51–60 of 67 posts
Kinda brilliant actually - convincing the AT&T guys of yore to give away everything for free so you can inject ads into a phone call. Yeah, that would certainly be met with disbelief, anyway I gotta go "skip some ads" on YouTube I'll talk to you later.
I wish Google would do that with everything. Allow me to see zero ads by paying.
This is not a good analogy at all for so many reasons. Here is something closer. Google went to University and read all books and created the worlds largest filing cabinet with an amazing index of the worlds information. They decided to allow other students to use the index to help track down the information they need for their assignment. They ask Google, where do I find information about X and Google tells them the…
100%. I recently read "Software Engineering at Google" https://www.amazon.com/Software-Engineering-Google-Lessons-P... , and my take away was that engineering culture matters a lot to drive any success and innovation. Those who work there have the freedom to challenge anything, to steer the product, and as a result, find opportunities as described in the previous comment and fix it. The management works on shaping th…
/snark
Every search engine uses ads to monetize itself. A search engine you paid for wouldn't get enough users to pay for itself, since the cost of indexing the internet is huge. Youtube is the same deal, there are more ads when watching cable TV you paid for than watching youtube. You can't say that Google made the ad situation worse there either. So Google isn't pushing ads into new areas, Google is just running a normal…
This is all true, except for the user data part. If Google were a billboard company that tried hard to get people to look at its billboard, that's fine. If they're constantly observing by scanning emails, calendars, browsing and location data that's another.
Kinda brilliant actually - convincing the AT&T guys of yore to give away everything for free so you can inject ads into a phone call. Yeah, that would certainly be met with disbelief, anyway I gotta go "skip some ads" on YouTube I'll talk to you later.
Maybe the AT&T those guys could teach something to these young'uns today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not for billboard companies.
They would if they could. Billboards can't so they don't, but businesses has monetized user data as long as it has been possible. Read this article for example about Target identifying people who were possibly pregnant to send ads and offers about baby supplies to them: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.... Google didn't do any innovations at all in this space, they just had more data and di…
Whatever happened to google's founders, Page and Brin? Did they make any public comment when google dropped the moniker "Don't be evil"? Have they spoken publicly in favour or against "surveillance capitalism" or whatever you want to call the business model, as practised by google contemporaneously?
Larry Page has been rumored to be chilling on his own personal island at this point like a movie supervillain. Note that while Brin and Page are no longer accountable to anyone and don't speak up because they're "retired", as Google's controlling shareholders, they're still completely in charge of Google.
And since nobody has commented here about what they think of dropping "don't be evil", I'm beginning to wonder if any journalist has ever asked them.
And if no journalist has ever asked them that question, I'm wondering what has happened to journalism in the world.
This is not a good analogy at all for so many reasons. Here is something closer. Google went to University and read all books and created the worlds largest filing cabinet with an amazing index of the worlds information. They decided to allow other students to use the index to help track down the information they need for their assignment. They ask Google, where do I find information about X and Google tells them the…
To me the spoof does a good job of outlining how google's model is inherently somewhat predatory, and is that way precisely because it grew by starting out free.
It's intriguing to consider that the important public service of searching for services and products (which is most of Google's revenue) could be financed in a more transparent and straightforward way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe AT&T long subsidized its local operations with revenue from long distance operations. This took advantage of businesses' higher willingness to pay for long-distance in order to subsidize local access networks (as opposed to reinvesting all the long distance profits into more long distance capacity). It stopped not just because of capacity increases but because the govt created the incentive for competition…
Interesting to consider how CDNs would work in that world!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe AT&T long subsidized its local operations with revenue from long distance operations. This took advantage of businesses' higher willingness to pay for long-distance in order to subsidize local access networks (as opposed to reinvesting all the long distance profits into more long distance capacity). It stopped not just because of capacity increases but because the govt created the incentive for competition…
Interesting to consider how CDNs would work in that world!