181–190 of 232 posts
When Google later went public in 2004, Larry, Sergey, and Eric made a pact to work together on Google for the following 20 years. That's coming due soon in 2024. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-executives/top-goo... https://money.cnn.com/2008/01/18/news/companies/google.fortu...
Didn't all three of them check out years ago?
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Competition being a click away is what keeps quality between Google and Bing comparable, and what keeps Google always trying to invest to stay a step ahead. But once quality is close like that, defaults matter, which is why Google pays Apple. If Bing wasn't there (or barely worked) and there was no competition to Google, then Google wouldn't need to pay Apple, because Apple would never consider Bing as a default in t…
In this case we have two ad supported search engines that deliver a very similar experience. As you note the differentiation is not great and thus, defaults matter. So in this case they are no longer competing on product quality, but on distribution. A high barrier to entry ($20B is high) but at There is also brand competition and Google has done a fantastic job building very strong brand preference. Honestly no one…
Incorrect. Quality is a moving target as search gets better. Competition is in quality and distribution. If Google stops improving and lets Bing move ahead on quality, it'll be dead. Witness the recent worries about incorporating LLM's into search.
> Furthermore no one, including Microsoft, is going to risk $20B on overcoming Google's brand preference.
Earlier this year there were reports that Samsung was considering switching to Bing, and it was suggested there was a similar $3B contract involved. So of course Microsoft is in the same game, and it's quite obvious that Google wouldn't be paying these sums at all if Microsoft weren't willing to offer something as well (but keeps getting outbid).
E.g. if Google weren't paying Apple $20B, it's quite likely that Microsoft would be paying Apple $15B instead. One of them would be.
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. - Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
But I'm sure they love being billionaires now. At some point most people will sell out. You see it all the time with companies, mainly consumer product companies, that sell to private equity who then create objectively worse products than before.
That might be true, but I don't believe people sell out for the money. There is no concrete difference in lifestyle between having a hundred millions and a billion. And no matter how luxuriously you live, there will be an enormous amount of wealth left to your heirs.
When you have that kind of money, changing the world and the future becomes more interesting than getting as rich as possible. After all our time on earth is finite. And as a tech giant you have a good possibility of doing just that.
So when extremely rich people sell out, I think the reason is rather some other kind of pressure and influence, that they might not be able to talk openly about.
If a dog steals a sausage, it's because it was hungry. But if a dog that has just eaten a hundred sausages and has his dog house full does it - then it's not hunger.
Without commenting on the direction of the company in recent years and where it is today, I'll be forever grateful to Google for setting the standard for how tech companies need to treat their engineers. People who have entered the industry in the last decade or two may not realize it, but the sky high salaries, stock grants, benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked pantries, gym memberships and lot…
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https://nitter.net/uhoelzle/status/1442040678167375877
TY! That was interesting and I learned that their first servers can be viewed in various museums. While web searching that, I found this interesting tangent, a Lego cased storage array from 1996: http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/...
You mean googling I assume?
Without commenting on the direction of the company in recent years and where it is today, I'll be forever grateful to Google for setting the standard for how tech companies need to treat their engineers. People who have entered the industry in the last decade or two may not realize it, but the sky high salaries, stock grants, benefits, flexible work hours, free gourmet meals, stocked pantries, gym memberships and lot…
You really need to read some mid-90's books like Microserfs or some of the early Mac histories for some historical context. None of this was new or particularly unusual in the valley at the time. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs .
"During this period when everybody at Apple was celebrating the increasing revenues piles of money that would make many of them so rich that they would be beyond millionaires, in the ozone of Croesus Mode, where wealth is counted in units of tens of millions John Draper was at home, playing with his Apple"
"wealth is counted in units of tens of millions" how cute!
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Yep - Eric left the company early, in 2020. Larry and Sergey are still employed there, but as you note, seem pretty checked out these days.
Sergey is pretty involved according to recent reports
(sergey is a genius and should have run his own R&D group and not bother other groups)
About a year before, in mid-1997, word got around that there was this cool new search engine project that was giving great results. You could get to it only from the Berkeley and Stanford campuses at http://google.stanford.edu Berkeley and Stanford, despite their sports rivalry, actually work together a lot and at the time had direct connect networks between the two schools (which also made file sharing across dorms…
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TY! That was interesting and I learned that their first servers can be viewed in various museums. While web searching that, I found this interesting tangent, a Lego cased storage array from 1996: http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures/display/...
“web searching” You mean googling I assume?