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Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

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Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#201

Post by scarface74 »

siliconviking wrote: post #71
mancerayder wrote: post #58

Google seems to be falling flat on its face growth-wise. Its ad revenue is down, its Pixel 3 platform fell completely flat, it shuttered Google + and had a security breach? How can you have a large scale security breach with a brutal tech hiring process, sky high salaries and a whitepaper-producing workforce? Hell, when you interview at much smaller firms, the tech groups copycat the Google hiring techniques, that's…

Its ad revenue growth rate decelerated, is what I believe you meant to say...

Or he could have said that net income dropped...

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#202

Post by lugg »

z92 wrote: post #127
philsnow wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "trouble" with Orkut was the large majority of those users were outside the United States. Brazil and later India made up the majority. Those eyeballs weren't worth as much to advertisers, and I don't think Google valued the product highly because of it.

That was because you couldn't "sign up" for Orkut. You had to receive an invitation from someone who already has an account. Therefore it spread in regions where people knew one another, instead of spreading smoothly. The reason why they kept it like that was because of the processing power that was needed to serve the pages. That was more than search. Every individual had to be served a different page. And computing…

> Therefore it spread in regions where people knew one another, instead of spreading smoothly.

I laughed far harder than I should have.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#203

Post by chacham15 »

jeffdavis wrote: post #172
basetop wrote: post #160

Eric Schmidt was the anti-privacy leader who dismissed privacy concerns. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid... Keep in mind this is the same guy who blackballed CNET reporters for finding personal information on him through google search. https://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology…

Privacy is usually not about things you don't want anyone to know. It's about things you don't want everyone to know.

I disagree, I wouldnt send a nude photo to a single stranger (even if they wouldnt send/show it to anyone else).

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#204

Post by trophycase »

manigandham wrote: post #142
trophycase wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, I guarantee a native Youtube donation/subscription/tipping service would already have far more users than Patreon even does currently (see twitch.tv for a great model) due the enormous network effect Youtube already has. Second of all, $1 billion and growing rapidly for a third party service . Nearly every quality Youtube channel I am subscribed to has a patreon at this point, and I can only imagine it…

>> native Youtube donation/subscription/tipping service This exists, already competes with Twitch, and is part of an even bigger portfolio of media services from Google. You're arguing for Google to do something they have been doing for years. https://www.youtube.com/premium https://support.google.com/youtubegaming/answer/6304294 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7277005

Well I use YT nearly every day and didn't know you could become a member of a channel or what the benefits are. Guess it is just poorly marketed. My bad!

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#205

Post by ocdtrekkie »

derefr wrote: post #178
jeffdavis wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy is usually not about things you don't want anyone to know. It's about things you don't want everyone to know.

More specifically, privacy is about things that you want to isolate to one sub-self and its corresponding social circle. Everyone leads a “double life” (or N lives) to some degree, and privacy is the societal etiquette allowing for the continued separation of those lives (without having to go to the effort of using real OPSEC to isolate them.)

So much this. I don't really want my work, my online life, and my family to collide very much, but within each sphere of general influence, I want to be able to reach out and interact with people fairly openly. The best way, of course, is to carefully curate different identities online, but that feels dishonest at times and can be problematic on occasion.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#206

Post by lugg »

KeenFox wrote: post #145
sumeno wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're not even attempting to play in the cryptoverse. They aren't even attempting to play in snake oil or astrology either

Crypto is 99% woo, but the 1% is interesting. The interesting stuff isn't world-stompingly amazing, so it gets less press. I like the idea of someday being able to take pennies worth of payments from places where transaction fees alone at traditional payment processors represent a huge % of income. Bitcoin won't be the one to do it, but some of the coins that depend on something other than proof of work might. At lea…

Penny payments will never* be viable.

* Never say never. Basically I don't think it could possibly be viable because it would require the total cost of transaction to be less than pennies. That includes the shopkeepers time to manage the automated store, the electricity used in the transaction, and a bunch of other non zero components.

Hell even transactions with real pennies today are almost a net loss. We eradicated 5c coins in NZ because they cost something like 6c to make.

And to be clear I understand you mean micropayments in general and maybe it is something possible im just not yet convinced the electricity costs will allow it unless it's subsidized in an unsustainable way.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#207

Post by ummonk »

systemBuilder wrote: post #141
m0zg wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. Larry doesn't get a pass on this one. I was there at the time, and this (unlike, say, Cloud) clearly was one of "his" projects, something he pushed relentlessly and cared about a lot. That's why G+ was where you went if you wanted a quick and easy promo: you could launch a total embarrassing turd and just because Larry liked G+ that turd would be promotion worthy nevertheless. Seeing the FB revenue figures today…

Google is not going to sell every g*damn email you ever sent for $$$, but Facebook will and does. So there was never as much profit there for Google as for Facebook because Google was run more ethically.

Did you miss the time that google was showing ads targeted based on the content of your emails?

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#208

Post by firebones »

UncleMeat wrote: post #90
nostrademons wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard lesson learned from a couple of research projects within Google and then again from my first couple years as an entrepreneur: Internal research is useless. The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it. People are complex; sometimes they do things that all rational thought says they shouldn't (buying Bitcoin and…

> The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it. And then get skewered left and right for shutting down products? You can't have it both ways.

Take a look at Google Reader, though. They got skewered for dumping that. But despite being shuttered years after RSS was a thing, even then it was limited to RSS wonks like a lot of us who were the only ones lamenting it (and the decline of RSS).

Fast forward to today and 10x to 1000x the number of us wonks are getting an overlapping amount of Reader's value (plus new value) from Twitter. The purging of Reader is a distant memory, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily bad to try a bunch of things and kill the non-viral losers (in a relative sense).

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#209

Post by icebraining »

zapzupnz wrote: post #136
z92 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was because you couldn't "sign up" for Orkut. You had to receive an invitation from someone who already has an account. Therefore it spread in regions where people knew one another, instead of spreading smoothly. The reason why they kept it like that was because of the processing power that was needed to serve the pages. That was more than search. Every individual had to be served a different page. And computing…

> Facebook was the first social network where you can actually go and signup an account on your own Myspace, Friendster, Bebo…

And Hi5 - I remember kids using that before FB took over.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#210

Post by 50656E6973 »

quixquaxqux wrote: post #130
beenBoutIT wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear that for some people Google has become synonymous with "the Internet".

Wouldn't it need to be "the internet" for _all_ people to be a monopoly?

No, there's never been a company x which was y "for _all_ people".

A monopoly is typically deemed so when it has inordinate power, no serious competition, and can increase costs without needing to increase quality

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