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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

secondbreakfast.co

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Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#381

Post by hanspeter »

joshuamorton wrote: post #236
HenryBemis wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product". And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data. This applies to many companies, but to Google most of all. Also, the further they keep users away from Win10 (where MS siphons everything) and they keep them locked in Android/Chrome operating syst…

Who does Google sell your docs and drive data to?

For using Gmail, Drive and Docs you will have a Google account and you'll be logged in often or all the time. Quite useful for targeting you outside those tools.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#382

Post by loughnane »

laxatives wrote: post #321
loughnane wrote: post #75

I get the desire to abandon google services, and have done so myself for email and search, but there isn't much to this article. An old gmail account being noisy is probably more a function of it being old than it being a gmail account. I suspect he'd see a great improvement just starting a new email address. Airtable has some nice functionality, but I don't think it's head-and-shoulders above sheets and this article…

How did you transition your email address? I've wanted to get off, but I can't do that without wiping all of my previous conversations or losing contact with many people.

I still have the old emails in gmail, I just moved to protonmail for new things and put up a vacation autoresponder. letting people know I don't use it anymore.

I might migrate, but honestly I don't go through old emails almost ever, so I'll prob just export an .mbox and deal with importing it sometime in the future if I ever need it.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#383

Post by secondbreakfast »

jcranmer wrote: post #64
jtbayly wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the four monopolies?

I just want to say that I love how the response to this comment is several lists of 4, with search being the only one present in all of them.

The 4 I was thinking of:

Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube

Chrome is arguably a monopoly if you segment desktop web traffic, but iOS Safari is such a large percentage that Safari can't be ignored.

People will disagree with email - but I challenge you to go look at email threads you're on and see what % of the emails are @gmail.com - not to mention G Suite addresses you don't know are Gmail. Outside of enterprise, there's no alternative.

Not bad either that Android and Chrome are duopolies at this point.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#384

Post by secondbreakfast »

domkema wrote: post #48
jtbayly wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the four monopolies?

If I had to guess what GP is referring to: search, maps, email, and browser. While I'm sure we could disagree on if Google actually has a monopoly in these domains, I think it's obvious they have a _substantial_ foothold.

Pretty much! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23632044

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#385

Post by RonanTheGrey »

three_seagrass wrote: post #253
tengbretson wrote: post #9

> It’s amazing how they have four monopolies and only monetize one of them. They appear to me to have begun monetizing google maps. And it is awful.

Probably because those are not really monopolies. People like to conflate being popular (having large marketshare) with being a monopoly (exclusive control of supply). Being popular in those markets is likely because they do not monetize it directly.

> exclusive control of supply

Is not the only, nor even the most useful, definition of a monopoly. And there's also not a magic moment where one second you're not a monopoly, and the next second you are when user X+1 signs up. It's a gradual process and that's why it is such a huge area of law.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#386

Post by neixidbeksoxyd »

Google is a classic case of "show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome". Google's performance reviews and promotions are based on building shiny complex things, not on simple but grungy work that solves real problems. So they constantly come up with things nobody uses or cancel products that many use but aren't shiny enough to get a bunch of people promoted so no leaders want to own them.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#387

Post by amaccuish »

blago wrote: post #264
PhearTheCeal wrote: post #8

For Google Translate you should check out DeepL https://www.deepl.com/translator It's absolutely insane, blows GT right out of the water with its accuracy.

It detected my Bulgarian (Cyrillic alphabet) test sentence as English: https://www.deepl.com/translator#en/ru/%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0...

That's because DeepL doesn't support bulgarian yet.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#388

Post by luhn »

nostromo wrote: post #285
dmitriid wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then, people would just focus on making stuff better And yet, Netflix had autoplaying videos at full volume that didn't even show trailers, but some random snippet from the movie/show

I actually close Netflix because of this. However, Netflix is full of smart people, so I have to assume that they've tested it and it increases engagement. Perhaps we're the outliers.

Netflix is well-known as a very data-driven company, so you can assume almost any change is backed by data. But solely data-driven decisions can be a bit myopic—You're likely to end up in a local maximum.

For example, Netflix selects the "optimal" categories to display on your home screen. For several years, "My List" and "Continue Watching" were part of those categories, meaning they would change position and sometimes not show up at all, with no way to access them. It drove me crazy that I specifically chose shows I wanted to watch and Netflix would sometimes choose not to show me them.

Re: Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead

#390

Post by jldugger »

mav3rick wrote: post #304
nailer wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stadia is a cloud gaming platform. Like Nvidia Shield, Microsoft xCloud, Sony PS Now, OnLive, and the rest. Gmail, maps, page-rank based search, and other pre-2010 Google tech were category makers. Every competitor has to massively step their game up to make something as good. Stadia is not a category maker. There's no massive competitive advantage or leading position for anyone else to catch up to. It's nowhere near…

This is getting old now. Tensorflow, TPUs, Spanner, Photos, Waymo. Just keep shifting the goal posts.

Tensorflow / TPUs were a pretty big deal, but are Spanner or Photos really that widely used?

Waymo's not even out of private alpha yet =)

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