Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Web by Google (TM)

landshark.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 496 posts

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#81

Post by crispyporkbites »

mnd999 wrote: post #8

I think we’re in a real low point right now. Gmail, AMP, Chrome, Android. So many peoples internet experience is from one place. With Amazon dominating retail, and Facebook under its various brands dominating social media, there isn’t much scope for other players. I don’t see another option than breaking theses companies up at this point.

I don’t think breaking them up is the only option- we need to continue to create innovative companies that defeat the incumbents.

Its hard to see right now but history tells us it will come and they will fall, every incumbent always gets complacent and stops innovating and someone comes and cleans up. For example YT hasn’t fundamentally changed in a decade, and the user experience is starting to feel a little off (sponsored content, a gamed recommendation algorithm etc. are all degrading the experience).

I don’t know how / where we’ll consume the bulk of our video in 2030, but there’s a significant chance it won’t be YouTube.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#82

Post by NateEag »

staticelf wrote: post #17

This is depressing, we as developers have to take the bull by its horns. Simply stop using their services, advocate against AMP etc. But in the end, the US government will most likely have to split the company in order for stuff to really change.

I'm posting this from Firefox Mobile. Works just fine for my day-to-day surfing.

DuckDuckGo is my default search engine, and it's not perfect or a panacea, but it works well enough (and there's "!g" for when it doesn't).

What we really need to do is be willing to pay for our tools, though.

Wikipedia estimates there are 21 million developers in the world, so if one out of twenty developers donated $1 / month to Mozilla, they'd be getting $1 million / month. You could sustain a few small dev teams on that. Not tons, but it's something.

If you took it to $5 / month, now you're looking at a lot more manpower.

If donations are given to specific software projects rather than the foundation as a whole, and bookkeeping is in the open, you can have decent confidence your money is actually going where you'd like it to go, too.

Just some half-baked thoughts.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#83

Post by huffmsa »

mnd999 wrote: post #8

I think we’re in a real low point right now. Gmail, AMP, Chrome, Android. So many peoples internet experience is from one place. With Amazon dominating retail, and Facebook under its various brands dominating social media, there isn’t much scope for other players. I don’t see another option than breaking theses companies up at this point.

Amazon is only 4% of the US retail sector though. I wouldn't call that dominant.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#84

Post by simias »

The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry.

I suspect that if you broke those companies up you'd only win in the short term, then it would consolidate again. You'd need a constant pressure to prevent this situation and given that the USA would be in the best position to do that I'm not holding by breath.

The internet started decentralized because there was no money to make and we were still figuring things out. As soon as it became mainstream it started to coalesce and we're just now reaching the final stage of this evolution. Even here on HN you have threads full of people coming up with excuses for why they won't run Firefox, and that's a community that should understand the implication of those things. Good luck convincing the internet population at large.

Are there statistics on the browser usage on HN? Just for a good laugh.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#86

Post by avasthe »

eiWit7oo wrote: post #5

> Google’s capture of the Web is a fait accompli. Only legislation will keep the World Wide Web from finally becoming Web by Google (TM). I really hope it's not the case, because then Google will cancel it. /s Search is probably something where there could be creative use of the p2p decentralized technologies. If when performing a search I could ask my contacts to look in their history if they have something matching…

Distributed schemes don't take off. Especially this one can lead to severe privacy / security loopholes. And what about people who rarely come online / have limited bandwidth?

A more realistic dream would be finding good algorithms for "webscale" search engines, that all competitors (Bing, DDG) can use such that any one of them can't have excessive advantage over the others.

Secondly, human curated directories may still have future. If I search Google for interesting links or just programming blogs on specific topic, I find lot of SEO optimized low quality content instead of deep technical content so that I often have to search through HN, reddit etc.. and sort by popularity - but searching for particular topic is difficult.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#88

Post by huffmsa »

Spivak wrote: post #47
alangibson wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They kind of do, which is why alot of big tech should be highly regulated like utilities.

I feel like saying that AWS should be regulated like a utility because lots of businesses use their products is a little sill. They have heavy competition in basically all of their markets, their moat is their breadth of services and they’re constantly at risk of being unbundled by a competitor that has more time to devote to a single product segment. They have persistent natural competition with colo-ing that keeps…

There are tons of niche hosts that have sprung up recently, a lot for developing and serving AI/ML applications.

Amazon was there first, but it's getting cheaper by the day to buy a bunch of hardware, stick it in an increasingly cheaply electrified building, run a bunch of fiber to it and slap some virtualization software on it.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#89

Post by crispyporkbites »

nightcracker wrote: post #41
zpeti wrote: post #2

It does look pretty tragic at this point. But it’s worth noting that every tech business so far was talked about as if it’s taken over the world, forever, and without 5-10-20 years they were overtaken. IBM, Intel, Microsoft. I think google is overplaying their hand in many areas, and this will inevitably lead to the downfall of their dominance. Just like most other large businesses in history.

Microsoft is overtaken by who exactly? In desktop & laptop Windows still holds a 87% market share.

Microsoft are an absolute beast, their revenue is diversified across so many areas in b2c and b2b, and they are selling real products / services that solve problems that people actually need and pay for. Contrast that with fb/google who are selling ad space for others to buy to fill with actual products, it’s clear who’s driving real value.

I would bet that MS will outlast all the other tech giants by a long way.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#90

Post by avasthe »

mrweasel wrote: post #50
tomschwiha wrote: post #3

You can blame Google for a lot - however I believe if it wasn't about Google someone else would dictate the game. In the past it was Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, XFire, .. I mean those companys were so big (e. g. XFire for gaming streaming) but they failed to stay ahead of time - lets see whats up with Google or Facebook or Amazon in 15 years.

It’s also not 100% Google fault. Chrome was needed to move the web forward when it was launched. And are they now suppose to make a less good browser to help competitors emerge? I’m not happy with the current situation and would hate to see Mozilla fail, but I can’t fault Google for the current situation.

Yeah success can lead to all these. Especially when shareholders demand it or someone in marketing gets the idea. In general programmers don't get that much evil ideas.
Post reply on HN