571–580 of 888 posts
It never eventuated though. Many of the interesting products and technologies that came out of it were either bought from or copying the actual innovators.
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Those things aren't free, they're supported by ad revenue and the sale of personal or aggregated user information. I'm not saying there isn't a place for that type of software, but imo it's wrong and somewhat dangerous to equate that with things that are actually free. And even so, to the extent that any of Google's software is actually free, it's mostly a loss leader for the sake of vendor lock-in, which is intrinsi…
A) Do you pay them? - No: then yes it is free “But my data” Have your ever sold your data? Would the value you could ever possibly receive for your data ever equate to the value you get from the free services? Likely No and No. Is the free ad supported city newspaper free? Yes it is in fact free, just like FM radio is free, and broadcast television is free, and sidewalks next to billboards are free Someone creating s…
My data has been sold, yes. By me, no, because I don't have the means. But by others and especially by nefarious actors, absolutely.
So indeed, it's not free. Just because data isn't liquid at the individual level doesn't mean it has no value.
HN is a special place but among the average folk, I get why 90% of people use google. I'm no google fan, but it still baffles me how bad the alternatives still are. Especially with so many companies scraping the whole web for AI data, and so many GPUs chugging on that data. I suppose they are all focused on replacing the concept of search results with LLM prose. Ironically bing is down at the moment https://downdetec…
In the early days, Google seemed like it promised to give us another Bell Labs or IBM Research, which would have made me think at least something good was coming from their anti competitive behavior. It never eventuated though. Many of the interesting products and technologies that came out of it were either bought from or copying the actual innovators.
I think as a general principle it would be best to break up companies automatically from a certain size on. We need more competition and less powerful corporations. I don’t see any benefit that these trillion dollar companies are providing for society. Only downside
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So if Google dies then we'll have more diverse browser and mobile ecosystem? Where exactly is the downside?
Google funds Chrome. Other browsers use Chrome as a base. The majority of Firefox's funding is from Google. They will suffer as well. MS would need to step back up with browsers and you would also have Safari left over. I think it would be a major shock to the browser ecosystem.
To repeat the question from above, where is the downside?
Microsoft only abandoned EdgeHTML and adopted Blink because Google owned sites like YouTube were deliberately breaking in Edge.
At this stage I don't imagine they'd go back (to EdgeHTML as their engine) specifically, but it's not hard to imagine a world where MSFT maintains its own fork of Blink for use in Edge, Opera potentially the same.
As for Firefox: they get money for being the default search engine - if Google is broken up, the search engine company that emerges will have even more reason to want to be the default search engine on as many browsers as possible (and thus incentive to pay money to other browsers).
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At least according to this, Google generated ~$47B/year. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/google-play-statistics/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/444476/google-play-annua...
That’s revenue not profits. Majority goes to app devs. Profits are all that matter
The money Google spends internally either on development or on cross subsidies is no profit and is what most of the issues in this discussion are addressing.
Profits is just money they couldn't find a place to spend on growth.
(Also a maximum of 30% goes to app devs which isn't a majority any way you measure it)
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Are you sure? Google has a search and location data, Google email is on one side if not both of most email chains, receipts, etc. I don't use meta for much. Google on the otherhand takes some pretty dedicated behavior to avoid.
> Are you sure? Google has a search and location data, Google email is on one side if not both of most email chains, receipts, etc. Absolutely not discounting all of that; there are some pretty strong parallels between the data you can infer on a person based on their gmail graph versus their fb messenger graph, for example. Meta has a lot more "self-revealed-preference" data, though. Which of $thesePosts did you eng…
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>android has a huge market share on mobile. Not in the US they don't; it's a minority share, split across many different manufacturers who all have their own flavor of Android, their own (crappy) app stores and pre-loaded crapware apps, etc. Apple has a clear majority of the US smartphone market (and it's a vertical monopoly, with Apple controlling the phone hardware and the app store and not allowing any alternative…
If these measurements are correct, iOS has about 11% more of the US market share than Android. This is very different from the global market share, where Android has 45% more. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ios-vs-android-market-s...
This case is about US antitrust law, so what happens outside US borders isn't really that important, except as far as it affects the companies' revenues and profits. Supposedly, the actions of any antitrust action are to protect consumers/the general public, but what that really means is consumers in the US. Consumers outside the US are irrelevant. And the simple fact is that, by your own numbers, consumers in the US are mostly using iOS, not Android.