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How did Google get so big?

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Re: How did Google get so big?

#291

Post by foobarian »

nostrademons wrote: post #138
jasode wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if Sanjay and Jeff worked directly on DEC's AltaVista search engine but that project was treated as a low-priority "demo showcase" for DEC Alpha servers instead of being seen by DEC management as a new multibillion dollar internet business to pursue. DEC could have had a "Bezos-hey-we-can-sell-computing-as-AWS" moment with AltaVista but they missed it and let Google surpass it.

They didn't - AltaVista was done by Louis Monier and Mike Burrows, both of whom also worked at Google and both of whom also made significant contributions to the codebase. I do agree that management was the critical ingredient - my former VP at Google (employee #48) credited Urs Hoelzle (employee #9, and Google's first VP) as a key ingredient to Google's success. Ironically, though, Google hired Western Digital's man…

Mike Burrows was a coauthor on the algorithm behind bz2 [1]. It's the most mindblowing algorithm I ever encountered and so I have utmost respect for that couple of guys :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transf...

Re: How did Google get so big?

#292

Post by eftychis »

adventured wrote: post #287
HillaryBriss wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> why does Google think that spending money in this way is useful? 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 mat…

Unfortunately, I agree that lobbying has become another "tax" to be paid, consequently a "tax" to the consumers. Tangent: I still don't understand how people find lobbying natural and a good idea.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#293

Post by adventured »

philg_jr wrote: post #118
RestlessMind wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which successful companies came out of EU in the last 20 years? How well do they stack up against US (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber etc) or China (Tencent, Alibaba etc)? If not many, does that mean EU entrepreneurs are hindered by the regulations? One might also argue that European model is better because it might prevent one company from dominating the market. But if that is the case, why does EU face technology do…

How about...Nokia? Seimens? SAP?

The US has approximately 100 tech companies worth $10 billion or more. Europe, with over 2x the population of the US, has about two dozen.

Seimens is a very old - 170 years old - industrial conglomerate. That's like using GE, Berkshire Hathaway or 3M as an example.

Nokia is barely a good example. They're a $30b market cap company, Google can sneeze and lose or gain that in a day. Texas Instruments and Broadcom are worth 3x what Nokia is; Cisco is worth 7x Nokia. In a land of giants, Nokia is pretty small.

SAP is a very serious tech company, and by far the only good big tech example Europe has today. They're slow growth, have a $140b market cap, with $4b in profit (equal to about a month of Apple's profit). They're less than half the size of Oracle and will be eclipsed in size by Salesforce in the near future.

ARM was one of the more exciting European opportunities, until Softbank ate them. NXP might be able to make some good growth moves now that they're apparently not ending up in the belly of a US giant. I could see them forging a good path as an independent.

Spotify might have a bright future. They have to make a decision soon about whether they're going to be culturally an acquiring and aggressive growth company, or whether they're going to watch that extreme valuation (which they can probably never justify given the margin situation) disappear and get acquired in the next market downturn. If they play their cards right, they could be a legitimate long-term $30b-$50b market cap media/tech company (legitimate as in actually backing that up with earnings).

I think Europe's big opportunity, broadly speaking, is in artificial intelligence over the next decade plus. That's a solid inflection point where some new big companies will emerge. Europe has tons of AI talent to make something happen there (if they don't all sell out to big US or Chinese tech).

Re: How did Google get so big?

#294

Post by jazzyjackson »

ur-whale wrote: post #251
stuckinarut wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would that be a good thing? Or rather, a better thing than the current situation? Why would that even be desirable? Because wealth inequality is massively harmful for society. It's the sort of thing that leads to revolution. > If you believe e.g. that company equity should be more uniformly distributed, go talk to your congressman, have him draft a law to that effect and get congress to vote on it. and then Goo…

> Because wealth inequality is massively harmful for society. Nope. Hunger, poverty, lack of education, lack of access to medical care, etc.. is harmful to society and leads to revolutions and whatever root cause leads to those is to be fought against. Except that wealth inequality isn't such a root cause. Wealth inequality isn't and has never been a problem except in the minds of utopian ideologues, collectivists or…

You're pretty dismissive of a theory I find interesting, I wonder if you've ever really entertained the idea that a wealthy country will cater its services to those who can pay, leaving those who can't pay behind.

So USA has a high median income, so we have high education outcomes, high healthcare outcomes, right? We certainly have the best schools and the best hospitals. But only the top few percentile can afford the best schools and best hospitals, everyone else gets left behind.

But we have higher infant mortality than many countries with lower incomes, and we don't compete so well when it comes to average assessment scores.

Naturally I was exposed to this thinking via a TED talk years ago, from this guy:

https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson

Maybe you want to offer a rebuttal, or maybe you just want to insist he's jealous.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#295

Post by fixermark »

xg15 wrote: post #211
fixermark wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quick experiment you can try to check if Google is blocking competition: 1) navigate to bing.com 2) do a search If it works, congratulations; Google isn't blocking competition. The 98% market share is probably because the market is winner-take-all, and people don't see a need to use a new competitor that's even equivalently-effective over one they are already comfortable with.

Imagine you run a website. Some day, for whatever reason, Google is blacklisting you. Are you going to say "eh, no big deal, I'll just have my customers use Bing instead"?

Your customers already know how to get to your website: yourdomain.com.

Do you mean "Some day, for whatever reason, Google stops directing traffic to your website of people who don't know who you are, for free?"

Sounds like it's time to spend some money on advertising.

Their ability to kick a bunch of traffic towards you or refrain from doing so makes them a market-maker, but they share that with newspaper and television networks. It doesn't make them a monopoly. It's not their fault or responsibility if people don't "tune in" to the Bing channel.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#296

Post by booleandilemma »

whoahnoway wrote: post #283
zjaffee wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There shouldn't be a problem. If I offer two services and I advertise service 2 on the website for service 1 I'm just doing what makes sense.

I agree, it’s like Domino’s advertising their cinnamon sticks (or whatever) on their pizza boxes. They don’t have to advertise Papa John’s cinnamon sticks. Why should they?

Re: How did Google get so big?

#297

Post by seabrookmx »

adventured wrote: post #284
bps4484 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google was solely responsible for YouTube's ultimate success and they deserve the credit accordingly. It was a dead company if they didn't buy it, they were rapidly bleeding to death financially and the legal picture was disastrous. It was viewed as a stupid mistake of a purchase in part because the argument was they would be a giant red ink pit forever. The sole reason YouTube survived the legal attack was due to Go…

> Universally the high profit, small share player

I'm curious though, was this always supposed to be the case? I think Apple has adapted amazingly well to the market (look at their profits) but I don't think there's any evidence that this has been a holistic, from the start business strategy for them.

I know my Elementary and High schools had Macs because of Apple's aggressive Educational discounts, and at the time it was generally accepted that Apple was trying to get a generation of kids used to Macs so that they would be the mainstream computer when they reached adulthood. Ultimately we were all forced to use Wintel boxes when we got jobs so this play didn't work. Apple didn't get in bed with businesses the same way they did with schools.

Then when we swing over to iOS, the first iPhones were premium devices because they _had_ to be. The hardware required to realize their vision was bleeding edge and they knew it would take a few years to commoditize it. Ultimately Android popped up and stole the budget market (with crappy devices, some of them having keyboards and resistive touchscreens) before Apple felt comfortable putting out something budget like the 5c much too late.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#298

Post by fixermark »

stuckinarut wrote: post #238
fixermark wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a user searches for "Restaurants near me," how does Google answer that question reliably without using its own mapping service? Trying to feed that query to a third-party service and then give users the results back adds significant risk that the third-party changes their API, changes their feature-set in an incompatible way, goes out of business, gets in a corporate fight with the search provider... It's both c…

They pay to integrate with third party services via a bidding process. > adds significant risk that the third-party changes their API, changes their feature-set in an incompatible way, goes out of business All very unlikely to happen when dealing with a client the size of google. > It's both cheaper and more convenient for the end-user if the search provider handles the mapping itself added bonus, google gets to domi…

> They pay to integrate with third party services via a bidding process.

It's an interesting idea; I don't think I've seen something like that floated before outside of the government space of fair bidding against contracts.

> added bonus, google gets to dominate mapping then jack up the cost 30x when they decide they want it to be a billion dollar business. LIke they did recently.

I hear OpenStreetMaps still exists, and has an API.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#299

Post by shkkmo »

deklerk wrote: post #279
nine_k wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, fairness? "Level playing field", maybe. The idea of anti-trust regulation is to break up companies that cornered a market, that is, (mostly) prevented competition on it. Breaking them up serves to make more, smaller companies (out of the split giant) that would start to compete again. Anti-trust laws can be seen as pro-market laws that try to prevent long periods of monopolized markets without waiting for a natu…

I used "fairness" because it appears in most definitions of the anti trust regulation. A "level playing field" is 100% not the point of antitrust laws. Sidenote: I don't believe any "playing field" in business is "level". I think something for folks to keep in mind is that much of the US antitrust laws were made back in the early 1900s to combat _literal_ monopolies, objective collusion between companies to harm cons…

> This sentence is dangerous: it is very close to saying that any long-term, successful company should be "disrupted". Interpreted differently it could be read that startups should have some inherent right to evenly compete with large companies (by fining or splitting up large companies to be "beatable" by startups).

No it isn't. "Successful company" and "company that has cornered/monopolized their market" are not even close to the same thing.

Anti-trust laws don't aim to make competition fair, they aim to make it possible.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#300

Post by fixermark »

acover wrote: post #96
fixermark wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal opinion: the fact that type of sharing hasn't happened with open source services speaks volumes about the priorities of the open-source communities and is the single-biggest argument in favor of allowing large corporations leeway to create big cool things with big data. I don't see anyone else stepping up to solve the hard problems like this.

Have there been open source projects that had the opportunity to and decided against it?

OpenStreetMap currently exists. Is there an open-source search engine out there that could try to integrate with them?
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