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To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

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Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#191

Post by djsumdog »

Afforess wrote: post #8

Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully. Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, et…

I was so glad when Google Reader died and I switched back to a real RSS reader. Google Reader was garbage. It wouldn't show 404s and had a ton of bugs. Every RSS reader I've tried since has been loads better.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#192

Post by andrewem »

acituan wrote: post #133
Afforess wrote: post #8

Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully. Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, et…

> Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, etc. (for example: Google Reader could not be spun off This is a not a likely speculation. Did reader really require anything special that doesn’t already exist as a Google Cloud API? Or majority of their killed products honestly? Or to look another…

It's probably true that now (in 2020) Google has cloud services that do everything which Reader needed, but it wasn't true when Reader was shut down in 2013. For instance, cloud Bigtable launched to the public in 2015.

(I don't know whether current Google products mainly rely on the public services, or internal near-equivalents to the public services, or significantly different internal services. I assume it's mainly either the first or the second.)

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#193

Post by theduder99 »

sukilot wrote: post #186
flak48 wrote: post #32

I don't work at Google but I had to take similar training too, where using words/phrases like 'dominant', 'market share', 'leading in a market' etc were discouraged. Specifically because the 'market' can be interpreted in a zillion different ways, especially for tech companies. Don't think this kind of thing is new, rare or shocking. Peter Thiel in Zero to One also gives examples of how a company can be considered a…

What's the point of saying "Peter Thiel says" when stating basic facts? May as well say "Wikipedia says" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly "Establishing dominance" section.

sorry for triggering u

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#194

Post by MiroF »

jackfoxy wrote: post #152
dehrmann wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful not to confuse monopolies with conglomerates. You're right conglomerates mismanage (usually neglect) some divisions, but that wasn't the case with Standard Oil. Esso wasn't a neglected divison; oil is oil. The new companies being more valuable is interesting. It helped that they were regional monopolies. Maybe people thought the added competition drove growth on its own. Maybe the new companies became crow…

I didn't imply Standard Oil was a conglomerate or that conglomerates are monopolies. How did you parse that? Alphabet on the other hand has characteristics of both.

You certainly imply that the "history" you refer to in your third sentence is the one described in the previous two.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#195

Post by monadic2 »

ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote: post #184
Afforess wrote: post #8

Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully. Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, et…

I’m not sure that it’s insane to kill off profitable products. Some folks were upset recently that Honda is discontinuing the Fit subcompact hatchback in the US. That’d be easily understandable if it were an unpopular, unprofitable product. But the Fit was well-loved and dealers struggled to keep them on the lots. So why did Honda kill it? The HR-V subcompact SUV based on the Fit has been produced for the US in the s…

How does that make sense? On paper they just lose the revenue of the Fit without gaining any new revenue elsewhere. That’s just a loss. It takes some magical thinking to argue that these lost customers will move over to the more popular model, a qualitatively different car.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#196

Post by bryanrasmussen »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #144
kube-system wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trademarks are specific to context. Someone searching 'nike' could be looking for greek mythology. It's only trademark infringement when you use a word while engaging in the trade for which the trademark was registered The same word can be (and frequently is) trademarked by multiple companies in different industries at the same time.

I would argue that when Google serves nike.com as the top real search result, over the nike.com ad it charges Nike to show, it's well aware of what context it's being used in. (I just tested, and Google does this, exactly. It stacks a pay-for-click Nike ad above Nike's home page, the top real result.

>it's well aware of what context it's being used in.

I don't think so, I think it's just guessing. I just went and searched Nike to find the Greek goddess as suggested earlier, but it still showed me the shoes nike.com despite that being obviously wrong for what I wanted.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#197

Post by flak48 »

sukilot wrote: post #186
flak48 wrote: post #32

I don't work at Google but I had to take similar training too, where using words/phrases like 'dominant', 'market share', 'leading in a market' etc were discouraged. Specifically because the 'market' can be interpreted in a zillion different ways, especially for tech companies. Don't think this kind of thing is new, rare or shocking. Peter Thiel in Zero to One also gives examples of how a company can be considered a…

What's the point of saying "Peter Thiel says" when stating basic facts? May as well say "Wikipedia says" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly "Establishing dominance" section.

I had read the book, but not the Wikipedia article.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#198

Post by chrisandchris »

shadowgovt wrote: post #68
jacquesm wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why we originally had an IETF and RFC's were publicly commented on and why standards are supposed to be company agnostic. The whole proprietary-APIs-over-HTTP was a giant step back. Before we did that interop between internet based applications was far more common and supported. Now every company treats 'their users' as their own private little walled garden when before 'your users' were not so much cows to mi…

I'm not convinced, though there are, obviously, advantages to RFCs and IETF. The primary disadvantage is speed. A private corporation innovating on its full stack can come up with a faster and more secure HTTP alternative for their use case in the time it takes the RFC process to get up in the morning and find its shoes. Google has a streamed cloud gaming service running in its web browser right now; how long would i…

I don‘t know that much about how the standardization in machine building is done, just from using this standards when working in this industry. However, I would assume a lot of those standards took very long to establish but they are stable, work basically everywhere and are easy to understand.

A lot of standards coming from Google are - so it seems - here to solve things just Google likes to solve and nobody else mostly does not care about. And it‘s not standardization if you‘re the only one caring about it and forcing it onto other.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#199

Post by gvjddbnvdrbv »

shadowgovt wrote: post #189
cat199 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who pays for search who says that 'search' has to be a consolidated system that needs to be paid for?

It's a hell of a lot more convenient as one. Not really thrilled about going back to the days of a fragmented web where webcrawler would give you some results, lycos some others, altavista yet a third batch...

Sounds great. These days we only get the Google or the MS batches of results.

Re: To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

#200

Post by menage »

d1zzy wrote: post #168
Afforess wrote: post #8

Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully. Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, et…

The engineering effort required to split up a mammoth code base where everything has been written based on those assumptions about the rest of the codebase is making such a split extremely unlikely to succeed. We're not talking about a few millions lines of code, we're talking about billions[1] of lines of code. It would take more than a decade of having thousands of engineers work only on this and not do anything el…

But most of those billions of lines are not the low-level infrastructure relied on by many projects. To split out a single product would only require creating external versions of a much smaller subset of the code (and once that had been done once, other products being split out could build on that effort).
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