
Google’s problems are bigger than just the antitrust case - martincmartin
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/07/30/googles-problems-are-bigger-than-just-the-antitrust-case
======
Animats
_About 60% of product searches now start on Amazon_

Now that's a big problem for Google. Product searches are Google's money
machine.

Google's other big problem is being terrible at anything which needs repair or
customer support. Their various attempts at becoming an internet service
provider, via WiFi, fiber, or balloons, have not been successful. Buying up
all the good robotics startups and running them into the ground benefited
nobody. The self-driving car thing is a huge money drain that still hasn't
produced a product. Anyone remember the Google Search Appliance?

Two other engineering-first companies blew it - Hewlett-Packard, and
Westinghouse. Both were successful, profitable, and renowned for excellent
engineering. It's useful to study what they did wrong.

~~~
galeos
While I wouldn't deny the Google has a poor reputation for customer support
across their product range, I can report a notable exception - my Google Pixel
(1) phone purchased from the Google Store in 2016. Every time I have had an
issue I have utilized the phone's support chat service. I have always been
connected to a live support agent in less than a minute. Whenever I have had
any issues, I have been sent a replacement handset next-day, including _twice_
after my 2 year warranty expired. The most recent of these episodes was last
month.

~~~
distant_hat
Only in US. I had a Google Pixel phone that went had a bad microphone. Google
issued a compensation for everyone who purchased the phone in US and maybe
Europe I think but left out the rest of the world. Pretty shitty behavior I
think. I've had issues with Apple hardware and they've never bothered about
where you are located, things get fixed equally.

~~~
Kihashi
Not sure about elsewhere, but in the US, the compensation wasn't voluntary. It
was the result of a class action law suit against Google.

------
ehvatum
> To keep hierarchies flat, Mr Brin and Mr Page briefly went so far as to
> abolish managers altogether, though the experiment had to be dialled back. A
> compromise was to give managers a minimum of seven direct reports to limit
> the time they have to loom over each underling.

In my experience, so many direct reports changes a manager’s job from
“managing people” to “facilitating people”. It’s the same for engineers and
laborers, scientists and shit-scrapers. There is time enough to defend your
team from HR terrorism, advocate for your team’s technical perspective, and
fight for resources - and that’s it. Except at the big-big overly-titanic
conglomerates, who trade behemoth economy of scale for total dysfunction, so
as to barely break even. IE, Google’s future.

~~~
BeetleB
In my experience, when a manager has a lot of reports, it usually ends up with
team members playing all kinds of pathological controlling behavior (e.g mild
to not-so-mild bullying). Conflicts arise, and team members who are the
loudest usually win. The manager simply is too stretched to understand enough
to manage these situations. He will usually cede to the people who he thinks
are the "experts" in the team.

Essentially, you now have unofficial managers in the team. It's no longer de
facto a flat hierarchy. And worse, there is little to no accountability.

People will try to "seize power" and carve out their niche. This is usually
not intentional on the part of said people, but I think it is more or less the
"natural" dynamic that arises.

I'm sure there are exceptions.

Having a manager who can assert authority and make decisions in conflict
situations is great. He/she shouldn't do it often (i.e. micromanage), but a
manager who has lots of reports (e.g. > 10) rarely makes good decisions in
such situations.

~~~
Spooky23
Military hierarchy has been pretty similar for a very long time because it
works conceptually. Section/Squad/Platoon/Company/Battalion/etc.

10 direct reports don’t work from a management sense unless some folks are
expected to operate very independently or if the reports themselves are second
level managers, or the manager is only nominally “managing” a time card or
whatever.

Management to me means you are accountable for output. I can’t be aware enough
of what 10 different people/teams are doing to be meaningfully accountable for
a longer period of time. It’s not fair to me and certainly not fair to the
people not getting the support they need.

In my professional life, I’m responsible for a team of ~200, with 5 direct
reports. It’s a mix of engineering and product/service teams. We aim for teams
of 4-5 with two functions each. The secret is to be as honest as you can, have
high standards, and be flexible.

~~~
MetalGuru
Can you elaborate on what you mean by the last sentence? Sounds interesting

------
voidhorse
If you watched the hearing, you will have noticed many of the congressmen and
women, after asking their questions in a harsh, accusatory manner, sometimes
speaking over the witnesses, turn down to their laps to look at their Apple or
Google phones, Google search something, post it to Twitter and or Facebook,
and maybe purchase something on Amazon for good measure.

That kind of illustrates the point that these companies just _might_ be too
big, but what I don't hear anyone discussing are the potential _consequences_
of breaking these companies up--they are a _hard_ dependency in some way for
most of the American populace if not the world's day to day operations and the
quality of their services is largely _reliant_ on their scale--I don't think
the analogy to Standard Oil does justice to the complexity of the situation.
We're not talking about a simple consumer product here, we're talking about
complicated data-driven _services_ , services that all rely on access to
massive pools of information collected over _years_ at this point, once you
fragment the access to that data, the services will no longer perform as they
currently do--then what will happen to the little guy we're trying to protect
from the big boys who relies on Facebook and Google to advertise, Amazon to
feed part of his supply chain, and Apple hardware? How might his business look
if you suddenly swap out all of these behemoth quality services he depends on
for disjointed shadows of their former selves, many of which will no longer be
able to justify the gratis offerings and free tiers they currently can?

Not saying it these giants shouldn't be broken up, just saying it's a process
that will require a _lot_ of incredibly careful thought and to be honest I'm
not confident those with the power to make the decisions in this case have all
the tools they need to ensure such a transition happens without having
catastrophic side-effects.

~~~
esperent
If Google search vanished overnight the world would turn to DDG within a day.
Ok, that would probably crash their servers but I'm sure they and other search
engines could scale up quickly.

~~~
Talanes
I mean, honestly, it would just be a massive surge of users to Bing. I don't
think any of the other competitors have the existing public name recognition.

~~~
nmfisher
After switching to DDG (and recently, Bing after switching to Edge), I don't
think Google's stock web-search is _that_ much better. Not saying it's not
better - it is - but if it disappeared from the face of the Earth, we'd all
survive perfectly well on the alternatives.

Google Maps, though, is still unquestionably king. It is ludicrous how poor
the alternatives are.

------
jorams
I'm still reading the article, but this stood out to me:

> More than 300bn emails are said to be sent every day and if only one-third
> originate on Gmail—a conservative estimate—then a stack of print-outs would
> be 10,000km high.

I don't think that's a conservative estimate at all. In fact, I'd say it's a
massive over-estimation.

Only one type of email is dominated by Gmail: personal email. I don't know
about everyone, but I don't see many personal emails being sent.

Lots of those emails are for work, and there Gmail is not dominant at all.
It's not insignificant, but Microsoft is a significantly larger part of the
pile.

Another very large part of the total is automated emails, which are not sent
through Gmail either.

Since Google Cloud doesn't include an email service, I'd go so far as to guess
that more email originates from Amazon (SES) than from Google.

~~~
kaesar14
[https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--
23](https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23)

Seems like 1/3rd is more or less right. I think you're underestimating how big
enterprise buy-in for the G-Suite is, Docs and Sheets are both widely used at
this point.

~~~
jorams
Very interesting! Looks like my perspective is very Western Europe-centric,
where the data matches what I expected. Gmail is bigger than I expected in the
US, and also in Eastern Europe.

I do wonder what "market share" means here, and how the domains are selected.
The massive market share of GoDaddy seems off, especially since from their
website they seem to be reselling Microsoft Office 365, but could be explained
by default email MX records on domains registered there (do they do that?).

~~~
kaesar14
FWIW, I've worked at two companies in my career so far, both could be
described as tech unicorns turned public in the last decade, and both used
G-Suite for all enterprise use-cases where applicable. Absolutely no adoption
of MSFT products. That being said it also means I'm somewhat in the SV company
bubble and I'm not sure how this picture looks throughout the industry.

~~~
bosswipe
Same. But I got a glimpse when I spent some time working at an established
east coast company how much Microsoft is used for absolutely everything. I
hadn't even heard of SharePoint but it is a whole massive universe unto
itself.

~~~
N1H1L
Microsoft is huge for legacy companies. It integrates really well now with
Office and while it was worse a few years back, it definitely seems to have
improved now.

------
hinkley
In the Evil Empire days of Microsoft, a few different people explained to me
that there's a lot of populism in antitrust cases.

That through history, the monopolist really only loses once their list of
friends and allies grows thin. Microsoft beat every case until a couple years
after the crowd had turned on them. I don't think the crowd has turned on
Google yet.

What has changed in this time is that the EU has gotten sharp teeth and quite
a lot of backbone, so they end up winning cases that help us a little bit here
in the States long before we get around to the same sort of conclusions.

~~~
murgindrag
Google is quickly becoming the Evil Empire of Microsoft of the Nineties (who,
in turn, has managed to pull a 180). The soul left with Larry/Sergei/Eric, and
we have corporate drones at the top seeking to maximize shareholder value.

It's only a matter of time before reputation catches up.

At the same time, Google is much less suited to weather a storm:

1) This quote struck me: “You can paper over a lot of problems by throwing
money at it and hiring more bodies,” says a long-time Googler, who previously
worked for Microsoft. Google went from a small, elite team of the smartest
guys in the room, to just bringing in bodies with a pulse. The screening
processes are, as has been mentioned many times, simply random.

2) The old culture carried elitism and arrogance, which kind of works if
you're competent, but much less so when mixed in with incompetence. Cultural
problems are tough to clean up. Wrong and arrogant about it is very poor.

3) Short-term profits are up, and they'll rise for a while yet, but the
fundamentals seem to be increasingly evaporating. Switching from Google has a
lot less friction than switching from Microsoft. Goodwill was a fundamental
for Google. Even when Google tries to be good, it doesn't follow universal
values. It's all grounded in a left-wing ideology that resonates with a tiny
fraction of its customer base. We can all agree with helping the poor. A lot
of people don't agree with identity politics.

It takes 5 minutes to switch search from Google to DDG, so I don't think
there's the same stickiness as having Microsoft file formats and APIs.

------
alderz
[http://archive.is/Oyn47](http://archive.is/Oyn47)

~~~
cooljacob204
Search Engines should punish sits that do this.

They put up a paywall a second after loading so bots can scrape the data and
advertise their site as providing answers when really they hide it behind a
paywall.

~~~
rosywoozlechan
> Search Engines should punish sits that do this.

Google won't do that. They're already in trouble for stealing content from the
sites they crawl, especially news sites. Google goes out of their way to
enable paywalls so they don't look like they're anti-copyright or out to
destroy news and content sites.

------
coliveira
I don't understand what is the big problem in just splitting Google into
separate companies. This will be great for everyone, including shareholders.
It is not a secret that one of methods to unleash value in a stock is to split
the company. See for example the case of Ebay and Paypal.

~~~
samename
Wouldn't this give other companies in other countries (who thereby can't be
split up) more power and prominence?

~~~
Avicebron
This is the classic argument, "we need our big guy to fight their big guy",
it's not true. Nimble smaller companies can work, and it's not like we don't
have a government to negotiate how we address large foreign companies. What
this is arguing is ceding national power to a private corporation because we
have given up on the govt. It's a weak smokescreen.....

Besides. They. Dont. Pay. Taxes. In. The. Country. They. Claim. To. Be.
Protecting.

~~~
rrdharan
> Besides. They. Dont. Pay. Taxes. In. The. Country. They. Claim. To. Be.
> Protecting.

Besides being an incredibly annoying way to state your point (leave the hand-
claps on Twitter, please), note that their very highly paid employees pay a
ton of tax.

Abolishing the corporate income tax entirely is something I'm in favor of and
it has its proponents across the political spectrum:

[https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/the-progressive-
case-f...](https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/the-progressive-case-for-
abolishing-the-corporate-income-tax-2)

------
johnyzee
So have Larry and Sergei completely checked out? It seems a little weird that
they would just turn their back completely on the company they created with
their own hands. Particularly since they still have the controlling interest,
and could do pretty much whatever they feel like with the company. That's a
lot of power to not use.

~~~
CobrastanJorji
Sure, but say you're a crazy rich billionaire and you've found you kind of
hate being a CEO. What I think a lot of crazy rich CEOs don't understand,
which Larry Page did understand, is that you can just stop. You don't need to
give away your control, you don't need to give away your fortune, you can just
point to somebody nearby and say "you're in charge now," then just go live on
an island in the middle of nowhere and watch old movies or build ships in a
bottle or whatever it is you like to do. Why is it a problem for you that you
have a lot of power that you're not using? It'd be a hassle to figure out who
to give away the power to, so just keep it.

It always weirds me out when I see these 75 year old CEOs with massive wealth
spending their retirement years trying to get Walgreens to grow an extra 5%
this quarter or something. Why are you doing this? Are you that invested in
the future of Walgreens? You're got $8 billion, maybe take a break or try and
fix the world or do something that will bring you joy.

~~~
xyzzyz
Maybe managing a multi billion dollar organization is what’s bringing joy to
them? I mean, it kinda has to do that for them to build such an org in the
first place. There is a difference between building something that’s your, and
working for someone else for a wage. Your argument is like asking why don’t
people take a break from being involved in their children’s lives once their
adult and settled in lives on their own.

~~~
Talanes
To be fair, many children have asked that question of their own parents.

------
shadowgovt
There are a couple of ways a startup can become a conventional company. Some
of them are good things that Google probably should do.

For example, big companies have quality expectations that startups don't need
to honor (because everyone kind of understands the whole undertaking is a risk
and if it fails, oh well). They also have more impact on culture and people
(in multiple countries, often), and the nature of that impact has to be
considered (because there's no such thing, really, as "neutral;" one person's
neutrality is another's adherence to status quo, and the status quo is not
always good. If it was, we'd never need new companies).

This results in some loss of velocity (quality takes time; consideration of
outsized effects takes time). But it's loss of velocity for the right reasons,
as a company moves from 1,000 users to 1 billion.

------
trevor-e
Since the article is login-walled I can only generally comment. The hard part
of competing against Google is they have seemingly infinite discretionary
money and computing power to throw at a problem. Normal businesses have to be
profitable to survive, but Google can subsidize loss leaders with their
advertising/search profits and still win in the end because it all feeds into
their data collection and strengthens their core business. Meanwhile
competitors in this areas get squeezed out.

Take Google Flights for example. They purchased ITA and eventually closed
external API access. The expensive computations are likely done via GCP for a
cheaper rate. Travel sites pay billions of dollars to Google for ad rankings,
yet Google can still promote their travel tools (search "Flights to San
Francisco" to see a custom UI that links to Google Flights) in search results,
and once you book a flight it creates a trip for you in Gmail.

See: [https://www.pymnts.com/antitrust/2020/google-under-fire-
alle...](https://www.pymnts.com/antitrust/2020/google-under-fire-allegedly-
promoting-own-travel-service-over-others/)

Disclaimer: I do work for a competitor but this is just my own personal
observation.

~~~
kumarvvr
The Achilles heel of Google is stricter privacy laws. Every other threat pales
in comparison.

Apple can survive, and in fact thrives in an environment where privacy takes
paramount importance.

Google cannot. Even FB may swim through, as it is driven by user actions.
People post on it, share articles, chat on it, etc.

Google has a big moat now, and that moat will vanish if people start getting
serious about privacy.

~~~
mrep
Really? I'd say it's the exact opposite between Facebook and Google. Google
gets the majority of their ad revenue from search and search ads for me at
least are always based on exactly what you are searching for. The other data
is only useful seems to only be used for their ads on other peoples websites
but that's only like 15% of their revenue. Facebook on the other hand
advertises essentially based on your browser history and not on the content
around it so they'd get hosed on stricter privacy laws.

------
Fiveplus
>In fact, it is a herd of ponies, some of which look rather more like full-
grown Shires. Nine have more than a billion users globally. Every day people
make an estimated 6bn search queries on Google and upload more than 49 years’
worth of video to YouTube. More than 300bn emails are said to be sent every
day.

The absolute scale of Alphabet and its services sometimes boggles my mind.

In particular - YouTube where one can't help but ponder about content
moderation at this scale being impossible without highly sophisticated
algorithms(which also face the heat every once in a while).

~~~
ericmcer
That was one big takeaway from watching the antitrust case. They definitely
view these tech giants as having infinite power over technology with little
regard for the complexity and scale of what is going on. I am in favor of
breaking up some of these giants, but at the same time how can people with no
concept of technology legislate it. They could very easily make a policy that
is difficult for google to enforce, and completely impossible for a smaller
player to even contemplate.

I’m always reminded of the Louis CK bit where a person is introduced to WiFi
in an airplane and then is complaining about it not working 15 minutes later.

~~~
ysavir
> They could very easily make a policy that is difficult for google to
> enforce, and completely impossible for a smaller player to even contemplate.

You can't fight fire with fire and you can't fight scale with scale. The
solution to these problems lies in eliminating the advantages of scale so that
operating on a national or international level becomes an expensive liability,
but competing on a local market is affordable and practical.

Companies in the US and China, for example, can scale immensely because they
have such huge, single markets in which to mature. They pay a one-time cost
per entry and then have no real obstacles from expanding to the full capacity
of that market.

I don't know much about how the EU works in this regard, but I imagine it's
much more difficult for a European company to reach the full European market.
Aside from legal obstacles, they have to face barriers from language, culture,
history, and other things, I'm sure. It's an ideal setup for a collection of
small-scale operations in a healthy market... Or it would be, if US and
Chinese companies weren't able to scale so easily and then expand out of their
own borders into the EU.

I tend to wonder if there are ways to bring similar barriers to the US. There
aren't enough natural barriers, but perhaps we could create artificial
barriers that will re-enable competition.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> You can't fight fire with fire and you can't fight scale with scale. The
> solution to these problems lies in eliminating the advantages of scale so
> that operating on a national or international level becomes an expensive
> liability, but competing on a local market is affordable and practical.

The problem was never the scale of the _company_. If YouTube was instead 100
different companies, there would still be a total of 49 years worth of video
being uploaded every day which nobody would have the resources to review. Each
company would have 1% of the video but also 1% of the revenue and the cost
would be just as insurmountable.

~~~
Avicebron
I'm not sure why you brought up reviewing the videos. I couldn't find it as I
glanced through this thread. If YT was 100 different companies competing
against each other, then there would be positive effects as each on tried to
out-innovate each other. They wouldn't just be 100 static mini YT's..and if
some of them did that they wouldn't make it.

The scale of the company prevents meaningful competition, that's the issue,
not necessarily that they can't affordably review the 49 years worth of video.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
This whole debate originated in some people noticing that there was a lot of
wrongthink on the internet and then starting to yell at tech companies for not
fixing it. But it turns out that problem is legitimately hard and the tech
companies don't have a magic wand, so all their attempts have been ham-fisted
disasters that trample all over everything like a frightened elephant.

That problem in particular isn't really one that competition would solve,
because it's fundamentally a demand for censorship, and more competition would
make censorship _harder_. Which is maybe a good thing anyway.

------
s1t5
> Mr Pichai’s foremost challenge is to prevent Alphabet from becoming what Mr
> Brin and Mr Page were so bent on avoiding—a “conventional company” that dies
> a slow death from lack of innovation and declining growth.

I don't think that he's succeeding at the innovation part but that won't
matter as long as their financials look good.

~~~
MayeulC
I'd argue that's what conventional companies do. And is also conventionally
the source of their ultimate demise: can't compete with new actors on the
market because talent has left the place, so the company has to resort to
lawsuits and acquisition until its cash flow dries out with its last cash cow.

Arguably, Google still has a lot of in-house talent, but optimizing for the
financial aspect usually ties talent down sooner or later.

~~~
scarface74
The issue is that looking from the outside, they have a lot of “smart people”
(tm). But not people talented enough to bring products to market that people
want. Despite years of trying - almost all of their profit comes from display
ads.

~~~
nerpderp82
If the hn consensus is that ideas have zero value, it should also be that a
bulk of smart people also has zero value, in that it isn't the abstract but
the concrete. Smart is mostly a bullshit term anyway, we need to be careful
and precise in how we use it.

Every company has lots of smart people, it is how it utilizes them that
concretely matters.

~~~
Nasrudith
That only follows if smart is confined to pure ideas and none to
implementation. The relevant "stable" of smart in that context are ones who
can implement ideas successfully.

Like the difference between trying to use a bunch of dutch style windmills,
lodestones, and copper wire to try to generate baseload power as opposed to
modern escalatingly large wind turbines.

------
qaz_plm
[https://outline.com/zHVV66](https://outline.com/zHVV66)

------
RestlessMind
> the company is now run by a different triumvirate. Besides Mr Pichai it
> includes Kent Walker, senior vice-president of global affairs, and Ruth
> Porat, the finance chief

Google leadership in 2001: 2 engineers and an eng manager. In 2020: 1 eng
manager, 1 lawyer, 1 banker.

No wonder!

~~~
pb7
That's not optional when you are running a company of this size.

~~~
RestlessMind
Amazon is bigger than Google. And yet, its leadership is only Bezos ever since
it started. Sure, it might have a CFO or CLO, but when it comes to calling
ultimate shots, there is no doubt regarding who is in charge. That's not the
case at Google where it seemed no one wanted to take charge and put his/her
stamp on company's execution.

~~~
pb7
Bezos holds the majority voting rights. He answers to no one. That hasn’t been
the case with Google since Larry and Sergei checked out.

~~~
RestlessMind
So what is holding Sundar back now that the founders have checked out? FWIW,
Nadella doesn't have majority voting rights in MSFT, but you can see his clear
stamp on the company's execution (de-emphasizing Windows, for instance).

------
querez
> Another is for Google to become more of a data fiduciary that manages
> people’s information for them—a bit like a bank does with money.

I'm not sure Google is the right company for this due to people not trusting
them, but overall I kind of like that idea. I've self-hosted a lot of my
services due to not wanting to give companies too much of my data. But it's a
hassle. I noticed that I'm willing to pay money for peopel to take this off my
hands, but those need to be people I trust. I think protonmail might become
the company of choice for me in these regards. They already have my email, and
I wouldn't mind outsourcing my calendar and VPN to them, either.

------
Shivetya
I was under the impression that having all these separate subs within
Alphabet. As for the changes at the Cloud division then simply having Alphabet
management put up a firewall between groups that dissuades that type of
structure moving across the company is necessary, by firewall I mean come out
with a policy denoting it. Perhaps more autonomy for each within Alphabet is
needed. You can get back to the "small" feeling and still be part of a larger
family; the only family reunion setup where you only meed the relatives on
occasion but you know you are all part of a larger whole.

------
RobertSmith
Google's ad revenue had declined 8% in the second quarter. Revenue and profit
also dropped year-over-year. [https://news.alphastreet.com/alphabet-goog-
googl-q2-2020-ear...](https://news.alphastreet.com/alphabet-goog-
googl-q2-2020-earnings-the-most-important-numbers/)

------
three_seagrass
Clever of the Economist to drop this on the day of Google's earnings.

------
sandoooo
If all you want to do is make money off of stock speculation, it doesn't
matter much who's going to win between the FAAAs. You could just split your
investment evenly or by market cap. Even the losers are going to hold their
value quite well in the mid-term, there's plenty of time to exit before the
writing's on the wall.

In the short term there's the whole coronavirus-and-shrinking-gdp-and-money-
printing thing going on, of course, so who knows.

------
DoctorNick
Remember when we all were happy that Google was finally starting to break down
the Microsoft monopoly? And then they ended up becoming a way, way worse
monopoly? Good times.

~~~
jefftk
How is Google a way, way worse monopoly than Microsoft was?

(Disclosure: I work for Google now, and I think I would not have worked for
Microsoft 20 years ago)

~~~
ThrowawayR2
Microsoft just wanted to be paid its OS and apps, not so different from anyone
else selling a product. Sure, they wanted dominance but who doesn't? Google
certainly can't credibly claim that.

Google is inserting itself into every aspect of communication and information
retrieval on the Internet to build a profile of people so that it can better
cram targeted ads into their faces. Both the privacy aspect and the
advertising aspect are troubling.

~~~
jefftk
Microsoft went well beyond just trying to get paid:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish)

I work on ads at Google and "inserting itself into every aspect of
communication and information retrieval on the Internet to build a profile of
people so that it can better cram targeted ads into their faces" is not a good
model. For example, Gmail data is not used for targeting ads:
[https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-
in...](https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-the-
enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely-align/)

(speaking only for myself)

~~~
deleuze
You work on _ads_ at Google, and are concerned about the ethics of working at
Microsoft in the 90s? Sure, anti-competitive business practices might be
unethical, but how can you possibly in good conscience suggest that bundling
IE is more ethically problematic than building massive surveillance
applications to sell ads? Just the implications of the data collection alone
should be enough for you to quit your job before even considering any business
angle.

Hope you enjoy the stock grants!

~~~
jefftk
_> Hope you enjoy the stock grants!_

If I thought my work at Google was making the world worse I wouldn't do it;
see this discussion a few months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21617291](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21617291)

For example, I'm currently exploring whether
[https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/blob/master/explainers/su...](https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/blob/master/explainers/subresource-
loading.md) can increase the security and privacy of ad loading and rendering.

 _> bundling IE is more ethically problematic than..._

I don't think bundling IE was at all the worst that Microsoft was doing in the
90s. Their efforts to kill the web, Java, and Linux, all threats to their
strategy of a Windows monopoly, were much more of a problem.

 _> building massive surveillance applications to sell ads_

Ads fund an enormous number of sites, and without them the web and information
in general would be even more centralized.

If you oppose ad personalization and targeting, trying to convince individual
adtech employees to quit is a terrible strategy. Instead you should advocate
for legislation such as the GDPR and CCPA that set out what sorts of behavior
are acceptable.

------
chiefalchemist
Too many of Google's eggs have been in one basket for quite some time. Thiel
was spot on in Zero to One when he pointed out how many of Google's endeavors
are simply a cover for its stranglehold (read: monopoly) on search and
associated adds. Also, given Slack and Zoom's growth certainly Google is
crying when it thinks about Wave and Hangouts.

Microsoft had to fall to get back up again. Now it's Google's turn.

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sabujp
I think selling boston dynamics was a mistake, as was spinning off motorola.
Instead of merging these with AI initiatives, these were sold off because they
weren't "cultural fits" whatever that means. Business units need to have their
own cultures because their customers have different cultures as well.

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jjwilliamson
Google's ads revenue is down a lot, but they will try to make people not pay
attention to it by focusing on other stuff. The reality is that Google's
almost all revenue is from ads, period.

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monadic2
I’m fairly certain a conventional company was the plan all along. Why else
bring in Eric Schmidt?

Any perception that it was not is marketing to push down engineering salaries.

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neonate
[https://archive.is/Oyn47](https://archive.is/Oyn47)

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psadri
Will Google buy Shopify to compete with Amazon?

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saberience
Paywall on this, can someone provide the text?

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zozin
Out of the four companies questioned by Congress Google seems to be the most
poorly/inefficiently run, as well as the most likely to be broken up due to
its products monopolizing the spaces they compete in. If Congress does act and
if Google does indeed get split up or negatively affected by antitrust regs,
doesn't it stand to reason that the other three also face the same fate?

Weakening AdWords would be a boon to Facebook; making Android independent
might help out iPhone sales and increase Apple's walled garden; spinning off
YouTube would probably help Facebook, Prime Video and YouTube TV; Google
Shopping ceasing to be subsidized by AdWords would be great for Bezos'
bottomline, etc. It seems to me that if Congress weakens one of the four, the
others will only grow in size/influence.

~~~
jeffbee
You really think Google is the inefficient of those four? Apple runs a
hot/spare datacenter strategy. Their overhead has to be ridiculous.

~~~
kccqzy
Hardware doesn't cost that much. Think about the number of new projects or
products Google just starts without a coherent strategy and then shuts down
without monetizing them, pissing off both users and the original developers.
Think about the wasted engineering time. That's why Google is inefficiently
run.

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binarymax
Has google meet come up in antitrust allegations? Google has been forcing it
on me everywhere. That nonsense is egregious.

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known
One President/Prime Minister cannot lead/manage 7 billion people;

Google should be split into separate companies;

[http://archive.li/WOJje](http://archive.li/WOJje)

