91–100 of 294 posts
Uber have struck me before as a bigger potential headache for Google than even Facebook were/are, and I suspect this is all an effort to acquire them and drive the price down. There is something about the automated dispatch at giant scale business which overlaps with the search as interface idea. "Get me to [wherever]" is a natural extension of what you might do after searching. Furthermore, the act of finding a driv…
I'm glad that the article highlighted how valuable the mapping information is that Google collects. While Uber probably could still run its current operations without Google map data, there is a much smaller probability that they would be able to run a self-driving car service without a highly accurate mapping product. And to build a mapping product is really difficult and expensive. I was surprised when Google start…
On the one hand, this is great. Competition and I couldn't wish Google's infinite pockets on a more terrible group of people. On the other hand, Google has only been successful with search and advertising and are known for terrible customer service. I mean, who are you going to call when your driver rapes you? You'll never be able to talk to a human.
I would presume, whether the driver was a personal acquaintance, a traditional taxi driver, an Uber/Lyft driver, or a "Google Rides" driver, the answer to that question would be ... the police and a personal injury attorney, and whatever physical and mental health professionals you thought were appropriate.
Of course, since the reports of Google developing a ride hailing service are that it is in conjunction with their autonomous car project, it seems at least plausible that that wouldn't even be physically possible with the Google service.
My inner paranoid finds this interesting from the perspective of Google entering yet another domain where they have high accuracy data on the present/future whereabouts and private concerns of a large number of people.. add it to the hundred other properties they maintain that appear to have no direct business value other than capturing masses of sensitive data that was previously nicely decentralized and private. Ca…
Well you're in luck on that last point, because nobody has ever paid for their meal with Google Wallet.
Uber have struck me before as a bigger potential headache for Google than even Facebook were/are, and I suspect this is all an effort to acquire them and drive the price down. There is something about the automated dispatch at giant scale business which overlaps with the search as interface idea. "Get me to [wherever]" is a natural extension of what you might do after searching. Furthermore, the act of finding a driv…
- Facebook had access to tremendous amounts of personal information, and it was assumed they could leverage this data to improve ads and search and beat Google at their own game.
- Everyone sat at their desktop computer staring at Facebook for hours on end, making it valuable ad real estate. Again, this cut into Google's core business.
So is Uber a comparable headache for Google? I don't see Uber as being a threat to their core business (their business is ads, not search; search just happens to be their best channel for ad delivery). Arguably it provides valuable information to improve their ad targeting, but it seems like a huge investment for relatively little payout in that regard.
My guess is that it's a natural extension of their work on self-driving cars. People have identified how Uber would be natural fit for self-driving cars. But I doubt Google wants to be reliant on a third-party company with reputation problems to introduce these cars to the world. That would introduce too many variables. So they're cutting out the middle man and doing it themselves, at least at first.
So how does this impact advertising? A nation-wide or global fleet of automated, networked cars would obviously produce a glut of valuable information (arguably their Uber-clone would too, but an automated solution could be taken to another scale). But really, I think the self-driving car is a disruptive enough technology that it could be completely orthogonal to their core business and still worth pursuing.
On a side note, can we agree yet that Facebook is quickly fading into irrelevance? It seems to have two important properties left (neither of which they developed): WhatsApp and Instagram. WhatsApp gives Facebook as much value as AIM gave AOL in its later years (which is to say, not enough to justify the company's size and market capitalization). Instagram took Facebook's best use case (looking at your friends' photos) and stripped away everything that made the experience suck: ads and Farmville (in other words, Facebook's business model).
I like what they're doing with React though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they could just ask/hack Google You mean "buy from". This is Google's core business. And I don't consider the NSA more creepy than Google's other customers.
Surely they don't need to buy it, surely they can request it under the guise of national security.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if eventually NSA will get massive layoffs because much of what they'd do would be redundant, and for 80 percent of the stuff they want they could just ask/hack Google. The other 20 percent employees will remain for users of Google competitors and more targeted spying. So essentially 80 percent of NSA's "intelligence" would be outsourced to Google (for free).
> they could just ask/hack Google You mean "buy from". This is Google's core business. And I don't consider the NSA more creepy than Google's other customers.
> This is Google's core business. And I don't consider the NSA more creepy than Google's other customers.
Google's core business is keeping personal data and using it to target ads that advertisers pay Google to show, not providing that personal data to paying customers. Selling the data would be giving away the prime competitive edge Google has, which lies in selling services (primarily advertising) where Google has a competitive edge because of its unique access to the data.
So, unless the NSA wants Google to show you ads rather than wanting detailed information on you, what they would be looking for would not be what Google's core business involves selling.