A Post-Google World? • Hacker News Board

Re: A Post-Google World?

#31

Post by adamm255 » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 6:07 PM UTC

pestaa wrote: post #30

mbrumlow wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think about this a lot and feel like we are in a horrid position. All of our core service and software is locked up in a handful of companies. For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source. It hurts me as somebody who wants to make money off software, but SaaS is just a bad deal for everybody. My compromise is i…

SaaS is not a bad deal when users pay for the service directly. And Google have provided tremendous value with their free tools. People forget what it was like before Gmail and Docs. I sincerely hope we can move away from their business model, but looks to me consumers rather pay with anything but their money.

So many people have never known any different. Gmail launched in 2004. Google Docs in 2006.

So anyone who’s 18 today has never known a world without it.

People don’t know what the save icon is in reality.

Paying for things is interesting as media streaming is frequently valued by paying for it, collaboration and things like Google Maps not so much.

I remember using a Palm Pilot with Tom Tom, and an old maps pack that didn’t have half the new main roads included in the UK! I’d honestly pay for Google Maps for the value I get from it.

Re: A Post-Google World?

#32

Post by shaky-carrousel » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 6:10 PM UTC

tmpz22 wrote: post #19

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #4

> At some point, they will give up and realize that the writing is on the wall for their current business model. I'd sooner think hell would freeze over than Google would ever 'give up' on its business model of its own accord. I can hardly imagine half of its services being viable as separate businesses. Which might well be a boon for competitors (especially in adtech), but not for any of Google's current employees o…

If profits degrade for Google society will feel the impact pretty quickly. Think about how many schools rely on Google for Education for email, SSO, and Chromebooks. Think about people who rely on Google Maps, Sheets, Docs, and other loss-leading products. Think about all the data they scoop up in all their apps. Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic.

Meh, they'll switch to Microsoft.

Re: A Post-Google World?

#33

Post by johnchristopher » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 6:17 PM UTC

mbrumlow wrote: post #24

tmpz22 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If profits degrade for Google society will feel the impact pretty quickly. Think about how many schools rely on Google for Education for email, SSO, and Chromebooks. Think about people who rely on Google Maps, Sheets, Docs, and other loss-leading products. Think about all the data they scoop up in all their apps. Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic.

I think about this a lot and feel like we are in a horrid position. All of our core service and software is locked up in a handful of companies. For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source. It hurts me as somebody who wants to make money off software, but SaaS is just a bad deal for everybody. My compromise is i…

> For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source.

That ship has sailed in my opinion. I am under the impression most enterprise and public facing open source projects are fauxpen-source and use FOSS as bait for commercial support and freemium plugins. I am at the point where between two solutions, one fully commercial where I don't even host but can export data out and has strong GDPR compliance and an open source one with a locked-in scheme then I'd rather go with the commercial one because at least I am not under the delusion that I am financing feature-parity open source alternatives to commercial products. I draw the line at formats and protocols, maybe ? /rant

Re: A Post-Google World?

#34

Post by dijit » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 6:17 PM UTC

mbrumlow wrote: post #24

tmpz22 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If profits degrade for Google society will feel the impact pretty quickly. Think about how many schools rely on Google for Education for email, SSO, and Chromebooks. Think about people who rely on Google Maps, Sheets, Docs, and other loss-leading products. Think about all the data they scoop up in all their apps. Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic.

I think about this a lot and feel like we are in a horrid position. All of our core service and software is locked up in a handful of companies. For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source. It hurts me as somebody who wants to make money off software, but SaaS is just a bad deal for everybody. My compromise is i…

I’m reminded of a situation that happened in a small town in Sweden.

Lots of boutique stores in the city centre moved into the newly created mall (due to the economics of malls being as they are)- the mall was also centrally located so: nothing lost.

Almost immediately after this happened; another mall was built outside of town (requiring a car to get to), but as you might expect: rents were substantially cheaper.

All those stores (via peer pressure, cost saving and so forth) moved into the new mall.

Those boutiques never returned and the high-street is dead.

— we have this same situation in tech,

We have lost the ability to function without loss leading technologies (all US based, tying those needs to whatever economic and political situation is happening in the US to the entire world), and, at some point that will have to end, but the oxygen has already left the room for anything else to exist - everything else is starved.

And, Microsoft will not save us, they are leaning into these practices and will suffer the same if US tech is regulated (as it should be). There’s no space for competition.

Re: A Post-Google World?

#35

Post by forrestthewoods » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 6:19 PM UTC

tmpz22 wrote: post #19

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #4

> At some point, they will give up and realize that the writing is on the wall for their current business model. I'd sooner think hell would freeze over than Google would ever 'give up' on its business model of its own accord. I can hardly imagine half of its services being viable as separate businesses. Which might well be a boon for competitors (especially in adtech), but not for any of Google's current employees o…

If profits degrade for Google society will feel the impact pretty quickly. Think about how many schools rely on Google for Education for email, SSO, and Chromebooks. Think about people who rely on Google Maps, Sheets, Docs, and other loss-leading products. Think about all the data they scoop up in all their apps. Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic.

lol no. There already exists alternatives to every Google service. The only moat any of them have is that Google can give them away for free as a loss leader.

There’s nothing special about Gmail in 2024. But Gmail is totally free which prevents anyone from investing in a significant competitor.

Society will be just fine.

Re: A Post-Google World?

#36

Post by aleph_minus_one » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 6:26 PM UTC

mbrumlow wrote: post #24

tmpz22 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If profits degrade for Google society will feel the impact pretty quickly. Think about how many schools rely on Google for Education for email, SSO, and Chromebooks. Think about people who rely on Google Maps, Sheets, Docs, and other loss-leading products. Think about all the data they scoop up in all their apps. Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic.

I think about this a lot and feel like we are in a horrid position. All of our core service and software is locked up in a handful of companies. For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source. It hurts me as somebody who wants to make money off software, but SaaS is just a bad deal for everybody. My compromise is i…

> All of our core service and software is locked up in a handful of companies.

> For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source.

This sounds like a decent plan. Why not start executing the first step of it today?

Re: A Post-Google World?

#37

Post by Arainach » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 6:30 PM UTC

tylerrobinson wrote: post #21

tmpz22 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If profits degrade for Google society will feel the impact pretty quickly. Think about how many schools rely on Google for Education for email, SSO, and Chromebooks. Think about people who rely on Google Maps, Sheets, Docs, and other loss-leading products. Think about all the data they scoop up in all their apps. Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic.

That bad, huh? I reckon everything you mentioned has a perfect substitute. What am I missing?

Integration, management, accessibility, auditing and compliance for starters.

Tech folks love to say "X is is perfect substitute for Y" in the same way they say "what's so hard about X, I could write that in a week" by considering only simple ideal workflows.

The real value, and the real moat for these products, is that they're tied in with SSO and other products, easy for organizations small to huge to manage, have dozens or hundreds of specialized features crucial to large organizations. They comply with legal regulations, accessibility standards (which ARE legal regulations in many jurisdictions such as if you want to sell to the government), and more.

Writing an email server is perhaps 2% of the work involved in building an email product.

Re: A Post-Google World?

#38

Post by jcgrillo » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 6:30 PM UTC

adamm255 wrote: post #31

pestaa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SaaS is not a bad deal when users pay for the service directly. And Google have provided tremendous value with their free tools. People forget what it was like before Gmail and Docs. I sincerely hope we can move away from their business model, but looks to me consumers rather pay with anything but their money.

So many people have never known any different. Gmail launched in 2004. Google Docs in 2006. So anyone who’s 18 today has never known a world without it. People don’t know what the save icon is in reality. Paying for things is interesting as media streaming is frequently valued by paying for it, collaboration and things like Google Maps not so much. I remember using a Palm Pilot with Tom Tom, and an old maps pack that…

OTOH something you pay for is much safer and more reliable in multiple ways. I've been in "interesting" situations before with Google Maps, here's one scenario:

You begin a trip with driving directions, but 2/3 of the way in your phone shuts off because you forgot to plug it in. When you get it going again you have no service. You open Google Maps and... nothing. Your directions are gone, and you can't load them again because you don't have network connectivity. I believe due to the restart this is even the case if Maps happens to give you the "download offline directions" option and you accept (which they don't always do). AFAICT there is no way to "reload" downloaded offline directions, only a search bar which does nothing without network connectivity.

Google only really makes things that serve Google's interests, that's why they'll never fix this. If you, the user, put yourself in a situation where you depend on them, you're the sucker. Google has no incentive to actually make the product good for users, they just have to make it good enough that a sufficiently large number of users look at the advertisements in it. I'd much rather buy software and services from a company that has better aligned incentives. That's why I keep a paperback road atlas in my car.

Re: A Post-Google World?

#39

Post by oasisaimlessly » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 6:35 PM UTC

webstrand wrote: post #15

wiseowise wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android already has alternative app stores.

Nevertheless you can't install a Kindle app that you can actually buy books through: Google's monopoly has prevented this.

You definitely can; just get the Kindle app from anywhere[1][2] besides Google Play Store. I installed it via Samsung's "Galaxy Store" and I buy books in-app often.

* [1]: https://galaxystore.samsung.com/detail/com.amazon.kindlefs?l...

* [2]: https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-com-Kindle-for-Android/dp/B004...

Re: A Post-Google World?

#40

Post by oddb0d » Sat, Sep 07, 2024, 6:37 PM UTC

mbrumlow wrote: post #24

tmpz22 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If profits degrade for Google society will feel the impact pretty quickly. Think about how many schools rely on Google for Education for email, SSO, and Chromebooks. Think about people who rely on Google Maps, Sheets, Docs, and other loss-leading products. Think about all the data they scoop up in all their apps. Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic.

I think about this a lot and feel like we are in a horrid position. All of our core service and software is locked up in a handful of companies. For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source. It hurts me as somebody who wants to make money off software, but SaaS is just a bad deal for everybody. My compromise is i…

>For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source.

I'm in the process of setting up a Community Interest Company to facilitate this very thing. I spent a couple of decades in the world of Drupal, which is the largest open source community in terms of contributors, and have spent the last few years following and supporting the ceptr.org project which is rebuilding the tech stack aligning as to how nature works.

One of CEPTR's subprojects is Holochain.org, a distributed agent-centric open source language, and I'm using https://theweave.social/moss/ which is built on Holochain, to collaborate with my as of current one collaborator who is my support worker, funded by an Access to Work grant as I discovered and was diagnosed last year aged 50 as autistic and ADHD.

Free/Libre Open Source Software can work and be sustainable, it just takes more people getting involved in every aspect of it, and I find the biggest issue there is the majority simply don't know this stuff exists, let alone they can use it and adapt it to their needs.

So times are changing, we have the power, we just give it away every day by not making the most of what we have control over.