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Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

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Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#411

Post by jcrawfordor »

deadowl wrote: post #347
thearn4 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The endless spigot of cash from Steam is something that does enable Valve to take some very experimental leaps (VR, Steam machines, SteamOS, etc.) In my opinion, Valve also has the same shortcomings as google: practically zero customer support, and an un-curated app platform full of shovelware (finding gems on the Steam and the Google Play & Chrome Web Stores can be tricky). But there is still a ton to admire in both…

Are you kidding me about Google customer support? They're the only company that ever solved my problem with a Linux question, and later helped me when I purchased a movie on YouTube on an account I didn't intend to purchase on. They might not provide great customer support to some market segments, but when it comes to the end-consumer, they go above and beyond.

I'm kind of astounded to hear anyone speaking positively of Google support, and certainly my experience trying to get support and even pre-sales on Google Apps has been miserable - a lot of filling out forms (often slightly broken ones) and never hearing back. Most notably, someone once started spamming an organization I worked for from Gmail by just pasting hundreds of addresses into the To:. Over a year of multiple abuse reports from multiple people and they were still going, and the abuse report form had broken validation so that having the headers too long (because of the over 300 recipient addresses) resulted in a message that the headers field was empty. This is where oddly typical of my experiences with them.

This makes me think that it's rather particular to the product. YouTube was acquired and now has a significant focus towards consumer sales via movies and Red, perhaps these two factors have lead to a significantly different culture surrounding support?

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#412

Post by phil21 »

the8472 wrote: post #400
oxide wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over 40% of the titles on Steam have been added in the past year alone. The floodgates need to close, now. As someone who has voted on hundreds of Greenlight titles, Greenlight is an abject failure IMO. It's flooded with garbage, the first few waves of approvals gave us some great titles that otherwise would have never seen the platform, but now it's a nightmare. There are no more approval lists. What's worse, it's t…

> The floodgates need to close, now. Why? The internet itself is an open, uncurated platform. The basic ability to publish things and finding good content are two separate problems. Don't try to solve one by restricting the other.

So you're saying I should publish on the open/free Internet, and use a custom app to find good content?

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#413

Post by iamatworknow »

CM30 wrote: post #409

To some degree, this is like anything else in life, isn't it? The more successful/skilled/good you are at anything, the less you have to worry about whether you're doing things the 'right' way. See for example, sports. A gifted athlete could quite easily defeat a far less gifted one with more 'technical knowhow' because they're simply more skilled by default and can hence make up for their inefficiencies or mistakes.…

>See for example, sports. A gifted athlete could quite easily defeat a far less gifted one with more 'technical knowhow' because they're simply more skilled by default and can hence make up for their inefficiencies or mistakes.

This is a surprisingly good analogy. Look at Steph Curry in the NBA. He takes a ton of awful long range 3-point shots, but he also makes a ton of them (45.4% in 2015-2016 compared to league average 35.4%). But some people are arguing that he's actually a detriment to the future of basketball because kids are emulating him instead of learning fundamentals:

>"Even watching this weekend, everyone is trying to hit the three and there are a number of big guys that are pretty good that aren't seeing the ball at all," Johnson said at an EYBL stop in Indianapolis in April. "It's like guards feel like they have to shoot the three to reach their goals, but it comes at the sacrifice of actually playing a team game. There's a lot of guys chucking a lot of bad shots without actually knowing how to get their teammates involved and create for other people."

http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2016/6/13/11876304/stephen-curry...

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#414

Post by NTripleOne »

iamatworknow wrote: post #410
robryan wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The user review system for games is the best I know of and arguably more useful in deciding what to buy than critic reviews. Steam is also constantly promoting new games to you and making suggestions based on what you currently play. There is also the social aspect in that you can see who is playing what, leading to new discoveries.

Why does it seem like every review I read is basically a joke by someone with 1500 hours in a game saying simply "it's pretty good" or conversely someone with 2 hours in a game that writes an entire novel about how let down they were when they barely scratched the surface? I will admit that at least having the verifiable length of time a reviewer played a game helps, but I don't find the reviews themselves to be all…

Why does there even need to be a full review when someone has spent 1500 hours of their life playing it?

If it was worth 1500 hours of the reviewer's time then it's probably worth 10-50 of a potential buyer's.

Inversely, I don't need to play a bad game for 1500 hours to decide that it's bad. I played 60 minutes of No Man's Sky and you'd have to pay me to play a single one more. Does that mean I should be discredited from voicing my opinion?

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#415

Post by lobster_johnson »

swang wrote: post #369
lobster_johnson wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under "Search tools", click on "Verbatim". It will cause the query to actually honor the words you typed.

does this honor typos? i like spellcorrect changes but i hate all the other assumptions they make about my search terms.

It will show a "Did you mean:", but doesn't automatically rewrite it. Example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=gam+of+throes&tbs=li:1

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#416

Post by pc86 »

Fiahil wrote: post #228
georgespencer wrote: post #112

There's an interesting fiscal corollary of having unbridled ambition matched by enormous firepower which brings the world's smartest engineers and hackers together: a Xoogler who was early in the business once told me about how engineers would hack/exploit the travel allowance policy. Google allowed folks to book their own flight and accommodation, and had an algorithm which determined rewards for folks travelling wi…

Fired? Why is that always the go-to solution? Firing someone cost money, affect teammates' motivation, and make people unhappy. "Hi Mr X, I saw you managed to extract a significant benefit from the travel allowance policy. Congratulations! Please don't do that again, or you'll have to go through Mr Y for validation next time. Have a good day!". Here you go.

I don't think this is a fireable offence but it's not hard to see the logic that leads one to believe that:

- Company sets up a rewards program to incentive financial discipline.

- Employee notices something that could allow them to, as you put it, "extract a significant benefit"

- Employee chooses not to bring this to someone's attention

- Employee proceeds to willfully navigate the benefit system in an unintended manner which causes the company to expend quite a bit more X than expected (where X can be money, or processing time, or paperwork, or benefit credits, or whatever).

Spurious is the key word here in the original post. Reservations they wouldn't have otherwise booked in order to maximize there own personal financial gain. If 0 is intended activity and 10 is outright fraud, that isn't a 10 but it's a hell of lot bigger than 0.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#417

Post by the8472 »

phil21 wrote: post #412
the8472 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The floodgates need to close, now. Why? The internet itself is an open, uncurated platform. The basic ability to publish things and finding good content are two separate problems. Don't try to solve one by restricting the other.

So you're saying I should publish on the open/free Internet, and use a custom app to find good content?

I'm not proposing solutions. I'm saying that "restrict publication" does not follow from "I'm seeing low quality content".

Don't restrict other people for your own benefit. Instead a solution that lets them do their thing while you get the content you want is much more equitable.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#418

Post by GCA10 »

morgante wrote: post #368
GCA10 wrote: post #57

Big companies seem to step in the same puddle, every time they try to set up one of these "breakthrough incubator" projects. They pick fascinating projects. They hire lots of smart people and give them great autonomy. But they inadvertently set up incentives that lead to the repeated creation of LINS (lavishly impractical non-solutions). And then the plug gets pulled. I think the key problem is that the research team…

This is exactly what Alphabetization is meant to solve. A federation of companies can more effectively allow individual divisions to operate like startups. Additionally, it's a lot easier to push experiments when they're not attached to the Google brand. Personally, I think Google should just funnel all the profits into GV.

Ah, but my point was that they don't operate like startups. They may adopt a lot of startups' superficial trappings, but in their first three years, they aren't sharpening their objective by being cash-constrained and exposed to the evolving tastes and distastes of the outside ecosystem. They're semi-generously funded while building whatever will amuse Sergey and Larry. That's creates LINS problems, again and again.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#419

Post by psbp »

blub wrote: post #397
psbp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ocdtrekkie is infamous for having endless anti-Google arguments on Google+ for the past 5 years. Trust me, you're not going to have a fruitful discussion.

What would the ideal result of such a fruitful discussion be? Accepting that Google is truth and Google is love? This is exactly what we need, exposing antisocial behavior for what it is.

I'm not saying the argument is bad (I probably agree with it more than not), but from memory, it almost seems compulsive rather than an actual attempt to discuss Google's role. Many posters on G+ resorted to blocking him because it became insufferable.

Re: Google Makes So Much Money, It Never Had to Worry About Financial Discipline

#420

Post by morgante »

GCA10 wrote: post #418
morgante wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what Alphabetization is meant to solve. A federation of companies can more effectively allow individual divisions to operate like startups. Additionally, it's a lot easier to push experiments when they're not attached to the Google brand. Personally, I think Google should just funnel all the profits into GV.

Ah, but my point was that they don't operate like startups. They may adopt a lot of startups' superficial trappings, but in their first three years, they aren't sharpening their objective by being cash-constrained and exposed to the evolving tastes and distastes of the outside ecosystem. They're semi-generously funded while building whatever will amuse Sergey and Larry. That's creates LINS problems, again and again.

I agree that they don't operate like startups enough, but it is in fact the goal of Alphabetization.

You're right that it's not working well enough. That's why I think they'd be better off simply making GV the largest private equity/venture capital firm in the world.

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