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Google to mobile industry: 'F*** you very much'

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Google to mobile industry: 'F*** you very much'

#91

Post by JadeNB »

rms wrote: post #90
JadeNB wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I would have bought some statement like “For many people, their cell phones are the way they access the Internet”; but “cell phones are the Internet” seems bizarre. I didn't know that about India! When I was last there, it was all still Internet cafés. (Well, it was 8 years ago, so I guess it's no surprise that a lot has changed—besides which, I get the impression that the current generation is a lot quicker th…

I meant what I said. I think it only sounds bizarre because you are thinking of the internet as something that is accessed rather than something that exists. Wikipedia defines the Internet as "a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide." Surely a cell phone is one of those interconnected computer networks.

> I think it only sounds bizarre because you are thinking of the internet as something that is accessed rather than something that exists.

Yes, you are mostly right. More precisely, I think of the Internet as consisting of the data on it rather than the machinery that pushes that data around, and this does explain most of why I didn't expect the wording of your comment. Still:

> Surely a cell phone is one of those interconnected computer networks.

Yes, I agree! However, it seems to me that that would be better expressed as kl4m did (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1047752), possibly with ⊆ in place of ∈.

Re: Google to mobile industry: 'F*** you very much'

#93

Post by ax0n »

chrischen wrote: post #85
ax0n wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't vote this guy into office. But I did vote. And I knew going into it that either candidate would've screwed us over in his own way. Most of us have come to terms with the fact that all candidates are for bigger government, it's just whose pork barrels will be filled for the next 4-8 years.

You can be a candidate too. That's the the whole premise of democracy. Choose the right guy, and if the right guy ain't there you can step up. Or you can keep whining and wait until someone else does it like the rest of us.

That'd be great, if America was a democracy.

Re: Google to mobile industry: 'F*** you very much'

#94

Post by ytinas »

angelbob wrote: post #67
ytinas wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But MS had exactly the weakness I was talking about. If someone gives away their OS for free what will you do? Giving away advertising for free wont affect anything.

Presumably they have a weakness. As you say, it's hard to quantify what they're doing, but that just means we don't have an easy way to figure it out. It still has statistics, limits and numbers, even if only their accountants have a good handle on what those are.

Well, in this case no one has a handle on the numbers yet. If you don't advertise at all and you have zero customers, then you advertise with google and get 100 customers, then the value is easily quantifiable. But it's never that cut and dry. How much value is e.g. HP getting from google?

If you can't know what the actual value of the service is, how can you make decisions about who is cheaper? Is bing cheaper? Maybe, but what about after you consider the vastly decreased exposure? How much does that matter?

I still think the only way to beat google today is to make a better search engine. Tomorrow that wont work either.

Re: Google to mobile industry: 'F*** you very much'

#95

Post by ytinas »

chrischen wrote: post #69
bbuffone wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone complains about the mobile industry but if I listed the industries that have or are currently screwing me mobile isn't even in the top 10. Health-care, Insurance, Oil, Headphones, Government, Credit cards, Banking, Financial, Video Games, Cable then maybe mobile. My mobile plan is one of the lowest monthly bills that I have based on amount of usage. To my knowledge it is one of the least subsidized industrie…

I find it interesting when people trash the government. In the US atleast, you have some control over it. If you are getting screwed by the government, you have various outlets to mobilize change and if you don't act on them it's no ones fault but your, since the government answers to it's shareholders: you.

I'm sorry, but this just isn't well thought out. I do agree that people should be much more active in politics than they are (and much more educated on the subjects!), but the US has a hopelessly broken government. It will take a great deal more than activism to effect that.

If you were talking about an actual, direct democracy (e.g. Switzerland) then what you say would have some truth to it, but in the US? No.

Re: Google to mobile industry: 'F*** you very much'

#96

Post by ytinas »

nostrademons wrote: post #75
ubernostrum wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fairly frequently, stories come up of a software vendor whose product was doing well until, one day, (Apple/Microsoft, depending on which OS it was for) comes out with their own bundled or free/cheap software which does the same thing. People often get upset at this potentially business-destroying transformation from "they provide my platform" to "they're my competition". Often there's a round of followup posts which…

Because we're consumers here. Always remember that the economy exists to serve consumers. Hell, our regulators tend to forget. I'd argue that Google's in the right here, and that we ought to remember it when, as software developers, we complain about some big new competitor moving into our market. The end goal of business is to serve consumers. If some bigger business can serve consumers better, that's the why we hav…

Except what the bigger business will actually be providing is just selling a cheap copies of the same product on razor thin margins.

The end goal of business is not to serve customers. It's to create more share holder value. If you can do that best by serving customers then so be it. If you can do it better by dirty tactics then don't think people will think twice about doing so.

Re: Google to mobile industry: 'F*** you very much'

#97

Post by nostrademons »

ytinas wrote: post #96
nostrademons wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we're consumers here. Always remember that the economy exists to serve consumers. Hell, our regulators tend to forget. I'd argue that Google's in the right here, and that we ought to remember it when, as software developers, we complain about some big new competitor moving into our market. The end goal of business is to serve consumers. If some bigger business can serve consumers better, that's the why we hav…

Except what the bigger business will actually be providing is just selling a cheap copies of the same product on razor thin margins. The end goal of business is not to serve customers. It's to create more share holder value. If you can do that best by serving customers then so be it. If you can do it better by dirty tactics then don't think people will think twice about doing so.

Ugh, Milton Friedman started perpetuating that particular falsehood around 1970 and now everyone believes it, so much so that they expect to get raped up the ass by big corporations.

Why do we have an economy? It's because ordinary people need goods and services. If we didn't, we could all stop working and stop buying things and live happily ever after. Most of us aren't shareholders in any significant way; if we actually believed that businesses existed to serve shareholders, let's get rid of them!

The reason company officers should act as if they're beholden to shareholder value is because there's no economic check on their resource consumption otherwise. It's easy to satisfy consumers: simply take lots of money from shareholders or the government, and give it to the people (a la AllAdvantage.com and several other dot-coms). But that's not economically efficient: there's no check on the resources consumed, so there's no incentive to be efficient, and you eventually run out of money. The profit motive ensures that businesses consume as little as possible and produce as much as possible, so as long as they act as if their goal is to maximize shareholder value, they maximize efficiency throughout the economy.

But over time, acting in the best interest of shareholders has been confused with the goal of the company is the best interest of shareholders. The former is an instrumental goal; the latter is an inherent one. And the inherent goal of corporations is not to maximize shareholder value, it's to provide useful goods and services as economically as possible. Google gets this; most other companies today do not.

Re: Google to mobile industry: 'F*** you very much'

#98

Post by ytinas »

nostrademons wrote: post #97
ytinas wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except what the bigger business will actually be providing is just selling a cheap copies of the same product on razor thin margins. The end goal of business is not to serve customers. It's to create more share holder value. If you can do that best by serving customers then so be it. If you can do it better by dirty tactics then don't think people will think twice about doing so.

Ugh, Milton Friedman started perpetuating that particular falsehood around 1970 and now everyone believes it, so much so that they expect to get raped up the ass by big corporations. Why do we have an economy? It's because ordinary people need goods and services. If we didn't, we could all stop working and stop buying things and live happily ever after. Most of us aren't shareholders in any significant way; if we act…

Well, my statement is based on what the actual US law is (CEO's are required by law to increase share holder value) and actual experience working at large companies. Large companies are inherently inefficient, not more efficient. There are inefficiencies everywhere and "cost cutting" measures usually don't have any useful effect.

Your theory, like communism, etc., sounds good on paper but I've never seen it work as described.

Re: Google to mobile industry: 'F*** you very much'

#99

Post by nostrademons »

ytinas wrote: post #98
nostrademons wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, Milton Friedman started perpetuating that particular falsehood around 1970 and now everyone believes it, so much so that they expect to get raped up the ass by big corporations. Why do we have an economy? It's because ordinary people need goods and services. If we didn't, we could all stop working and stop buying things and live happily ever after. Most of us aren't shareholders in any significant way; if we act…

Well, my statement is based on what the actual US law is (CEO's are required by law to increase share holder value) and actual experience working at large companies. Large companies are inherently inefficient , not more efficient. There are inefficiencies everywhere and "cost cutting" measures usually don't have any useful effect. Your theory, like communism, etc., sounds good on paper but I've never seen it work as…

I actually agree with the law, I'm making a statement about cause and effect, and inherent vs. instrumental values. The law that requires CEOs to increase shareholder value is valuable because it leads companies to satisfy customer desires in the most efficient way possible. If it didn't lead companies to satisfy customer desires efficiently, it should be eliminated.

The problematic part is when you get that causation mixed up and argue that because CEOs are required by law to increase shareholder value, the government should help them, eg. by protecting them from competition. Because customers are best served by robust competition between businesses. Shareholder-value laws, antitrust laws, and intellectual property laws are all tools for this purpose. Just because CEOs should maximize shareholder value doesn't mean that government should pass laws that make it easier for them to maximize shareholder value, particularly if those laws are at the expense of consumers.

(And I realize that points have sorta become twisted around, such that it now seems like I'm arguing against myself up-thread. It's complicated. Basically, government should enforce level playing fields - it should make sure that products compete on their own merits, and not on the basis of their success in other fields. Cross-subsidization, like what Google does on a massive scale, is a tricky area. It's wrong if the company uses it to enter a market, dominate, and then jack up prices. But it's fine if the company uses it to enter a market, dominate, and then keep prices low.)

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