To head off regulators, Google makes certain words taboo

Post by dna_polymerase » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 10:02 AM UTC

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…

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 11:52 AM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #249

jacquesm wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inertia is a good measure for how successful a particular protocol version is. See for instance IPV4 and how hard it is to get rid of it. And that inertia is good , you don't want to rip up your standards every two years.

Every two years, no. When the standard starts to actively limit further development, though... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion

Post by josephg » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #293

shadowgovt wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every two years, no. When the standard starts to actively limit further development, though... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion

Nobody stops you from adopting IPv6, the reason that many people don't do it is because they have legacy stuff that they can not reconfigure so they're stuck. But it will happen, and IPv6 adoption is steadily on the rise.

Post by astral303 » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

627467 wrote: post #254

d1zzy wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Id like to think that if younger versions of sergey and larry (and other relevant eng working with them) suddenly time traveled to our times they wouldn't think its impossible to build a good search product that doesn't involved "mammoth code base"

Post by tetrometal » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 3:59 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #248

tetrometal wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is property rights and economic freedom. There's nothing inherent to it that requires monopoly. Natural monopolies can occur but are perpetually unstable provided there are no artificial barriers to entry. Of course, those barriers exist (one form is regulatory capture), but they are not capitalistic. Absent those artificial barriers, even natural monopolies must behave over the long term as though competi…

> Capitalism is property rights Capitalism is property rights Capitalism is a very specific model of property rights and economic freedom as far as consistent with that model, which was designed—incrementally, over a long time—to advance the power interests of a particular clases (mostly not collectively, but as the aggregate of individuals in that class leveraging their growing power to advance their personal intere…