Google AMP case study: leads dropped by 59%

Very much agree with this comment. It’s quite likely that the AMP pages received incremental impressions in lower positions, which reduced the overall average position but increased clicks.

The screenshot of rankings from another tool (looks like Accuranker) with a few +1 ranking improvements after disabling AMP also seems insignificant. Often this kind of fluctuation is very normal. Without knowing the baseline level of ranking fluctuation, it’s hard to read too much into this.

This is the danger of analysing ‘totals’ without segmentation to better track incrementality.

Any test needs to be properly controlled to form clear conclusions and I don’t see enough rigor here.

I would however commend the article on its advice to avoid simply ‘disabling’ AMP after using it for a period of time. There is cleanup to be done as the article touches on, and I suspect many may not be aware.

Often times the websites are completely broken under reader mode: images are in the wrong locations, image captions are treated as article text, article text doesn't appear on websites that have awful scrolling behaviour.

I completely understand why people have problems with AMP. However, AMP is a drop-in replacement (for the user) and Firefox's reader mode is simply not equivalent, as much as I use it.

My experience over a similar time period is that most of what appears to be dev team incompetence...isn't.

It usually maps to constraints they can't control.

> why do so much for open source?

For the low price of working under an open source[1] license, they bought over a decade of support from a large portion of tech industry professionals. Google (along with the other FAANG businesses) was able to simply ask people to supporting their increasingly monopolistic position.

When some of us attempted to warn about the long term consequences of giving Google/etc even more power, we were ignored or accused of being "crazy conspiracy theorists"; with a lot of open projects to use as counterexamples, and not many current, specific examples of Google actually abusing their power, a lot of people simply couldn't believe that Google might be doing anything bad.

Open sourcing anything that overlapped with a competitor's proprietary software was a highly successful strategy to undermine the market and hurt their competitor's revenue. The minimax best move isn't always the move that maximizes your benefit; sometimes it's the move that minimizes your opponent..

[1] Note that while they use FSF/RMS-style free Software, Google generally doesn't license their open source software under the GPL. Their openness has a carefully considered limit.

> But that said, why do so much for open source?

It gets them more users for their services if people make use of their open-source libraries that happen to be optimized for Google, e.g. by integrating better with Google's cloud offerings.

> Why not keep big things proprietary?

They do keep big things proprietary. If it directly makes money for Google, you're not going to see it's source code, unless you work for Google.

> Why sell Chromebooks that can be unlocked, put in dev mode, and flashed with FOSS BIOS implementations? Why allow unlocking the bootloader on Nexus and Pixel phones?

Most people don't change their OS ever, so it doesn't really matter whether bootloaders are locked or not. Even if more people did it, many of them would still install Google apps, so it would continue not to matter.

> There's lots of things they do that clearly aren't for the bottom line or just to trap you in their ecosystem (they do offer versions of basically everything for iOS as well, which makes it easier to switch to iPhone even if you are deep in the Google ecosystem).

Google is not in the phone business. Their phones are just funnels for their advertising business. If they were in the phone business, offering those indispensable apps to iOS users would decrease their ecosystem lock-in. But because they're not in the phone business, offering apps for iOS increases their ecosystem lock-in, because even going to Apple, you still stay with Google.

Nexus/Pixel phones exist only as funnels into the Android ecosystem. Android exists only as a funnel into default-installed Chrome, Gmail and Google Search. Chrome itself is a funnel for Google Search, while Gmail's purpose is to make people sign into an account for easier tracking. Then there's the general ecosystem pull of being the one-stop shop for a bunch of online services. But in the end it all boils down to ads.

Because the majority of their products are only funnels, they'll happily cooperate with competitors for some of those products, if that helps them keep people in the wider Google ecosystem. So you get Chrome for iOS, Google Search for Firefox and so on.

When a company seems to be hurting their own bottom line by giving away stuff for free, it's usually because the free stuff isn't that important to them and their real bottom line is elsewhere.