebook and Google. Google gets the majority of their ad revenue from search and search ads for me at least are always based on exactly what you are searching for. The other data is only useful seems to only be used for their ads on other peoples websites but that's only like 15% of their revenue. Facebook on the other hand advertises essentially based on your browser history and not on the content around it so they'd get hosed on stricter privacy laws.
>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).
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Of course, they do know the answer to those questions but their legal team told them to keep their mouths shut.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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And creators would either upload their videos to 100 different services, or users would only be able to find 1% as much content.
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.
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.
So now when I want to find videos on a topic, for many of the videos I’ll get a hundred hits for the same video uploaded to each service. But if the one I want was only uploaded to one device, it’ll be buried in a sea of hundreds of duplicates.
If using a search engine is the ordinary method of discovery then there would be no need to upload the same video to multiple services. Meanwhile if people did that anyway, the search engine would want to figure out how to merge the duplicates.
And let China be the only one with scale advantage?
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
Therefore, I highly doubt any legislation would ever be passed for this. (even though it may end up being much better for the consumer)
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.
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.
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.
>perhaps we could create artificial barriers that will re-enable competition
A fragmented market prevents competition, so I don't understand what you're trying to say. Like with your friendly local cable company.
A fragmented market prevents competition, so I don't understand what you're trying to say. Like with your friendly local cable company.
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.
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.
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.
This is why "we've had enough of experts" is such a dangerous mindset.
I'd argue that job is impossible - the most heavily legislated areas are the most dysfunctional -- because they don't understand.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I like this discussion a lot, because I agree that the regulations are pretty dumb, but I can't imagine a world without regulations that yields superior outcomes.
What kinds of improvements would improve the state of banking today that don't also throw the baby out with the bathwater?
What kinds of improvements would improve the state of banking today that don't also throw the baby out with the bathwater?
The biggest improvement they could make would be to create a class of accounts intended to never have a large enough account balance to be capable of incurring severe losses, and then waive most of the regulations for those accounts. Then you use the regulated accounts for your retirement savings, but keep a hundred bucks in an unregulated one to use for buying stuff on the internet, which could then be completely anonymous and have minimal transaction fees.
And what's to stop me creating thousands of these anonymous unregulated accounts to launder money? There are a lot of aspects to regulating the financial industry that have to account for the many different scenarios involved. The regulations for the finance industry aren't perfect but it is an incredibly difficult balance to strike.
What stops you from doing the same thing with cash and cash businesses? Nothing, why is why AML rules are pointless and should be abandoned because they're doing dramatically more harm than good.
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.
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.
Louis CK bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4
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.
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.
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.
To potentially reinterpret the GP, it isn't that we need to regulate scale, but that scale doesn't excuse you from being regulated.
Specifically in the case of YT, as an extreme example, if all video available online in a country had to be moderated by a human, YouTube couldn't operate at it's current scale. It doesn't have a right to skip those regulations because of it's scale.
If a company can't scale and still comply with regulations the answer isn't automatically to get rid of the regulations. The inverse is also true, if a society decides that a company operating in a given environment has to adhere to new regulations, being so big those regulations fundamentally affect your business model doesn't excuse the company from complying.
Specifically in the case of YT, as an extreme example, if all video available online in a country had to be moderated by a human, YouTube couldn't operate at it's current scale. It doesn't have a right to skip those regulations because of it's scale.
If a company can't scale and still comply with regulations the answer isn't automatically to get rid of the regulations. The inverse is also true, if a society decides that a company operating in a given environment has to adhere to new regulations, being so big those regulations fundamentally affect your business model doesn't excuse the company from complying.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
We need the 32GB so that slack can use 30 of them.
Yeah, it could, in theory, but it hasn't been, and I doubt it will. So the volume of email continues to be what it is, and thus, is much larger than the volume of Google searches. You've mode-switched from descriptivist to proscriptivist.
probably includes spam emails too
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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.
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.
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.
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.
On any given day approximately 23.37 million years of human experience occurs.
But there's a lot of crossover surely - families that live together we could consider "one" day's worth experience, minus the time they spend apart pooping or whatever.
Yeah that’s an interesting way of slicing it.
When people say “everyone’s different” I’m quite fond of saying things like “well, there’s 7.8 billion of us, surely we’re not all that different?”
When people say “everyone’s different” I’m quite fond of saying things like “well, there’s 7.8 billion of us, surely we’re not all that different?”
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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
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."
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.
Doesn’t that suggest a market need for another search engine for this purpose?
Meta-search? Searching the search engine..I like it.
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
Here's a nice one with many public instances you can try: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx
I constantly have trouble trying to find "that one tweet" from yesterday, a much less intimidating problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 $2.1m which is far, far, far cheaper than what we spend on plenty of things. Like I said above: This is not impossible. In fact, I bet the NSA is probably already doing it. At least for public videos. This truly is peanuts.
Is the average as relevant as some other statistical measure that I'm not knowledgeable enough to know about? For example if the vast majority of views are on 10% of the videos, the other 90% could be stored on less expensive hardware that has less bandwidth maybe?
edit: for example the average net worth of an American is 76,000$ but toss a couple billionaires in the mix, whose net worth is larger by such an enormous factor, that the "average" is misleading
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
[deleted]
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.)
(Of course, boiling a wide distribution of values down to a single value, no matter by which process, is fraught with problems.)
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.
We get time travel by 2034 so no issues - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor
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.
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.”
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.”
>$12,400 per megabyte
I believe the first hard drive cost about $100K/MB in today's money.
I believe the first hard drive cost about $100K/MB in today's money.
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.
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)).
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
Wouldn't want your only ice cube to melt
But also under aggressive and exotic compression.
I think we give google too much credit by assuming sophisticated moderation _algorithms_.
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.
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.
They still do that.
And it still actually works, the algorithms are sophisticated, but the heavy reliance on them leads to some serious blind spots.
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.
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.
But I guess that's the price to pay to be able to be "friends" with big media.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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...
Thats just one of their datacenters?! Thats huge!
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.
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.
This strangely seems like the outcome of a successful dwarf fortress
Plot twist: The beams are pressurized lava.
Seems like Bright Energy could do more to prevent bird deaths, such as nets or active scarecrows or audio deterrents.
Google wanting to draw 1.5 million gallons/day when the article says that across the state 330 million gallons/day are already drawn, mostly for agriculture, doesn’t seem like “scary pressuring of local government”.
IUUC the 1.5 million is all from a single rapidly disappearing aquifer, while the 333 million is, as you said, the total of all groundwater usage across the entire state.
The use also seems totally unnecessary, as to use an example from the article, the NSA's Fort Meade data center uses wastewater.
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....
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....
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.
> 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.
Sorry, my mistake. The point your were trying to make is very interesting too.
Even harder and even more expensive to extract if you give a damn about the environment.
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.
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."
Like my dad said, "when someone shows you who they are, believe them."
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 naïve").
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 naïve").
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.
> 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.
Good point! Your comment has made me curious about the total lifecycle of the waste products from these processes.
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)
(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)
Nowhere does that say that REEs are used in chips.
At least they are recoverable and recyclable, oil not so much.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
The rare earth metals are kinda irritating to separate because they have very similar physical properties, but it obviously can be done. They frequently co-occur in ore deposits for exactly that reason.
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.
Gold is recovered in significant quantities from e-waste[1]
1: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/electronic-devices-source-of-m...
1: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/electronic-devices-source-of-m...
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).
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...
1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/02/10bn-pre...
> 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...
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...
> 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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
That might not last, the younger crowd seems to be going for TikTok these days.
> 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.
I don't think that he's succeeding at the innovation part but that won't matter as long as their financials look good.
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.
Arguably, Google still has a lot of in-house talent, but optimizing for the financial aspect usually ties talent down sooner or later.
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.
See also the Innovator's Dilemma.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not concentrating on profit seems to have served Amazon rather well.
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.
Netflix is also borrowing money for an “asset” that is worth less over time - content.
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.
Every company has lots of smart people, it is how it utilizes them that concretely matters.
That only follows if smart is confined to pure ideas and none to implementation. The relevant "stable" of smart in that context are ones who can implement ideas successfully.
Like the difference between trying to use a bunch of dutch style windmills, lodestones, and copper wire to try to generate baseload power as opposed to modern escalatingly large wind turbines.
Like the difference between trying to use a bunch of dutch style windmills, lodestones, and copper wire to try to generate baseload power as opposed to modern escalatingly large wind turbines.
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.
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.
They write this as if that hasn't already happened. To put it bluntly, Pichai is no Nadella.
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.
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.
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?
Yep, answered some points here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24004156
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.
Ballmer says/did some stupid stuff and it gets (rightfully) flamed for it but he guided Microsoft with many correct decisions during his time. Even Satya says so: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/16/satya-nadella-credits-ballme...
Ballmer pushed hard for Xbox, was a big proponent of cloud and, most importantly, placed a huge emphasis on enterprise customers. A lot of the fruits of his labor were reaped under Satya's tenure.
More interestingly, it could be argued the biggest cloud evangelist in Microsoft at the time was neither Ballmer nor Satya, but rather Bob Muglia (the SVP of the servers and tools division). Muglia was notoriously hated by Ballmer and prevented his probable rise to CEO (he was fired by Ballmer and his position was filled by Satya).
Ballmer pushed hard for Xbox, was a big proponent of cloud and, most importantly, placed a huge emphasis on enterprise customers. A lot of the fruits of his labor were reaped under Satya's tenure.
More interestingly, it could be argued the biggest cloud evangelist in Microsoft at the time was neither Ballmer nor Satya, but rather Bob Muglia (the SVP of the servers and tools division). Muglia was notoriously hated by Ballmer and prevented his probable rise to CEO (he was fired by Ballmer and his position was filled by Satya).
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.
> 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.
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.
I like this term: "He's McKinsey guy".
Then I wonder which product person is suitable to lead behemoth like Alphabet. On top of that, do the board trust a product person to become CEO of Google? I think, in mature stage of company, board trust MBA people more than engineers or product people unfortunately.
Then I wonder which product person is suitable to lead behemoth like Alphabet. On top of that, do the board trust a product person to become CEO of Google? I think, in mature stage of company, board trust MBA people more than engineers or product people unfortunately.
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.
I think it is convenient here to blame the pandemic but it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nice analysis, thanks.
>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?
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?
I'm not sure that a cross-platform GUI (Flutter) really counts as an innovation given Qt, wxWidgets, Tk, Dear ImGUI, and the innumerable largely-unused other GUI toolkits, but I assume the parent is talking about monetized-innovations. Google is doing a great job in CS research but I can't think of a revenue stream that uses one of those. The closest I can think of is voice recognition, but they don't seem to be getting revenue from it.
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.
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...
+ 12.5% with Google Network, isn't that ads or am I misreading?
> 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!
Google leadership in 2001: 2 engineers and an eng manager. In 2020: 1 eng manager, 1 lawyer, 1 banker.
No wonder!
That's not optional when you are running a company of this size.
Amazon is bigger than Google. And yet, its leadership is only Bezos ever since it started. Sure, it might have a CFO or CLO, but when it comes to calling ultimate shots, there is no doubt regarding who is in charge. That's not the case at Google where it seemed no one wanted to take charge and put his/her stamp on company's execution.
Bezos holds the majority voting rights. He answers to no one. That hasn’t been the case with Google since Larry and Sergei checked out.
So what is holding Sundar back now that the founders have checked out? FWIW, Nadella doesn't have majority voting rights in MSFT, but you can see his clear stamp on the company's execution (de-emphasizing Windows, for instance).
Pichai was never a SWE. He's an MBA with an undergrad in metallurgy.
Pichai was a PM actually.
[deleted]
> Another is for Google to become more of a data fiduciary that manages people’s information for them—a bit like a bank does with money.
I'm not sure Google is the right company for this due to people not trusting them, but overall I kind of like that idea. I've self-hosted a lot of my services due to not wanting to give companies too much of my data. But it's a hassle. I noticed that I'm willing to pay money for peopel to take this off my hands, but those need to be people I trust. I think protonmail might become the company of choice for me in these regards. They already have my email, and I wouldn't mind outsourcing my calendar and VPN to them, either.
I'm not sure Google is the right company for this due to people not trusting them, but overall I kind of like that idea. I've self-hosted a lot of my services due to not wanting to give companies too much of my data. But it's a hassle. I noticed that I'm willing to pay money for peopel to take this off my hands, but those need to be people I trust. I think protonmail might become the company of choice for me in these regards. They already have my email, and I wouldn't mind outsourcing my calendar and VPN to them, either.
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.
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...
Clever of the Economist to drop this on the day of Google's earnings.
If all you want to do is make money off of stock speculation, it doesn't matter much who's going to win between the FAAAs. You could just split your investment evenly or by market cap. Even the losers are going to hold their value quite well in the mid-term, there's plenty of time to exit before the writing's on the wall.
In the short term there's the whole coronavirus-and-shrinking-gdp-and-money-printing thing going on, of course, so who knows.
In the short term there's the whole coronavirus-and-shrinking-gdp-and-money-printing thing going on, of course, so who knows.
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.
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)
(Disclosure: I work for Google now, and I think I would not have worked for Microsoft 20 years ago)
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.
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.
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)
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)
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!
Hope you enjoy the stock grants!
> Hope you enjoy the stock grants!
If I thought my work at Google was making the world worse I wouldn't do it; see this discussion a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21617291
For example, I'm currently exploring whether https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/blob/master/explainers/su... can increase the security and privacy of ad loading and rendering.
> bundling IE is more ethically problematic than...
I don't think bundling IE was at all the worst that Microsoft was doing in the 90s. Their efforts to kill the web, Java, and Linux, all threats to their strategy of a Windows monopoly, were much more of a problem.
> building massive surveillance applications to sell ads
Ads fund an enormous number of sites, and without them the web and information in general would be even more centralized.
If you oppose ad personalization and targeting, trying to convince individual adtech employees to quit is a terrible strategy. Instead you should advocate for legislation such as the GDPR and CCPA that set out what sorts of behavior are acceptable.
If I thought my work at Google was making the world worse I wouldn't do it; see this discussion a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21617291
For example, I'm currently exploring whether https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/blob/master/explainers/su... can increase the security and privacy of ad loading and rendering.
> bundling IE is more ethically problematic than...
I don't think bundling IE was at all the worst that Microsoft was doing in the 90s. Their efforts to kill the web, Java, and Linux, all threats to their strategy of a Windows monopoly, were much more of a problem.
> building massive surveillance applications to sell ads
Ads fund an enormous number of sites, and without them the web and information in general would be even more centralized.
If you oppose ad personalization and targeting, trying to convince individual adtech employees to quit is a terrible strategy. Instead you should advocate for legislation such as the GDPR and CCPA that set out what sorts of behavior are acceptable.
The end result of Microsoft wanting to dominate OS is equivalent to Google wanting to dominate communication; through monopoly of a resource they are able to charge a tax to all users of consumer technology.
> "The end result of Microsoft wanting to dominate OS is equivalent to Google wanting to dominate communication; through monopoly of a resource they are able to charge a tax to all users of consumer technology."
I agree with you and the other Google employee who brought up EEE; Neither Google nor Microsoft is better than the other in that regard.
What I am saying is that Google's broad collection of personal data (over which the public has minimal visibility or control) and their focus on advertising (not really a societal good by any measure) adds on top of their desire for monopoly to clearly make Google the bigger problem.
I agree with you and the other Google employee who brought up EEE; Neither Google nor Microsoft is better than the other in that regard.
What I am saying is that Google's broad collection of personal data (over which the public has minimal visibility or control) and their focus on advertising (not really a societal good by any measure) adds on top of their desire for monopoly to clearly make Google the bigger problem.
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!)
... 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!)
This the kind of comment that only portrays one side and the readers think "Google BAAAAAD".
You know what happened when background services were allowed completely, battery issues, crashes, just a complete shitshow. One one hand HN raves about the iOS quality, OTOH blames Android for trying to do the same thing.
You know what happened when background services were allowed completely, battery issues, crashes, just a complete shitshow. One one hand HN raves about the iOS quality, OTOH blames Android for trying to do the same thing.
It should up to user to decide what to do with their devices. Operating system should just ask for permissions to perform tasks with potentially harmful effects, and notify on high energy drain. If a user is fine with that, he shouldn't be handcuffed by OS vendor from doing what he needs.
> One one hand HN raves about the iOS quality, OTOH blames Android for trying to do the same thing.
Oh, good old straw man argument? Actually, Android started out as an almost completely free GNU/Linux computer, and is slowly morphing into the same almost fully locked clone of iOS. And in my mind it's NOT a good thing. And yes, Apple's monopoly on sending push notifications on iOS is as harmful, as is Google's on Android.
> One one hand HN raves about the iOS quality, OTOH blames Android for trying to do the same thing.
Oh, good old straw man argument? Actually, Android started out as an almost completely free GNU/Linux computer, and is slowly morphing into the same almost fully locked clone of iOS. And in my mind it's NOT a good thing. And yes, Apple's monopoly on sending push notifications on iOS is as harmful, as is Google's on Android.
Also, most users want their devices to work not have to constantly fiddle and make decisions. You can put AOSP and even a different app store and do whatever you want.
You can put a different appstore, right, but you still have to rely on some external push notification service, because the OS became crippled and less capable than it was.
I repeat, you could easily run background tasks in Android 1.5, no problems, and you can't now. Only with persistent icons, and even that looks likely to change. So AOSP doesn't really help here because the OS itself becomes more restricted.
Also, 'most users' argument is not valid. It's like suggesting, "people can cut themselves with knives, so let's ban knives and everything with a blade. If some people NEED to cut other people, like surgeons, well, whatever, they shouldn't, because most users don't do that"
I repeat, you could easily run background tasks in Android 1.5, no problems, and you can't now. Only with persistent icons, and even that looks likely to change. So AOSP doesn't really help here because the OS itself becomes more restricted.
Also, 'most users' argument is not valid. It's like suggesting, "people can cut themselves with knives, so let's ban knives and everything with a blade. If some people NEED to cut other people, like surgeons, well, whatever, they shouldn't, because most users don't do that"
What a stupid argument. Again buy a phone from a different company. Flash your own bits. "Hacker" needs can't dilute a consumer product.
Well, that phone from a different company will have to run another OS, because no Android vendor will help with the kind of problems I'm describing.
Also, do you _really_ suggest that running a persistent ssh session in a terminal or a VPN connection is a 'hacker' activity that should require flashing a phone with a custom build of an OS? Uh-oh.
Also, do you _really_ suggest that running a persistent ssh session in a terminal or a VPN connection is a 'hacker' activity that should require flashing a phone with a custom build of an OS? Uh-oh.
Please put AOSP on your devices. Let us others have a sane device experience not dealing with bad apps.
And how do you suggest working with restricted background running, given that AOSP still has precisely the same policy regarding background tasks? And you can't even rely on push notifications, because as I understand you suggest getting rid of Google Apps too - and Push notifications come only with Google Apps.
You can modify AOSP how you like. If you want hacker friendly behavior, be ready to hack.
Returning to my original comments, on Windows I could do all the things I can't do on Android without hacking or modifying it.
And guess what Windows does suffer from shitty apps giving you blue screens. Battery isn't as much of a concern on PC but it's absolutely critical on mobile.
> you can't really run your app in the background
This, last I checked, was OEM specific. I agree with your point, most OEMs are indescribably awful about killing any and all background apps - this does not, however, make it Google's fault.
I've disabled GApps and the GSF on my phone, but Riot/Element still works quite well with background notifications when it's excluded from battery optimizations.
> I could record incoming calls easily.
This is still possible, and I do it, with the stock dailer on android 8.1. I use a VOIP provider that offers call recording. As it's my primary number, all my calls are recorded with no interaction on my part.
Off-topic, but transcribed voicemail is offered as well - which I think used to be carrier or even iPhone specific. There's lots of functionality in Android that's not natively supported, but that doesn't mean it can't be done :)
VOIP provider in question (that I'm not affiliated with) is voip.ms, in case anyone is curious.
This, last I checked, was OEM specific. I agree with your point, most OEMs are indescribably awful about killing any and all background apps - this does not, however, make it Google's fault.
I've disabled GApps and the GSF on my phone, but Riot/Element still works quite well with background notifications when it's excluded from battery optimizations.
> I could record incoming calls easily.
This is still possible, and I do it, with the stock dailer on android 8.1. I use a VOIP provider that offers call recording. As it's my primary number, all my calls are recorded with no interaction on my part.
Off-topic, but transcribed voicemail is offered as well - which I think used to be carrier or even iPhone specific. There's lots of functionality in Android that's not natively supported, but that doesn't mean it can't be done :)
VOIP provider in question (that I'm not affiliated with) is voip.ms, in case anyone is curious.
> This, last I checked, was OEM specific.
Umm, no. It is nice how you cite your anecdotal evidence about riot, but if you would study this issue a bit you would know, that on Android 1.5 you could launch a background process and it would stay in memory indefinitely, and on recent androids it's only possible with persistent notificaton icon (to which a lot of users complain about). If you don't have the persistent notification, then oops. If you don't want to research this subject yourself, you should probably trust me, because we have an app with >1M installs that depends on being in memory.
>> For example, in Android 6 I could record incoming calls easily. Not so much on Android 9,
> This is still possible, and I do it, with the stock dailer on android 8.1
Let me check, was Android 8.1 released later than Android 9? Hm, I guess, not. Anyway, this link [1] would be a good place to start to learn more on this subject. Let me cite:
"The official API for call recording was removed with the launch of Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Developers are hard to stop, so they found workarounds to keep this feature alive, but Google finally killed off the ability to record calls with Android 9.0 Pie."
So, do you agree now with my point that Android is becoming a more and more restricted platform in every way?
[1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/record-calls-android-101910...
Umm, no. It is nice how you cite your anecdotal evidence about riot, but if you would study this issue a bit you would know, that on Android 1.5 you could launch a background process and it would stay in memory indefinitely, and on recent androids it's only possible with persistent notificaton icon (to which a lot of users complain about). If you don't have the persistent notification, then oops. If you don't want to research this subject yourself, you should probably trust me, because we have an app with >1M installs that depends on being in memory.
>> For example, in Android 6 I could record incoming calls easily. Not so much on Android 9,
> This is still possible, and I do it, with the stock dailer on android 8.1
Let me check, was Android 8.1 released later than Android 9? Hm, I guess, not. Anyway, this link [1] would be a good place to start to learn more on this subject. Let me cite:
"The official API for call recording was removed with the launch of Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Developers are hard to stop, so they found workarounds to keep this feature alive, but Google finally killed off the ability to record calls with Android 9.0 Pie."
So, do you agree now with my point that Android is becoming a more and more restricted platform in every way?
[1]: https://www.androidauthority.com/record-calls-android-101910...
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....
How things have changed thanks to government intervention and Google....
You aren't going to lay any of the blame at Ballmer's feet?
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.
The third was the browser. No one cares about browser dominance except for Google because of advertising.
I think your statement is right. Things really have changed.
the great thing about tech monopolies is that there are so many of them
Too many of Google's eggs have been in one basket for quite some time. Thiel was spot on in Zero to One when he pointed out how many of Google's endeavors are simply a cover for its stranglehold (read: monopoly) on search and associated adds. Also, given Slack and Zoom's growth certainly Google is crying when it thinks about Wave and Hangouts.
Microsoft had to fall to get back up again. Now it's Google's turn.
Microsoft had to fall to get back up again. Now it's Google's turn.
I think selling boston dynamics was a mistake, as was spinning off motorola. Instead of merging these with AI initiatives, these were sold off because they weren't "cultural fits" whatever that means. Business units need to have their own cultures because their customers have different cultures as well.
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.
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.
Any perception that it was not is marketing to push down engineering salaries.
Will Google buy Shopify to compete with Amazon?
Paywall on this, can someone provide the text?
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.
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.
You really think Google is the inefficient of those four? Apple runs a hot/spare datacenter strategy. Their overhead has to be ridiculous.
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.
Has google meet come up in antitrust allegations? Google has been forcing it on me everywhere. That nonsense is egregious.
One President/Prime Minister cannot lead/manage 7 billion people;
Google should be split into separate companies;
http://archive.li/WOJje
Google should be split into separate companies;
http://archive.li/WOJje
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.