Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors
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Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors
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Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors
#2It's rather sad that Google needs to pay Android makers a fee for installing it's apps, given how Google gives away source code that makes Android exist in the first place.
On the contrary, Apple's ecosystem is completely closed, app cut fairly high and non-negotiable at 30% and app store rejections arbitrary at best and blatantly anti competitive at worst. In the name of user centricity, their platform places arbitrary restrictions on code execution and access.
Who'd you think the EU would investigate for monopolistic practices?
Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors
#3Why is it a "black box"? Is it because Google doesn't break down the number or elaborate on the details of each contract?
Also, an increase in share price (Yandex) doesn't necessarily correlate to a change in actual usage.
Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors
#4I can't help but have a bit of schadenfreude here. Part of what happened was that Google used to send a fair amount of organic traffic to smaller sites. And many of those smaller sites had Adsense ads.
Google's changes in search shifted much of the traffic that went to smaller sites to larger, more established sites. Ones where the cost per impression/click are higher for Google.
So, part of it is self inflicted. They did, of course, get benefits out of that in the form of less low quality sites in their ad inventory. But some babies went out with that bathwater.
Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors
#5Why is it a "black box"? Is it because Google doesn't break down the number or elaborate on the details of each contract? Also, an increase in share price (Yandex) doesn't necessarily correlate to a change in actual usage.
Perhaps that it just isn't broken down into basic buckets like "Adsense" vs "Doubleclick" vs "All Other".
Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors
#6It's rather sad that Google needs to pay Android makers a fee for installing it's apps, given how Google gives away source code that makes Android exist in the first place. On the contrary, Apple's ecosystem is completely closed, app cut fairly high and non-negotiable at 30% and app store rejections arbitrary at best and blatantly anti competitive at worst. In the name of user centricity, their platform places arbitr…
>app cut fairly high
Same as Google's, so it seems standard.
>non-negotiable at 30%
Reduces for certain types of apps, given specific conditions, but yes for 99.99% it's non-negotiable. Still, it's their platform.
>arbitrary at best
I'd wager most rejections follow very clear rules. There are some head scratchers, but those aren't the norm, so "at best" is wrong.
>Who'd you think the EU would investigate for monopolistic practices?
Gotta have a monopoly in order to be investigated for it.
Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors
#7Everyone is paying more to acquire users these days. I haven't read the book that coins them as 'attention merchants,' but it seems like an accurate description, and their product is getting to be scarce and expensive.
I've got things to do, and when I waste time I'd like it to be wasted in a way that relaxes or recharges me or the people I care about.
Not that there isn't such a thing as good advertising, but the trick seems to be targeting. If you can't target people who actually want what you're offering to them, it's a waste of everyone's time and people will start tuning you out. Worse, you really have to hit them when they want what you're selling.
Like, when I go to Digikey and see an ad for some company's 48V/166F supercapacitor bank, or a new line of 16-bit ADC chips? Yeah, that sort of thing is a reasonable bet. When I go to a news story and see an ad for a VR headset? Not...quite.
Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors
#8It's rather sad that Google needs to pay Android makers a fee for installing it's apps, given how Google gives away source code that makes Android exist in the first place. On the contrary, Apple's ecosystem is completely closed, app cut fairly high and non-negotiable at 30% and app store rejections arbitrary at best and blatantly anti competitive at worst. In the name of user centricity, their platform places arbitr…
Apple sells Apple phones with Apple iOS.
Notgoogle sells Notgoogle phones with Google Android. Futzing with what another company does with it's product can get you anticompetitive interest.
If you want to talk about Apple being anticompetetive talk about how you can't buy/rent movies on Google Play, Amazon, etc. apps on iOS. Even so, Apple has a much better legal stance for curating it's own market than Google (Alphabet?) has for manipulating other companies' products.
Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors
#9It's rather sad that Google needs to pay Android makers a fee for installing it's apps, given how Google gives away source code that makes Android exist in the first place. On the contrary, Apple's ecosystem is completely closed, app cut fairly high and non-negotiable at 30% and app store rejections arbitrary at best and blatantly anti competitive at worst. In the name of user centricity, their platform places arbitr…
The thing is if you sell a device running your software, there's no law that says you have to build in features and support for anyone else to install their own software. Feature phones are also computers, but there's no mandatory regulation compelling vendors to allow installation of third party software. Going a step further, if you sold a device with a proprietary only app store, so it can only run software you provided access to, like a feature phone where some features could be downloaded, again what's wrong with that? You used to be able to buy children's computers with limited educational software you could download, probably still can. Would you compel the vendor to open up that 'app store'? Chances are such a regulation would kill products like that stone dead. Same with consoles. Any regulation you make for the App Store should really count against consoles too, wrecking their whole business model.
It's like a slippery slope. If you enforce rules that say Apple must allow side-loading of software, doesn't that mean any computer should provide that facility? What if that opens up real security risks, is it really regulator's jobs to open up vulnerabilities like that? It's a massive, horrible can of worms. At the end of the day, if you want an open platform like that you can build or buy one. There's really no benefit to the market to mandate that all platforms must be like that though. If open really is better, then it should win on it's own terms not through regulatory fiat.
Re: Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors
#10It's rather sad that Google needs to pay Android makers a fee for installing it's apps, given how Google gives away source code that makes Android exist in the first place. On the contrary, Apple's ecosystem is completely closed, app cut fairly high and non-negotiable at 30% and app store rejections arbitrary at best and blatantly anti competitive at worst. In the name of user centricity, their platform places arbitr…
> It's rather sad that Google needs to pay Android makers a fee for installing it's apps, given how Google gives away source code that makes Android exist in the first place.
This is a very innocent view of Google's business practices in this area. Google has a tight hold over most device makers through anti-fragmentation agreements and other contracts if they want GMS and want early access to the non-public AOSP tree, which is a practical necessity to ship cutting-edge Android devices. Aside from hard legal power, Google also projects soft power through their control of the ecosystem and device makers wanting to maintain good relations. As a result, Android-derived innovation in the ecosystem is highly constrained even if AOSP is open source licensed since device makers and manufacturers cannot ship devices with Android-derived operating systems in device categories enumerated by the AFAs unless the devices pass CTS (which prevents most kinds of serious divergence from Android).