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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

#211

Post by easton »

polyomino wrote: post #104
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…

This could be a good forcing function for them to get their act together on cloud. However, I've heard that teams internally can't build on google cloud for various reasons. It may even make more sense for them to directly spin off onto AWS. Even "seperate" companies like Waymo build their systems on the internal google infra.

I'd imagine (although I don't work there) that it has something to do with datacenter availability. Google probably has a lot more datacenters than are available in Google Cloud used purely for internal workloads that run on their commodity hardware, which was what Borg was designed to run on. It's much easier to manage internal workloads by saying "it has to work on this" instead of letting each individual team go wild on Google Cloud and spin up whatever they want, which is how you get into an unmanageable flustercluck of shadow IT. Coupled with "Google-scale"(tm), where every service has to be able to scale globally (which is why they have so many datacenters and boxes in ISPs, etc.), it'd be difficult to manage that real estate the same way as companies do on your cloud (what if you need to bring up a ton of Gmail or YouTube traffic and the datacenter is at 97% load because Google Cloud had a good sales month? Not an impossible problem to fix, I suppose, but you could suddenly find yourself without enough hardware when you're talking about Google sized traffic.)

I suppose AWS figured it out, although I always figured amazon.com didn't exactly compete for resources with outsiders.

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

#212

Post by acituan »

andrewem wrote: post #192
acituan wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well the point is there is no “secret sauce infra”, let alone Google specific infra as the OP speculates. If we were to claim timing as a factor, AWS was available since 2006.

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

#213

Post by kbenson »

nostrademons wrote: post #185
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…

There's an interesting quirk of markets that can explain the broken-up companies being worth more. Prices in a market are set on the margins: the price of Bitcoin or Tesla stock is set by those who are actively buying and selling. If you think those assets are complete scams, you aren't going to go near them, which means your opinion doesn't matter for the purpose of setting the price . When a company is broken up in…

> If you think those assets are complete scams, you aren't going to go near them, which means your opinion doesn't matter for the purpose of setting the price.

Doesn't that reduce demand though, which lowers price?

> They all get their own teams of cheerleaders, who value the spinoffs at close to the value of the original because they think their preferred spinoff will take most of the market of the parent company. People who disagree with that valuation don't matter, because they aren't going to be trading in that stock anyway.

Doesn't that only make sense if only those cheerleaders are doing buying and selling?

I imagine there's three groups that matter for this argument, yay-sayers, regular people, and nay-sayers.

If yay-sayers are basically all in, they've brought the stock up I imagine, but they're probably not doing a lot of movement I would guess?

nay-sayers aren't buying anything, but that means there's less prospective people to buy what's being sold (stock-wise).

Regular people then buy and sell. There's less people to buy what they are selling though, so does that reduce the price at which they can actually offload shares?

Then again, maybe yay-sayers are willing to gobble up stock below a certain price (which is still a high valuation), propping up the market?

To me it seems like both have effects on the market, opposite of each other. Then again, my knowledge of the stock market is more theoretical than anything, so I'm happy to have my assumptions explained wrong.

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

#214

Post by jonas21 »

pdonis wrote: post #205
sukilot wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm willing to pay $5/mo Much of India will pay $1/mo Most people will pay $.1/month What will the price be?

> What will the price be? If you allow Google/Alphabet to practice price discrimination, it will charge customers in richer countries more. You and I would pay $5/month, much of India would pay $1/month, and people who can only afford $.1/month would pay that. If you insist that the price be uniform over all users, then it has to be $.1/month, or whatever the lowest common denominator is. Of course in that scenario i…

The problem is that even if every Google user on the planet paid $5/month, it would maybe just barely match their current revenue.

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

#215

Post by flak48 »

reaperducer wrote: post #70
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…

Don't think this kind of thing is new, rare or shocking. I think if you're entombed in the SV bubble, it might not be. But to the rest of the world, it's kind of head-shaking. Maybe it's because of the industries I've worked in, but clarity of communication was valued, encouraged, and even something we had training in. Say what you mean, so misunderstandings don't lead to mistakes. The public relations people were tr…

> But for everyone else, internal expression wasn't squelched out of fear of external forces.

I recall my reaction when doing that training; it was less a feeling of internal expression being restricted by force. But rather a vague feeling in the back of my mind, that if I care about the value of my stock comp, it probably makes sense to avoid putting my company in trouble by mistake.

I'm not saying that's the most rational reaction but that's what I recall feeling anyway (this was a few years ago). A slightly cynical take would perhaps be that my company bought my complicity for a few RSUs. :shrug:

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

#216

Post by ummonk »

monadic2 wrote: post #195
ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I got from that comment is that they're supply constrained, and gain new revenue elsewhere by producing more of the HR-V.

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

#217

Post by pdonis »

jonas21 wrote: post #214
pdonis wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What will the price be? If you allow Google/Alphabet to practice price discrimination, it will charge customers in richer countries more. You and I would pay $5/month, much of India would pay $1/month, and people who can only afford $.1/month would pay that. If you insist that the price be uniform over all users, then it has to be $.1/month, or whatever the lowest common denominator is. Of course in that scenario i…

The problem is that even if every Google user on the planet paid $5/month, it would maybe just barely match their current revenue.

You'd need something over 3 billion users at that rate to match Google's current revenue (about $16 billion a month). Google currently has about 2 billion.

However, Google's current revenue pays for a lot more than just search. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that search could pay for itself with revenue from users instead of ads.

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

#218

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

danans wrote: post #203
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. This is hardly new. I have been at Google since the mid 2000s and this stuff has been around at least since then. There was also a similar training when I was at Microsoft. Btw, in the trainings I've taken, it's not just about avoiding specific words, but avoiding the thoughts behind those words. Our goal shouldn't be to "dominate the competition/market." The goal should be creating compelling experiences and pr…

> Our goal shouldn't be to "dominate the competition/market." The goal should be creating compelling experiences and products for our customers. Googler also. I believe that the phrase used to capture the desired mindset is "respect the opportunity".

Ugh. I detest that phrase. :( It sounds so corporate.

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

#220

Post by lrem »

pdonis wrote: post #205
sukilot wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm willing to pay $5/mo Much of India will pay $1/mo Most people will pay $.1/month What will the price be?

> What will the price be? If you allow Google/Alphabet to practice price discrimination, it will charge customers in richer countries more. You and I would pay $5/month, much of India would pay $1/month, and people who can only afford $.1/month would pay that. If you insist that the price be uniform over all users, then it has to be $.1/month, or whatever the lowest common denominator is. Of course in that scenario i…

Another subthread here states that ads on search are a majority of Google's revenue. Looking at [1], we see the US being 46% of the revenue. So, assume that search in the US pays for 20% of Google's revenue. Apparently Google's revenue is $160B/year. Do you think the US would have 100M customers willing to pay $320/year for search? Or 10M willing to pay $3200? Or, any mixture of that to reach the balance?

Dislaimer: I'm a Googler, but only base the above on this comment thread and the first results in Google search.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266250/regional-distribu...

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