How did Google get so big? • Hacker News Board

Re: How did Google get so big?

#361

Post by nostrademons » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 7:01 AM UTC

jotz wrote: post #323

nostrademons wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have already accepted cryptocurrencies as the wave of the future, Coinbase provides enormous value. You can't do much in the crypto world without owning some cryptocurrencies, and they are the largest, easiest to use, and generally most trusted way to exchange $USD for Bitcoin or Ethereum. Most Americans have not accepted that premise (and I don't exclude myself...I'm on the fence as for whether crypto is a bu…

In 1996 the internet was in every imp University campus worldwide and every CS dept had multiple labs working on a lot of the what most people take for granted today that allowed the internet to scale. No such thing is happening with bitcoin. You can't scale something to internet levels if its banned in half the worlds research labs.

"Every imp[ortant] University campus" is a tiny subset of "all people". The total population of 4-year college students in the U.S. is 13.4M, roughly the same as the number of Coinbase users. In 2005 Facebook was in every important university campus worldwide, and yet people (including myself) continued to call it a fad until they started making billions in 2012.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#362

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 7:07 AM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #359

0xEFF wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Approaching operations from a software development perspective wasn’t unique to Google. Also ops is engineering and has been since before Google existed.

Ops is probably more reasonably called engineering than most so-called “software engineering”.

[deleted]

Re: How did Google get so big?

#363

Post by y4mi » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 7:11 AM UTC

snikeris wrote: post #24

wallflower wrote: post #8

If I could give a six word response for the technical side: "Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat and team". To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and their team have time and time again managed to design and build st…

Also, the Google SRE book makes the point that they couldn't have achieved their scale w/out approaching ops from an engineering perspective. Linearly hiring ops people as services scale would have been too expensive.

The book : https://landing.google.com/sre/book.html

Re: How did Google get so big?

#364

Post by elgenie » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 7:19 AM UTC

nunez wrote: post #254

samstave wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall one of the questions in my interview at google years ago: "Do you know what kind of company Google is?" "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."

Well techncially Google is an information company that happens to use ads to fund its mission of making information more accessible and useful.

"claims to be", perhaps.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#365

Post by gretch » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 7:21 AM UTC

smt88 wrote: post #318

gretch wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're making the point with your own answer. You say "in terms of revenue and profit...". Oh! Great point. I'd say you are right. What if you were to frame it in other terms? I mean if the entirety of Google can be summed up in 3 sentences, what topics in the world do you consider to have depth? Imo it's looking at a Shakespeare sonnet and saying 'yeah it's fucking poem'

They asked him what kind of company Google is. They weren't asking for an essay on a Shakespeare sonnet or anything close to that end of the spectrum.

You don't think the kind of reply he gave is pretty combative for the interviewing for a job at said company?

You recommend that as a path forward for people who interview at your company or at Google in the future?

Look I understand sometimes people don't want to work at a certain company. But typically it's better to decline the interview than to show up and be smug or righteous about it.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#366

Post by sidcool » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 7:24 AM UTC

sseth wrote: post #342

Let's ask a question : How did Google defeat another giant - Microsoft - in 2 major markets where Microsoft had a head start and deep pockets? How did Chrome beat IE, and how did Android beat the several generations of Windows Mobile and Windows Phone? Clearly Microsoft had no dearth of talent or money. So how come it could not keep Google at bay? In my view the answer lies in the fact that Google's engineering led c…

I think this is somewhat related to how Google lost to Facebook in the social space. Google already had Orkut with them. Similarly the idea of Google drive was floated around in Google as early as 2008. But it took the Advent of Dropbox for Google to realise what they had missed.

Same goes for the public cloud. Although Google had the app engine, they did not aggressively invest in it. Azure clearly over took Google in cloud space.

I am sure there would be many such examples from all the Tech Giants.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#367

Post by Theodores » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 7:38 AM UTC

sseth wrote: post #342

Let's ask a question : How did Google defeat another giant - Microsoft - in 2 major markets where Microsoft had a head start and deep pockets? How did Chrome beat IE, and how did Android beat the several generations of Windows Mobile and Windows Phone? Clearly Microsoft had no dearth of talent or money. So how come it could not keep Google at bay? In my view the answer lies in the fact that Google's engineering led c…

Google did a great job of putting the user first. You never felt like you were being sold something, a refreshing change from the MSN 'homepage' at the time.

You also did not feel that you were being given something for free that had a catch to it - see HN story today about prisons getting 'free' tablets.

Make no mistake, Microsoft can do free very nicely too - Internet Explorer in the Netscape days was partly ascendant for doing 'free' very well at a time when Netscape was emerging from 'shareware'. But with Microsoft 'free' you always felt that you were a pawn in their plans for global domination, to blot out the rivals.

I think that Google came along with a great series of products and services that put the user first with an ethos that Microsoft, Apple and others just did not 'get'. Although Chrome was marketed with billboards and a link in the search results, the real work on adoption was done by the users recommending the superior, user centric product to their workmates, friends and family.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#368

Post by sseth » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 7:52 AM UTC

southerndrift wrote: post #358

sseth wrote: post #342

Let's ask a question : How did Google defeat another giant - Microsoft - in 2 major markets where Microsoft had a head start and deep pockets? How did Chrome beat IE, and how did Android beat the several generations of Windows Mobile and Windows Phone? Clearly Microsoft had no dearth of talent or money. So how come it could not keep Google at bay? In my view the answer lies in the fact that Google's engineering led c…

Microsoft's problem for Windows was that they wanted to make money of selling Windows for mobile phones instead of giving it away for free. Chrome's success could be due to Google having an ad for Chrome at the top of the most visited site of the internet.

No doubt Chrome had an advantage over Firefox in this case. But that does not explain how they beat IE. Microsoft had the advantage of shipping IE with the OS itself.

I don't believe the licensing cost of Windows Phone was what led to its downfall. The Nokia deal probably cost Microsoft more than any licensing fee it would have collected. Microsoft had the money and the presence in the market to out compete Google. It just did not have the right product at the right time.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#369

Post by sseth » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 8:02 AM UTC

Theodores wrote: post #367

sseth wrote: post #342

Let's ask a question : How did Google defeat another giant - Microsoft - in 2 major markets where Microsoft had a head start and deep pockets? How did Chrome beat IE, and how did Android beat the several generations of Windows Mobile and Windows Phone? Clearly Microsoft had no dearth of talent or money. So how come it could not keep Google at bay? In my view the answer lies in the fact that Google's engineering led c…

Google did a great job of putting the user first. You never felt like you were being sold something, a refreshing change from the MSN 'homepage' at the time. You also did not feel that you were being given something for free that had a catch to it - see HN story today about prisons getting 'free' tablets. Make no mistake, Microsoft can do free very nicely too - Internet Explorer in the Netscape days was partly ascend…

This is a great point.

And i think Microsoft could have done this too. But perhaps the conflict between improving the open web vs pushing their own operating system was a conflict they never resolved internally, giving Google the time and space it needed to outflank them. And Google moved fast enough, and as you have said, created a great enough user experience, that it could quickly establish a strong foothold.

I think if Microsoft had truly been focused on keeping IE as the best browser in the world, it would have been difficult to displace given its dominance.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#370

Post by barry-cotter » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 8:12 AM UTC

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…

> Google was solely responsible for YouTube's ultimate success and they deserve the credit accordingly.

If they were capable of making a success of video without buying YouTube why did they buy it in the first place. Video.google.com was developer internally, YouTube thrashed it, Google gave up and bought YouTube.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Video