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Microsoft sides with Oracle against Google in Java appeal

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Re: Microsoft sides with Oracle against Google in Java appeal

#51

Post by jkn »

taligent wrote: post #39
cromwellian wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of all web businesses founded since the dot com era have had ads as their business model, because of either, failure to get a universal, easy to use, micropayment system standardized at the start of the Web, or because people came to experience surfing to be transaction-cost free, most people are unwilling to pay for web services, and if you think ads are annoying, how annoying is signing up for an…

You clearly don't understand Google. They earn over 95% of their revenue from SELLING advertising. The other parts of their business e.g. search, mail, maps consume advertising like other web businesses. You are trying to equate the selling from the consumption which is illogical.

Search, mail and maps consume advertising in the same way that newspaper and magazine articles do. Or Facebook pages, or TV series.

Roger Federer earns 85% of his revenue from advertising[1]. Other parts of his business (tennis playing) consumes advertising (displaying Nike logos on his clothes).

What is the insight here? This tells something about how our economy works. It doesn't tell us much about the New York Times, Facebook, NBC, Roger Federer and Google. If you want to understand a company, you cannot limit yourself to a look at the sources of revenue. You have to go deeper and ask what makes it successful. Good newspaper articles. Good tennis play. Good web services and an open platform for mobile devices.

[1] http://spakovas.blogspot.com/2012/06/top-10-highest-earning-...

Re: Microsoft sides with Oracle against Google in Java appeal

#52

Post by jan_g »

flyinRyan wrote: post #50
jan_g wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, but you could say that for many IT companies. Why? Because most of them are getting money by utilizing advertising in one form or another. Is Twitter an advertising company? Is Facebook?

>Is Twitter an advertising company? Is Facebook? Are these serious questions? Of course they are. What else?

I'm questioning the need to constantly repeat the obvious. Just about every thread that smells of Google gets derailed by meta conversation about advertising.

For what is worth, I still consider these companies to be heavily tech oriented, despite their source of revenue. They give bread and butter to people like me - developers. Whereas your run-of-the-mill traditional advertising company doesn't.

Re: Microsoft sides with Oracle against Google in Java appeal

#53

Post by anon1385 »

cromwellian wrote: post #29
OGinparadise wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they don't start out thinking, for example, "How can I increase ad revenue by making voice recognition better." No offense, yet ad revenue magically it increase quarter after quarter after quarter. Surprise? FYI: You are an ad company, a cutthroat and an annoying one too (I am about to use adblock.) Yes, advertising is the majority revenue product Consider the "moonshots" as HR advertising and to get Google press. Vi…

When you find a way to hire 10,000 top engineers and scientists and put them to work on exciting web services with a decent salary (deployed on the most scaleable and power efficient datacenters out there), much of which, the average person loves to use, but won't pay for, and without using tax dollars or scraping by on donations, let me know, I've love to do a start up with you. Did you pay for Netscape when they us…

>if anything, people are induced to click on ads by making them less annoying and more relevant, otherwise, they 'mentally adblock' them.

or by disguising ads as a legitimate part of the page so that users click them by mistake, often leading people to download malware. Just about every software download page on the internet that has ads is full of Google served ads that lead to malware.

This is what Google has turned the web into for people that don't use adblock: http://i.imgur.com/0vPdDYU.png

People have complained about this for years. Maybe doing some OCR on the ads you serve to filter out big fake 'Download' buttons isn't enough of an "interesting or hard problem" for you super-geniuses to waste your time on.

Re: Microsoft sides with Oracle against Google in Java appeal

#54

Post by nitrogen »

kvb wrote: post #19
azakai wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Guessing only: MS is a software company so they'd want to make it harder for others to copy (like whatever Google supposedly copied from java.) The guess can be a little more specific: Microsoft saw what the verdict said about Java and was concerned for what it meant for C#. Oracle having less control over Java because languages are not copyrightable means Microsoft has less control over C#. C# is important to Micr…

Actually, I think that there are both benefits and costs to tightly controlled languages, and it's not clear at all that the costs outweigh the benefits. Indeed, arguably C#'s great progress in the last decade compared to Java is due in large part to Microsoft's hegemony as opposed to Java's community process. Regardless, as I understand it (though IANAL) Oracle's copyright argument was over Android's reuse of Java's…

My response to the cookbook analogy would be that Oracle shouldn't be granted a copyright on the API because that gives them effective ownership over the code everyone else writes to interface with that API.

Re: Microsoft sides with Oracle against Google in Java appeal

#55

Post by nitrogen »

OGinparadise wrote: post #44
cromwellian wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you find a way to hire 10,000 top engineers and scientists and put them to work on exciting web services with a decent salary (deployed on the most scaleable and power efficient datacenters out there), much of which, the average person loves to use, but won't pay for, and without using tax dollars or scraping by on donations, let me know, I've love to do a start up with you. Did you pay for Netscape when they us…

"Most of the meteoric rise can be traced simply to growth in the online audience and a switch-over from print to digital" Until 2007 maybe, but now you're 85%-100% ads on all commercial topics and most users probably don't realize it yet. Face it, that's the truth. Enjoy your paycheck and stock grants but there's nothing to feel proud about your company. Every time business owners growl about less traffic and penalti…

Or making the background as close to white and hide the ad disclaimers as possible?

The background actually becomes white at even slight vertical angles on cheap laptop LCDs; it seems to have been selected just for that purpose.

Re: Microsoft sides with Oracle against Google in Java appeal

#56

Post by rza »

zmmmmm wrote: post #13
callumjones wrote: post #5

Does Microsoft actually have a vested interest specifically in the use of Java by Google, such as being upset that Google had free use of the Java APIs while itself was scolded for implementing their own JVM? Or is it basically "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"?

Microsoft's interest lately is to conduct a kind psyops campaign against Google. They seem to have identified that a huge problem for them is that people really like Google a lot . So basically their strategy is to throw mud at Google until people don't trust them or like them any more. So I would say this fits into their campaign very neatly - if they can portray Google as stealing technology from other companies th…

If this is their plan, I think it's a terrible one. All they're really doing is reinforcing their image as a patent troll. This will only strengthen Google's position as the "good guy" as it is very easy to simply see this case as freedom and innovation vs. corporate greed.

Re: Microsoft sides with Oracle against Google in Java appeal

#57

Post by RestlessMind »

OGinparadise wrote: post #24
cromwellian wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common refrain, sometimes used as a slight, as if Google is just another Don Draper firm, that just happens to have some tech in its portfolio. As a rank-and-file Googler, my personal experience is that most Google engineers perceive that we are a technology company and advertising is often off in the edges of their mind. Yes, advertising is the majority revenue product, but like many startups, the people w…

they don't start out thinking, for example, "How can I increase ad revenue by making voice recognition better." No offense, yet ad revenue magically it increase quarter after quarter after quarter. Surprise? FYI: You are an ad company, a cutthroat and an annoying one too (I am about to use adblock.) Yes, advertising is the majority revenue product Consider the "moonshots" as HR advertising and to get Google press. Vi…

> you also buy politicians

Citations please!

Re: Microsoft sides with Oracle against Google in Java appeal

#58

Post by chii »

jan_g wrote: post #52
flyinRyan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is Twitter an advertising company? Is Facebook? Are these serious questions? Of course they are. What else?

I'm questioning the need to constantly repeat the obvious. Just about every thread that smells of Google gets derailed by meta conversation about advertising. For what is worth, I still consider these companies to be heavily tech oriented, despite their source of revenue. They give bread and butter to people like me - developers. Whereas your run-of-the-mill traditional advertising company doesn't.

banks are very heavily tech oriented (as in they use a lot of tech and also make their own tech). and yet you won't call a bank a tech orient ed company because a company's model determines the 'orientation', not what sort of tools they use.

many people agree that Google is an advert company. it just that they are different from the traditional Madison avenue style ad company. no one is saying that being an ad company is bad. nor are they disallowed to invest in tech. but they are not like the old research institute like the old palo alto xerox style company.

Re: Microsoft sides with Oracle against Google in Java appeal

#59

Post by chii »

gordaco wrote: post #33
chii wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is not a software company. Google is an advertising company that uses (massively intelligent) software.

My two cents. I worked for a few months in a local social network, a fairly-sized one by the way (second-only to facebook in traffic in our country). The engineers thought about the company as technology-based, and our work certainly was to develop such technology; we were the bread and butter of the staff, which means that most of the company's workforce was devoted to create software. As for managers and such, they…

so your managers have figured out that the best way to sustain ad revenue is to make a product that people enjoy using. that's why the focus is poon user experience and not on add visibility. making ads more visible or numerous is a short term gain but a long term loss. Google is doing exactly the same.
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