281–290 of 417 posts
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Someday Google's going to have to list the risk of Jeff Dean leaving on their 10-K ... (not entirely joking)
Companies actually do this behind the scenes. They list individual employees as financial assets.
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Urs Hölzle (engineering VP) and Eric Veach (AdWords) also don't get nearly as much recognition as they deserve.
Huh, I had no idea the guy who wrote the light transport thesis also built Adwords.
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Couldn’t people just stop using Google search though? There’s Bing, Duckduckgo, Ask.com (are they still around?)
The problem isn't google search as much as it is the fact that google search and their ad products allows them to promote their own products at a cost far less than their competitors.
"Some were investigated, but only superficially, the government just really isn't enforcing our antitrust laws. And that's what's happened. None of these acquisitions have been challenged." Behemoths like Google emerge every time new inventions lead to the creation of new markets followed by mass adoption during a relatively short timeframe, when regulations don't exist yet. It has happened in history time and time a…
I think it is also worth calling out that at least 2 of those acquisitions, android and google, were made before they became as dominant as they are today. Android was purchased by google 2 years before it even launched, and while youtube was explosively popular at the time of purchase, many at the time thought the 1B purchase price for a revenue-less company was a stupid decision, and nobody was concerned about a mo…
The mobile picture is a lot less clear. Perhaps a dominant open source solution would have emerged. Samsung has shown itself to be mediocre at producing competitive origination platforms, so I'm highly skeptical they'd have produced the big leading platform. Apple's iOS would have never held the dominate market share, because they're universally the high profit small share player. China only came on in the last few years in terms of their ability to originate such a platform, and the rest of the planet is simply not going to adopt a Chinese platform as the 85% global market solution. The Europeans have been entirely absent post Nokia's implosion. So who else was going to fund the expensive creation of and shepherding of something like Android? Nobody. Google deserves vast credit for that accordingly as well.
Does that mean all of China is <10%? That seems surprising.
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> If you don't like their price or approach too bad for you. You are kept out of the game yes, basically true, i think. the article says Google spent more money on lobbying last year than any other corporation... why does Google think that spending money in this way is useful? what does Google get in return? how does Google explain to shareholders that this is not a waste?
Are those rhetorical questions cause it seems liek the answer is pretty obvious in this context.
a skeptical journalist or consumer might immediately conclude that Google is unfairly influencing government to create an unlevel playing field.
but i'm genuinely curious to hear how Google would spin it.
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Innovative companies on their own are not really innovative really. A monopoly enforces their opinion and product in the world. If you don't like their price or approach too bad for you. You are kept out of the game (it is a monopoly right). As has been mentioned a bunch of times here, Google and Facebook have all too naturally embraced Microsoft's (and prior monopolies' ) approach of embrace, extend, and extinguish.…
> If you don't like their price or approach too bad for you. You are kept out of the game yes, basically true, i think. the article says Google spent more money on lobbying last year than any other corporation... why does Google think that spending money in this way is useful? what does Google get in return? how does Google explain to shareholders that this is not a waste?
It's not useful, it's required. You have two choices. You can do the equivalent of what Microsoft did for a long time, and hide in the Pacific Northwest and pray that the Monster in DC just leaves you alone, while all of your competitors lobby to have you destroyed. You will not be left alone no matter what, if you achieve that kind of success, no matter how you achieve it. The only rational choice, is to get in the game and try to influence the outcome, which is what all of your competitors are going to be doing. Microsoft learned that very painful lesson after waiving at the US Government for years and thinking they could ignore what was going on with their competitors lobbying. Google learned from Microsoft's mistake, and got in almost immediately once their position became dominant.
With the politics in DC, you're either in it defending your position, or you're dinner being served up by your competitors who are very aggressively in it and trying to use the political machine against you as a weapon. The US has a $7 trillion government system top to bottom, one third the size of the economy. There's no avoiding that.
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nit: Android was purchased long before Apple entered the market. Doesn't change your argument, no one was expecting vendors to rush to a new OS because of the iPhone revolution.
But Google was already aware of the iPhone the time they purchased Android. This has been their strategy for competition.
Even after Apple did release the iPhone, the strategy behind Android was entirely focused on competing with Microsoft, not Apple. Google was terrified that Microsoft would get into the smartphone OS market and achieve a dominant position, and then muscle Google out of mobile search and advertising. That's why Android is open source (well, mostly). Google made the Android OS free for manufacturers to use with their phones as a way to get them to use Android instead of a Microsoft OS.
The strategy worked brilliantly. Android has done exactly what Google wanted it to accomplish. Microsoft has never gained any meaningful market share in the smartphone market. And between Android and various deals with Apple, Google has a tremendous presence with smartphone users.
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I went through a three month-long interview process with them... then they said I did very well and they would be extending me an offer. THen next day, they called and said I would not receive an offer and would not give a reason. THey invited me to interview for that position multiple times over the next couple of years and I finally had to ask them to stop recruiting me for that position... they stopped. :-(
Maybe there were additional reasons, but tbh the answer you gave was very bad and probably would have been grounds enough to not hire you. >"Sure, everyone thinks you're a tech company or a search company or whatever - but Google is an advertising company, and thats it. All the other stuff distracts from the fact that youre just the most profitable ad company." When given the opportunity to demonstrate nuanced thinki…
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Even if everything about search was open source, how would an upstart competitor possibly compete on the hardware front? A single Google-style data center would imo be an insurmountable capital cost.
They could start on Google Cloud and work their way out from there. ;)
it reminds me of the decision where ATT was ultimately required to allow user-owned telephones to connect to its wired network. (in earlier times, ATT only let phones leased from and owned by ATT to connect to its network)