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Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

reuters.com

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Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#101

Post by grogenaut »

alasdair_ wrote: post #85
gen220 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This behavior is explained by the fact that these departments within Google are looking at their “rivals” for inspiration, rather than the fundamental problems Google is rewarded for solving (Search, targeted advertising, IT infrastructure). Nobody will remember it, but in eBay’s early days of success, Amazon spent a nontrivial amount of engineering effort into building an auction style marketplace. They actually bui…

>This behavior is explained by the fact that these departments within Google are looking at their “rivals” for inspiration, rather than the fundamental problems Google is rewarded for solving (Search, targeted advertising, IT infrastructure). In Steve Yegge's post on why he left google: "You can look at Google’s entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: G…

whats going on with facebook marketplace vs craigslist then?

Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#102

Post by nmfisher »

hangonhn wrote: post #51
justicezyx wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The engineering-focused mindset is hilariously short-sighted in hindsight. When I was AWS 2012-2013, the sense that the Cloud is going to be huge got more and more evidences from customer feedback. When I joined Google in 2013, the sentiment was that Google can easily beat AWS. But, for all those talks, they have not mentioned any significant understanding on what customers expect from GCP, and why and how GCP can wi…

Someone who used to be a Googler once told me: "A group of great engineers lead by a terrible manager will never succeed but a team of mediocre engineers lead by a great manager just might." I don't think anyone doubts Google has great engineers but I don't think it's enough for them to win. All you'll end up with is a lot of great products with no futures. I found myself in a similar situation in my previous job: a…

I suppose that, as long as the AdWords faucet keeps spewing money, Google doesn't need to build great products.

They can just wait for some rinky-dink startup to build something great, then swoop in and buy it.

Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#104

Post by biolurker1 »

lowdose wrote: post #98
gen220 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This behavior is explained by the fact that these departments within Google are looking at their “rivals” for inspiration, rather than the fundamental problems Google is rewarded for solving (Search, targeted advertising, IT infrastructure). Nobody will remember it, but in eBay’s early days of success, Amazon spent a nontrivial amount of engineering effort into building an auction style marketplace. They actually bui…

Could the biggest difference between Alphabet & Amazon come down to if the actual founder is still commanding the army? Bezos is probably a god within Amazon this could be a serious competitive advantage. I believe Zuckerberg and Musk also enjoy the force of good they have created themselves. I don't really understand why you would quit in such a position.

Because some people find other things in life after securing financial freedom. Ceo work is extremely stressful

Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#105

Post by joshAg »

grogenaut wrote: post #101
alasdair_ wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This behavior is explained by the fact that these departments within Google are looking at their “rivals” for inspiration, rather than the fundamental problems Google is rewarded for solving (Search, targeted advertising, IT infrastructure). In Steve Yegge's post on why he left google: "You can look at Google’s entire portfolio of launches over the past decade, and trace nearly all of them to copying a competitor: G…

whats going on with facebook marketplace vs craigslist then?

at least for cars, craigslist started charging $5 for private parties to make a post, but facebook is free.

Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#106

Post by godzillabrennus »

bearbin wrote: post #3

This is a good move but several years too late. Google has already squandered it's lead in shopping when they replaced an excellent shopping search engine with a crippled advertising board that neither shows the cheapest prices nor a wide variety of products to buy. This has been compounded by introducing absolutely no substantitive improvements to the product over the past few years. Meanwhile, because nobody used t…

E-commerce at scale is a lousy margin business. Walmart can’t turn a profit from it. Amazon doesn’t.

If you are Google why would you try and compete with them?

You already have sentiment analysis down as people search your site daily and use android to upload your life photos to their servers for analysis. Then you have Transaction data in their email you can analyze.

I think google is smart to let these other companies slug it out and to play tech partner to struggling brands.

Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#107

Post by acdha »

mattkevan wrote: post #49
acdha wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think that but G Suite hasn't notably improved in years and I don't think everyone bailing to Office 365 / Teams is doing so out of blind loyalty to Microsoft. Google needs to take the user experience seriously — things which aren't a Real Engineer's Favorite Problems™ are often just as important.

Been using G Suite at various companies I’ve worked on for a decade and it’s not improved much at all. Docs, sheets and slides are still limited and the iOS app versions are a joke. All that’s happened is that Gmail gets slower with each redesign. One of the biggest boosts to my productivity was reverting back to the old html only version.

Yeah, my experience recently really reminds me of 90s Microsoft just coasting — except that they forgot to get that level of marketshare first.

Re: Google drops charges on shopping service to counter Amazon's surging ad sales

#108

Post by thirdsun »

Invictus0 wrote: post #75
bearbin wrote: post #3

This is a good move but several years too late. Google has already squandered it's lead in shopping when they replaced an excellent shopping search engine with a crippled advertising board that neither shows the cheapest prices nor a wide variety of products to buy. This has been compounded by introducing absolutely no substantitive improvements to the product over the past few years. Meanwhile, because nobody used t…

Can anyone recommend a better shopping search engine or price comparison tool?

That depends heavily on where you are located. Here in Germany we have excellent shopping search engines with Geizhals and Idealo.

Particularly Geizhals is an indispensable product research tool since it does a great job of collecting, normalizing and filtering product attributes - it replaces the tedious process of comparing several incomplete spec sheets with different terms, values and units.

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