211–220 of 261 posts
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What apps does Apple sell in the App Store that used to be sold by third parties, but were then banned?
Look at how the Notes app has evolved… There are apps for scanning documents, for example which are now superseded. The Music app which now has a streaming service…
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It always completely astounded me how countless professional businesses are casually and mindlessly handing over their most private internal communication and metrics to Google on a platter. And aren't Google's privacy policies and ToS's stating that all collected information can be used to "improve their own services" or something along those lines? Does that include 'extract business advantage' from your data? I do…
(Not a Google engineer) Google's engineers are notoriously loose-lipped (which is a good thing!!!). There's no way they would be able to keep a secret like this. Anytime a customer's private data gets accessed, you either a) need approval by someone or b) "break the glass", which is only reserved for oncall fires. Either way, it gets audited. The only way I would believe something like this is if an executive/higher…
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"This is nothing new, as brick and mortar retailers have store brands for popular products as well". The analogy seems spurious to me. Do brick and mortar retailers charge other brands for being a market-place ? Don't they actually buy products of other brands ?
Yes, this is the crucial difference Brick and mortar stores are dealers, Amazon is a broker. Dealers have inventories - they purchase items from the suppliers and resell them - if they misjudge demand, they're left off with useless goods. Brokers simply facilitate a transaction between two parties - there's no risk involved. The fact that brokers get to charge a higher mark-up than dealers is just bizarre
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Self driving cars, free email, free docs, sheets etc. It is a serious point. Protecting advertising companies from each other is a perplexing choice of resource allocation given the alternatives.
Given the choice between free email and Google paying enough tax to improve the entire education system of the US, why do you think people would pick email? Do you believe everyone is stupid?
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Price of labor is a function of supply/demand. Developers still in very short supply vs demand. But profitability sets a ceiling on how much you can afford to pay. It seems to me that if antitrust action were taken that really eats into FAANG profits, that industry pay would decline. Not overnight of course, but gradually in real terms. May still rise in nominal terms. Startups/companies have been forced to raise wag…
Unless of course deadweight loss from monopoly power n FAANG is causing the industry as a whole to be less productive and competitive. In that situation antitrust against FAANG could actually cause wages to rise.
But a lot of comp in tech is benchmarked against FAANG. Specifically if you are a startup trying to hire top 80th-90th percentile people. If their pay fell, I'm pretty confident the top end of industry pay would as well, despite more competition/productivity. Median pay likely unaffected.
Even when you consider the low marginal cost to produce SaaS and similar, the same is true of any competitor. So you'd expect a highly competitive cloud (e.g.) landscape to be low margin despite low cost to provide.
Looking specifically at Azure, AWS, Google Cloud... They become somewhat of a local monopoly over their customers due to costs of switching. The higher barrier/cost to switching to a competitor, the greater pricing power the company has. Even considering that the first choice has a lot of competition.
Anyway, long story short, I think regulation that enables low cost of switching is inevitable in the longer run. As this provides the most competitive landscape, this highest net benefit to society. Would need to be crafted intelligently though.
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You forgot Chromebooks, that everyone around here is so eager to advocate, basically running their business on Google's infrastructure.
I would advocate Chromebooks and Chromeboxes only because once I remove the bootloader protection, flash the coreboot firmware and install whichever OS I want, from my point of view they're wonderful little machines. But from normal users perspective, once they discover that the hardware is locked to prevent the install of anything but ChromeOS, they are garbage, and probably it is what they become once the user has…
Still waiting for investigators to look into Chrome. In 2009 we were finally getting rid of IE and the web browser market was a healthy ecosystem with lots and lots of innovation happening. Today we are soon back on a browser monoculture with the owner of the most popular product being a company that has enormous interest in killing certain parts of the ecosystem and also has a long history of killing of their own pr…
Yeah, reminds me when Google purposefully blocked Firefox from accessing Inbox. Changing the user-agent revealed that they did that for no other purpose than "performance wasn't what we wanted" while the application worked fine as it was, proved by just changing the user-agent. They also let people use other applications that are slow in Firefox, like Google Photos, but somehow Inbox was different. Gist: https://gist…
- The Google engineer's explanation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8495498) - do you think he was just plain lying?
- The Firefox performance bug he mentioned (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1087963). Do you think Google engineers went out of their way to search for new performance bugs in Firefox, then figure out how to introduce those bugs in Inbox's code?
- If Google wanted to use Inbox support to hurt competitors, why would they invest engineering resources in making an Inbox app for iOS? Considering that Android vs iOS competition has much more impact on Google's business than Chrome vs Firefox competition (e.g. see how much Google pays to be the default iOS search provider).
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You cannot be serious. Where do you think all that money went?
Self driving cars, free email, free docs, sheets etc. It is a serious point. Protecting advertising companies from each other is a perplexing choice of resource allocation given the alternatives.
Coincidentally, around the same time big tech came into being, the nation that birthed, nurtured, and protected them started losing its world dominance to rival sovereignties that took the opposite approach in dealing with these generous givers by monitoring their behaviour, limiting their power and influence over the nation and its citizens, enforcing compliance with national policy (for good or bad), and extracting a fair share of the profits in return for their use of public infrastructure.
Still waiting for investigators to look into Chrome. In 2009 we were finally getting rid of IE and the web browser market was a healthy ecosystem with lots and lots of innovation happening. Today we are soon back on a browser monoculture with the owner of the most popular product being a company that has enormous interest in killing certain parts of the ecosystem and also has a long history of killing of their own pr…
I've started on Firefox before it was Firefox (2003?), then switched to Chrome when Firefox became slow, then switched back to Firefox when something annoyed me about Chrome (I don't even recall what), then switched to Firefox when I wanted more customization (how do I still live without custom tab colors? sigh), then switched to Chrome again because Firefox started to clamp down on extensions/customization and also it was kinda slow again. As far as I can tell, Firefox is currently in really bad shape... but I would switch instantly if I thought it was better.
Google makes the best browser (IMO/so far/for an average user). There only compelling reason for an average user to use a different browser is lack of information.
> The lawsuit also highlights Google's use of a secret program dubbed "Project Bernanke" in 2013 that used bidding data to give its own ad-buying an advantage. For example, in a 2015 iteration of the program, Google allegedly dropped the second-highest bids from publishers' auctions, accumulated money into a pool and then spent that money to inflate only the bids belonging advertisers who used the company's Google Ad…
I was going to ask the same thing. Also using some info from the WSJ comment below. - WSJ: "Texas alleges that Google used its access to data from publishers’ ad servers—where more than 90% of large publishers use Google to sell their digital ad space—to guide advertisers toward the price they would have to bid to secure an ad placement." - This is bid optimization & bid shading no? Both helping buyers place a high e…