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Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

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Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#11
So many companies try to emulate how Google works. There are multiple books, hundreds or thousands of articles. People speculate on the perks, the review structure, the hierarchy, the autonomy.

However, when other companies try to imitate Google they always fail because they're missing a crucial piece:

Billions of dollars in ad revenue

Google doesn't work the way it does to be successful. It works that way because it is successful.

I found this no more evident than when I worked on Google Search itself.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#12

Xoogler here. About a week after joining, and having partaken of the food, massages, meditation rooms, fitness centers, shuttle bus, sports facility, arcade, juice bar, tech stops, shwag etc. - I remember thinking to myself "whatever we do here must be ridiculously lucrative". There weren't signs of obvious waste (at least in my org.), and coming from other corporate gigs where you had to pay for coffee it really ope…

Indeed, it's amazing how profitable vacuuming up users' private data without their informed consent and monetizing it can be.

> informed consent

Sidenote, and completely off topic:

Is there a non-high-horse way to word this? I understand the meaning, but the same phrase can be used to be completely dismissive as well. It's a potential moral high ground, where if you don't agree you must be uninformed.

I'm not saying OP meant it that way, it just brought up the honest question from me.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#13
post #7

Xoogler here. About a week after joining, and having partaken of the food, massages, meditation rooms, fitness centers, shuttle bus, sports facility, arcade, juice bar, tech stops, shwag etc. - I remember thinking to myself "whatever we do here must be ridiculously lucrative". There weren't signs of obvious waste (at least in my org.), and coming from other corporate gigs where you had to pay for coffee it really ope…

A lot of that stuff although is cheaper for the corporation to provide than for the employee to pay for themselves in money and time. The corp has a tax advantage and a bulk purchase advantage. Not having a payment infra probably adds a little bit of efficiency too.

Yeah. Which is why I'm always amazed how many companies will nickel-and-dime on that stuff. Those benefits more than pay for themselves, a smart company would commit to them especially when times are bad.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#14

Xoogler here. About a week after joining, and having partaken of the food, massages, meditation rooms, fitness centers, shuttle bus, sports facility, arcade, juice bar, tech stops, shwag etc. - I remember thinking to myself "whatever we do here must be ridiculously lucrative". There weren't signs of obvious waste (at least in my org.), and coming from other corporate gigs where you had to pay for coffee it really ope…

Indeed, it's amazing how profitable vacuuming up users' private data without their informed consent and monetizing it can be.

Just stop using Google if that is a concern. Personally I use DDG.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#15

So many companies try to emulate how Google works. There are multiple books, hundreds or thousands of articles. People speculate on the perks, the review structure, the hierarchy, the autonomy. However, when other companies try to imitate Google they always fail because they're missing a crucial piece: Billions of dollars in ad revenue Google doesn't work the way it does to be successful. It works that way because it…

We humans have a hard time reasoning about correlation and causation. Superstition comes so naturally.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it's amazing how profitable vacuuming up users' private data without their informed consent and monetizing it can be.

You must be a joy at parties. How is any of the data private when you willingly use their tools, sites, servers, etc? You open up google.com and type things in, what privacy do you expect? Or am I missing something you are referring to?

The problem is that Google's target market is largely people who are unaware of what the risks are, unaware of the extent of what Google does with their data. It's up to us in the tech community to protect people from companies that use dark pattern behavior like Google.

yuhong: Responding to your question as an edit to my own comment since two -4 comments is probably enough for one day. Silently implementing opt-out features, and automatically opting everyone into new ways to violate their privacy, granting themselves the right to change their terms of service or privacy policy without notification. Using confusing terminology to make it difficult to discern what is the "more private" option. (Opting out of Google+'s "Featured Photos" feature, for example, requires you to switch ON the option to shut OFF Google stealing your intellectual property.) As existencebox noted, making ads on search look as close to search results as possible to mislead people into clicking on scam and malware laden Google Ads rather than real results...

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be a joy at parties. How is any of the data private when you willingly use their tools, sites, servers, etc? You open up google.com and type things in, what privacy do you expect? Or am I missing something you are referring to?

The problem is that Google's target market is largely people who are unaware of what the risks are, unaware of the extent of what Google does with their data. It's up to us in the tech community to protect people from companies that use dark pattern behavior like Google. yuhong: Responding to your question as an edit to my own comment since two -4 comments is probably enough for one day. Silently implementing opt-out…

[deleted]

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#18
post #7

Xoogler here. About a week after joining, and having partaken of the food, massages, meditation rooms, fitness centers, shuttle bus, sports facility, arcade, juice bar, tech stops, shwag etc. - I remember thinking to myself "whatever we do here must be ridiculously lucrative". There weren't signs of obvious waste (at least in my org.), and coming from other corporate gigs where you had to pay for coffee it really ope…

A lot of that stuff although is cheaper for the corporation to provide than for the employee to pay for themselves in money and time. The corp has a tax advantage and a bulk purchase advantage. Not having a payment infra probably adds a little bit of efficiency too.

Which does seem like sort of a loophole. Don't companies have to add perks over a certain amount to the employees pay so that it gets taxed? Wouldn't feeding an employee every day qualify?

It would be sort of weird if we turn back into having sort of 'company towns' where your employer provides a lot of what you need except they pay for it. It's not just Google this would be beneficial for, even if you run a factory you could pay employees a tiny bit less, but provide food/services for them that would make up for it. And because of the taxes/bulk situation it could be economically beneficial for both sides.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#19
Best i recall, the Glass problem was more Brin over-hyping than the tech itself.

And i do not recall reading about the car getting into trouble while under computer control. Either someone ran into it or it ran into something while human operated.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, it's amazing how profitable vacuuming up users' private data without their informed consent and monetizing it can be.

You must be a joy at parties. How is any of the data private when you willingly use their tools, sites, servers, etc? You open up google.com and type things in, what privacy do you expect? Or am I missing something you are referring to?

What's always frustrated me is that there are perfectly legitimate complaints about how google has gained their market share; but people seem to like weakening the broader argument with more emotional arguments.

I'll gladly cite examples: Search ad dark patterns. I remember a time when G was _proud_ of that their ads were entirely distinct from native search results, and never caused native results to fall beneath the fold. Now when I search on even a moderately sized monitor, literally half of the first page results are sponsored or ads (native content being entirely beneath the fold), to boot in a manner increasingly less distinct from the native results. (there used to be a separate ad box, and then a line between ads and native, and now just a tiny little 'ad' or grey 'sponsored' blip)

I've seen these encroachments across the board; youtube/G+ integrated logins was another, dark patterns for data-gathering approval on droid ("do you want to share data; yes/cancel"), which I'd best summarize as a slow collapse of any legitimacy to their "don't be evil" mantra from early on.

The one concrete point I can think of for "scraping data without approval" is that when various new data policies were established and yes/no controls added to your G profile settings, I believe some of them defaulted on? I've heard mumblings both ways in the HN discussions on this topic so it's a less strong point than my previous, but may be a basis for a more established argument of that aspect of dark patterns in private data acquisition that the parent was trying to pose.

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