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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#111

Post by fancyfredbot »

fidotron wrote: post #42

There are aspects to early Google that have been memory holed because they are no longer fashionable or even acceptable and yet may have been key to early success. Firstly they were allergic to design and marketers. The whole data driven approach yielded interfaces that were gawky but highly functional, the extreme opposite of today. The iPhone caused them to throw the baby out with the bathwater on that. More contro…

> floods of people that should have tormented Wall St who all landed in tech instead

Hmm, would these people have inflicted more or less damage on society if they had worked for Wall Street firms?

Re: Mourning Google

#112

Post by jqpabc123 »

This is really mourning the human condition.

This scenario is not new. It is one that has been repeated over and over again --- not just in the history of business but in the history of humanity.

I'm not the only one who saw the big flashing warning signs at the start of the Big Tech/social media era. The distressing and frustrating part is the fact that so many others didn't.

I watched as even my own family ignored my warnings and succumbed to the allure and promise of "free service" without really questioning why or how it was possible.

Some yearning deep inside the human psyche drives people to just "believe" in the impossible without questioning. Those who recognize and tap into this typically don't have altruism as their objective.

"Don't be evil" was really just a diversion --- a seductive marketing ploy that soon vanished --- to the surprise of few even though some holdouts still refuse to accept it out of fear for what it implies about themselves.

Re: Mourning Google

#114

Post by hotpotamus »

dmix wrote: post #59
samirillian wrote: post #25

I like Tbray's posts but I want to quibble over language. What's happening to the term "late stage capitalism"? Feels like it's becoming a meme like neoliberalism. What does it even mean to say that it wasn't tech's fault, it was late stage capitalism's fault? Kind of dodging a particular responsibility with a generality. I think LSC came to prominence through cultural marxists like David Harvey and Frederic Jameson.…

If you look at trends Late capitalism must be when markets became increasingly top heavy with ever escalating layers of state intervention favouring mega corps and entrenched players. Which resulted in things like the housing supply crisis or the destruction of small banks, where the banking market was reduced to 5 megabanks because after every market fluctuation new rules get added which only megabanks can afford (a…

You don't need state intervention to get monopolies; actually it's quite the opposite - economies of scale push for consolidation, and you eventually need government to intervene. Whatever it was known for, the Gilded Era doesn't seem to be associated with large-scale government regulation, but you certainly had mega corps. And given enough leeway, the mega corps will start to take on functions you'd normally associate with government - company tows, stores, and scrip as examples.

Re: Mourning Google

#115

Post by Planktonne »

robertlagrant wrote: post #14
verisimi wrote: post #10

My opinion is that google only ever presented as a new type of company - without ever being that. It was marketing spin - and I bought into that. I since found out it was funded from inception by inqtel, the CIA's venture capital arm. There are lots of articles to this effect, eg: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo... So, the hype, the free canteen, etc was all just spin to move people from…

I don't think that's true at all. The reason it could be like that was because it was making a ton of money. It's easy to buy whatever utopia you care to imagine when you have unlimited money. I also don't think you can say, in any sense I can imagine, that Google made the internet more "corporate". I agree that SEO is painful, but Google was still based around the open internet, and modifying it only slightly to all…

> It's easy to buy whatever utopia you care to imagine when you have unlimited money.

It's easy to think you've bought a utopia; money buys a lot of blindspots.

Re: Mourning Google

#116

Post by Tistron »

yard2010 wrote: post #106
vanderZwan wrote: post #22

> To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. Tangent: I kinda hate this metaphor. It reinforces this incredibly outdated idea that dinosaurs - or any other extinct life-form - went extinct because they were an evolutionary dead end. (Also, since I do not know a single nerd who isn't into dinosaurs the…

Excuse me if the dinosaurs couldn't handle an asteroid they did not adapt, lost the race and went extinct, good day. The birds adapted well and they're still thriving. There are no laws to the race of life. Just survive and reproduce. If you failed to do either you're out.

Maybe read something like this: https://evolution.berkeley.edu/what-are-evograms/the-origin-... :)

Re: Mourning Google

#117

Post by fancyfredbot »

bluetomcat wrote: post #27
fancyfredbot wrote: post #18

Part of me is actually happy that Google lost its shine. A part of this is certainly schadenfreude, for which I am obviously ashamed, but there is another side to it. I remember the awe/respect with which people thought of Google back in the mid-'oughts. Working there carried this huge cachet that few tech companies can compare to today (maybe OpenAI). All these amazing engineers went to work there and everyone was j…

> I don't mean to say it was a waste of talent, because clearly some of these things were a huge success. Nothing apart from search, ads, maps, Gmail, Chrome and Android was a huge success. They essentially created their own monocultural ecosystem. Most of everything else was a short-lived fad. Plus, Wave, Reader, Chat and Glass, to mention a few.

"Apart from all the many succesful products, everything they did was a failure" is an empty statement which can be applied to any company. So yes, you can say that about Alphabet. You can also mention that they have a market cap of $1.8 trillion and are the fourth most valuable company in the world.

Re: Mourning Google

#118

Post by moritzwarhier »

coldpie wrote: post #104
herval wrote: post #37

> "Larry and Sergey were smart guys who recognized they didn’t know shit about corporateness and quickly got into a pattern of hiring and empowering psychotic pricks who were presumably “good at business”. Not gonna talk about some of the things I saw because these people are wealthy and litigious." Big Tech in a nutshell

Well, sorta. Plenty of psychotic smart guys around in big tech, too, which is a potent combo. Bezos; Zuckerberg; Musk, if his loose spending habits qualify him as a big tech leader. Capitalism rewards psychopaths the most, without guardrails they're gonna win every time, everywhere.

Psychosis and psychopathic (or antisocial) traits are very different psychiatric phenomena. They are not even similar, also psychosis is often temporary.

So maybe people should look for a different "smart" way of describing craziness. Or, if you want to use psychiatric terms, subclinic antisocial persobality disorder is most closely related to business success, as far as I know.

Re: Mourning Google

#119

Post by k_kelly »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #11

I have to say, I'm not convinced by all of the AI hype, but it makes a bloody good search engine for a lot of the things I want to search (things where I am in a reasonable position to evaluate the truthfulness of an answer). It's only a matter of time before someone realises that and ruins it in the aim of making money.

It’s far more 5D chess than that.

Search costs nothing to run relative to ad revenue. Microsoft makes each query require 100x the cpu usage because users expect an LLM answer for results.

Microsoft’s share of search goes from 1% to 5%. Their cost go up but their sale of ads increases and they get valuable IP.

Google loses 5% share of market but its costs go up 100x.

Google can no longer finance its other bets like Cloud so effectively.

Microsoft meanwhile has a more compelling cloud offering.

Google starts to lose more ground on Cloud.

Amazon (not an AI company) lose ground to both.

Classic Art of War, if your opponent is strong, attack somewhere they are weak.

Re: Mourning Google

#120

Post by throwawayqqq11 »

samirillian wrote: post #25

I like Tbray's posts but I want to quibble over language. What's happening to the term "late stage capitalism"? Feels like it's becoming a meme like neoliberalism. What does it even mean to say that it wasn't tech's fault, it was late stage capitalism's fault? Kind of dodging a particular responsibility with a generality. I think LSC came to prominence through cultural marxists like David Harvey and Frederic Jameson.…

Id argue that neoliberalism is not just a meme and what the author, i think, refers to with LSC is an underlying systemic property of capitalism, that tries to do its capitalism thing in a saturated world.

Capitalism is great in growing, greed is not per se bad but these capitalist incentives start to cannibalize everything once growth hits deminishing returns. The "good capitalist times" end exactly here. Thats what makes it "late stage" (e.g. after the european conquerors took the americas, where growth was still easy. Or consider the chinese development).

You think this incentive structure, which actually explains well enough recent developments and can be seen pretty much everywhere -- you dont even have to actively look for it -- is just a meme!? To me, this smells like your bias to unreasonably dismiss the far-radical-left explanation. Your loaded language (like mine here) lets me suspect a distorted perception.

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