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How did Google get so big?

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Re: How did Google get so big?

#121
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's their product after all; do you point people to your competition from your product? Everyone is free to use anything else. Anti-competitive would be if you couldn't use anything else.

"Your product" is something completely different if you're a mom-and-pop shop or startup or if you have 90% market share. This is why antitrust exists and what arguments like this always seem to ignore.

Is the consumer being harmed? That’s the only question that matters in anti-trust. That mom and pop can’t compete isn’t a symptom of a monopoly, it’s a symptom of mom and pop not doing more to be the best choice. Mom and pop could compete if they had a better, cheaper product. If you want to compete — be better than the competition. Many startups are not — that isn’t the fault of Google.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#122
On the market end - Google got huge because they inserted themselves as a critical part of peoples' usage of a resource that got even huger.

As late as 2013, my coworkers and I would mock the Wall Street analysts who covered Google because (you could tell from their questions on the earnings call) they assumed that the Internet was no longer growing. So all the focus was on CPCs and Google's ability to monetize, when the number of queries had quadrupled over the previous 4 years. You can hold monetization absolutely constant and if usage is growing 400%, your revenue will grow 400%.

Just two days ago Google's earnings came out and people were wondering how they still managed 20% YoY growth. Some of that undoubtedly came from Cloud & other emerging businesses, but I'd bet that the Internet is still growing.

CoinBase is trying to pull off the same thing with crypto - they're a critical onramp for people wanting to get started with a new, fast-growing technology. Regulators & the press always fight the last war, though - they're focused on Google and Facebook rather than on the next wave of giant monopolies.

People always underestimate the potential size of consumer markets, because their perspective is human-centric. Before they & their friends adopt a new technology, it's a toy or a fad and will never catch on. Afterwards, everybody they know already uses it, so of course it's old news. Few people realize that "everybody they know" is less than one millionth of all of humanity, or that if you're in a developed country you will get innovations 10-20 years before the rest of the world does, or that if you're in a tech metropolis in a developed country you will get them ~5 years before the rest of the country. "The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed."

Re: How did Google get so big?

#123

Stoppelman's Yelp is a bad example. I don't want to visit a page that pesters me to install their app instead of showing me the reviews I came to read . If Yelp's ranking has been lowered, good riddance.

I don't really want to defend behaviors similar to Yelp's. Because it's indeed annoying. But let's play devil's advocate here.

Part of the reason why Google can have a clear and good user experience, is because they can afford it. On the other hand, for smaller company, not meeting user count goals could mean not getting funding and die. This will force them to nag the users to get them to install the app, even if doing that could annoy some of the users.

And this is pretty much a classic example of why monopoly is bad.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#125
post #17

"Some were investigated, but only superficially, the government just really isn't enforcing our antitrust laws. And that's what's happened. None of these acquisitions have been challenged." Behemoths like Google emerge every time new inventions lead to the creation of new markets followed by mass adoption during a relatively short timeframe, when regulations don't exist yet. It has happened in history time and time a…

Why did Google succeed and Yahoo fail?

Re: How did Google get so big?

#126
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someday Google's going to have to list the risk of Jeff Dean leaving on their 10-K ... (not entirely joking)

Companies actually do this behind the scenes. They list individual employees as financial assets.

Hmm, I hadn't heard of this practice before, and so I went searching and found this article to be a decent summary (posting here if others are curious): https://smallbusiness.chron.com/employees-intangible-assets-...

Re: How did Google get so big?

#127

"Bing, their competition, has 2% of the market. They have 90%." Who has the other 8%?

Cuil. On a serious note, it seems to me that barrier to entry for search is now exponentially higher than it was when they started. I'm not sure if it's even doable with small resources (in proverbial garage) anymore.

I dont know how much money MS do with Bing, but if i were they, i would open source everything to see a lot of Google competitors pop here and there based on their tech, and later buy the most proeminent contenders. They are locked in to the 2% position, and thats the only alternative i can see to shake things up and have a change to grab more.

They could also provide the pure search index for other companies by using their cloud infra, and charge for the cloud use instead where Bing would be only one of the clients of this open search index.

It was basically the strategy the open source world with the lead of Linux did to them, and were able to take down their dominant monopolistic position over software.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#128

OK, so I watched it all happen. Back in the day, I loved AltaVista. And then I dicovered Google. And found that it consistently gave me better results. At least at first, Google grew because its stuff worked better than the competition's. Still, it is pretty clear that Google now excludes competitors through discrimination in search results. But it's hard to prove, because search algorithms are so bloody complicated.…

[deleted]

Re: How did Google get so big?

#130
Hijacking this thread to share a very unpopular opinion: It requires an entity with the amount of resources, tech, talent and data they have to develop an AGI and eventually ASI.

I personally would prefer them to develop it, than say Amazon. Or worse Tencent or Baidu i.e an authoritarian government. This has been Larry and Sergey's motivation from the get go. This is obviously naive but I believe the ad machine and the power and money that came of it is only a means to an end. A real AI has always been the target.

Yes an open source consortium like OpenAI would be better but that is honestly not realistic. Who knows, it might go the way of Kubernetes and TensorFlow. Open source the framework and offer the best service to run it on.

Unless there is a massive war on the horizon this development is inevitable. There are downsides, as with all powerful tech. But in 300 years humanity might live in post-scarcity society and finally be done with the fear and hate for each other that comes with inequality. Sorry for the emotional rant.

This is blind optimism. I prefer to life like this. But we might of course also end up in a Blade Runner/Resident Evil/1984 type situation.

Generally looking forward to your opinions.

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