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.

Every single one of them, out of the box, has had terrible battery life.

The iPhone 7 has a 1960mAh, that's just insufficient. Full. Stop. No matter how you slice it, a 2000mAh batter is never going to get you through a day on an iPhone if you actually use it.

I've recently seen Android 10 phones available with 10,000mAh batteries. That sounds like it might at least get me through till lunch time.

For a moment there I had genuine hope.

There have been many documented cases of horrible support for both the Pixel series and Fi, with many articles appearing here.

I have the original Pixel beside me and I get frustrated at the piss poor pure Android experience. Dark mode GMail should have been released when Android supported dark mode instead of several months later. Maps still doesn't have a dark mode. At least they finally fixed the bottom navigation buttons on Maps which were white on white with a light grey shadow. In fact, many apps from Google don't have a dark mode.

The Pixel has trouble with gestures which started happening after Android 10 was installed. The biggest problem is sliding the keypad to unlock. Google support has no clue how to fix it. It is the same stupidity you get from the Idiot Bar at Apple.

My account used for Fi (and Android) isn't the account I use for mail. Gmail used to allow disabling accounts, but not anymore. Years ago Google added a unified inbox, but last year they regressed by defaulting to the primary account inbox. Even though there is an All Inboxes selection at the top of the folder menu, that is not the default.

I have location services turned off, including the Fi app. I have notification turned off for the Fi app as well. Yet, every hour I get a notification from Fi telling me to turn on location services. I had to disable the Fi app.

A recent update to Android Message keeps sending Fi carrier verification codes for RCS even though I don't want this enabled. Google has no clue why it is happening or how to stop it.

If you ever have a problem with a payment method used to pay for any Google service or product, Google may disable your account. Worse of all, there is nothing the Fi people can do about it because payments is a separate part of the company.

I could go on about inconsistent sync/autosync behavior but what is the point. Android and the Google apps are mess and every month it gets worse. The Pixel experience encompasses crappy hardware that is sold at a premium and runs crappy software.

Every Pixel has bad batches coming out of manufacturing and Google often replaces defective phones with defective phones. It is like Apple, when they replace the butterfly keyboard with another butterfly keyboard.

This is the direct result of the pervasive 10x/moonshot thinking. Anything that doesn't immediately sound like it can reach a billion users from the outset starts with a massive handicap when getting churned through the decision-making process. Anything that sounds like it requires a human in the loop, anything that has a manual step, anything that requires tech support, documentation, long-term stabilization....not even up for consideration. It's not just the launch-based performance review and promotion process, a problem which has at least penetrated the internal consciousness and is considered now in the whole perf process. It's not just the obvious product cancelations.

Fundamentally, Google is not willing to do anything that doesn't scale. They aren't willing to hold users' hands. They aren't willing to be there when something breaks, when something goes wrong, when someone is in a bind because some automated system locked them out, when all those messy unforeseeable situations occur. Putting users first is Orwellian doublespeak, because it's the thing Google hardly ever does--unless you are a corporate advertiser. Users--people like you and me--are the unwashed masses that Google believes it can wall off and keep as far away from its employees as possible. One user? Roundoff error. Ten users? Roundoff error. At Google scale, even a million users is a roundoff error.

Is there a 10,000 strong workforce dedicated to users' tech support? No. But there is a 10,000 strong workforce dedicated to sales, marketing, and partner relationships. Those people pull in the billions and billions of ad revenue, so absolutely they have 10,000 people hammering away at that goldmine. And if you are spending money on Google advertising, they will support your ass off.

Google is an ad business. Duh.

Just like GE, they ventured into finance in order to chase returns. While that arm was returning scads of money, everybody turned a blind eye.

Of course, at some point your finance arm crashes.

In Westinghouse's case, it effectively killed the company by draining it of cash. At that point, Westinghouse had to start selling off portions of the company to fund itself. And thus began the downward spiral.

Google search is lately getting so much noise that it is hard to find anything relevant.

Even if you actually search for some product, you are flooded with pages and pages of products and it is just too much to do any informed decision.

So I will rather use amazon.

Regarding what went wrong: same as always - stocks. Immediately when you allow people who have no interest in company but are only money oriented, "enter" the company by buying stocks, you will get huge pressure to earn money for them and what you actually do is second to profit. Then the slow dying of thousand cuts begins. Product quality goes down, everything that can be monetized will be, manager bonuses for yearly results doesnt help either.

Google has lost identity. They are just a huge ads bussiness now (if you look structure of their profit). Everything is second to that. And aws and azure surely doesnt help them. Or search that is becoming useless.

I really hope it wont go down as something like private data of people that google stockpiled for years might get on sale - and no one wants that to happen.

Edited to make past tense more clear.

EDIT: I absolutely love Fi. I've had no issues except that one time, and it was years ago. I show up in any random foreign country and every just works. My phone bill for me and my wife both is less than $50 a month these days, which I'm pretty sure is less than a lot of people pay for just one line. But I have this nagging fear that one day my account will stop working and I'll have to call up friends who are still Google and see if they can intercede.

Basic outline was that Google Pay would mark something as suspicious, and refuse to take payments. Payments would stop to Google Fi, resulting in the number / service being frozen. At that point, the whole thing would grind to a halt:

* No way to pay Google

* Overdue payments and accumulating problems

* No way to port number out with overdue account

All based on Google's automated systems falsely triggering suspicious activity detection.

It didn't happen to me, but I would never, ever, ever even consider Google Fi. I have T-Mobile. Not very competent, but I talk to a human being every time, and if there are problems, they escalate to people empowered to fix them.

I didn't last long on the service though. I just couldn't live without my iPhone in those early days of the service.

No idea how things are now.

EDIT: My bad, I see parent is referring to present day. Experience from the early days still stands though.

Compared to my experience trying to get support from any other utility, from T-Mobile to Comcast to my power company, or any other company no matter how modern (Amazon has been especially bad since the pandemic started, I literally can’t get them on the phone no matter how much I try), Google Fi has been a breath of fresh air.

That being said, it’s only a matter of time before they lose focus and that goes away. If there’s one thing Google does consistently, it’s take something good and abandon it or kill it outright. I have no doubt I will be switching back to a traditional phone carrier eventually, but for now I’m a happy customer.

The worst was when we last switched phones we traded our old phones in. My new phone arrived and my wife's just...didn't.

It took weeks to make them believe we didn't steal her phone for some reason and they wouldn't give us the photo from the Fedex delivery receipt (in case it just went to one of our neighbors). It turns out that yes, it did go to our neighbor's house right when they had moved in and it took a couple months for them to even get to the package. In the meanwhile we escalated, escalated, escalated, and so on for weeks until somebody finally just shipped my wife another phone.

It could have all been solved in maybe 10 seconds with the delivery photo.

Despite that, our phone bill is almost free with all the rebates and data usage refunds and we've traveled all over the planet with the service and it works fantastically.

Sprint & T-Mobile merging also eliminates the core novelty of the service, leaving you with something worse than Ting or T-Mobile prepaid that permits more domestic roaming.

Google has something that Amazon doesn't, though: services search. You cannot go on Amazon to buy concert tickets, change phone contracts, or get to a social network.

I got my Amazon Fresh grocery order last weekend, sourced from the Whole Foods up the road. The delivery was cheaper than every alternative (Instacart, etc), the produce was great, and the process was painless.

If 5 years ago you told me I'd be ordering fresh produce from Amazon with same day delivery, I wouldn't have believed you. Which do you think is more difficult for them logistically? Delivering perishable goods or digital services? Lol.

https://blog.google/products/shopping/buy-on-google-is-zero-...

80% of first link I click through is to Amazon.

Means 20% I might buy from somewhere else if I buy.

After a couple of disastrous shipping problems outside of amazon (lost money, no recourse), I've come to trust amazon.

Recently a USPS package (from amazon) showed up 1 month late, with most of the contents missing (DVDs all gone). Called amazon, quickly resolved and reshipped. No lingering bad feelings, no drama, no extra work, no litigation - amazon just resolved it and I am good.

I had amazon prime, but I asked to cancel before the year was up post-covid since I definitely wasn't getting 2-day shipping. Instead they refunded my entire year of prime service.

Amazon is not perfect, but I give them my money, they give me value and I have a good relationship with them.

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.

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.

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.

Having good managers is my goal now rather than having little to no managers.

This might be dumb but what is the industry standard here?

I mostly see teams of up to 5 people under "tech lead" who spends >50% coding and maybe ~20 people under a "manager" who spends almost no time coding.

Maybe what this policy means is >= 7 people under a lead? Because 7 people per manager does not sound very flat.

There are exceptions to the above depending on how independent the team is, or how stringent the deadlines are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control

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.

While these companies are big in every sense, they are not load bearing structures of the economy.

What I mean is that they are big, but say Google fails overnight. None of the phones work, none of their services work. There will be short term pain, losses and perhaps some economic impact too. However, the world will move on relatively quickly. There will be another tech company, or a bunch of companies to replace it. There will be new areas of economy opening up to competing products and services. Youtubers will move to platforms like Twitch, email gets moved to Hey (perhaps?), communication moves to platforms like Zoom and what not.

In a few months or perhaps a year, hardware makers will pivot to a new OS, new services, new products. Business will go on, with or without whatsapp / gmail / what not. Credit flow will not stop, businesses will not stop producing goods and services. If a business depends on Google for distribution of it's services, it will eventually find other ways to do it, perhaps through twitter, or email marketing or SMS or what not.

Coming to data collected over the years. Lets say all the data google ever collected gets deleted this instant. The most hurt people are the advertisers, who will start buying generic, non targeted ads for some time and then slowly move to other platforms.

However on the flip side, a company like Google has very real power to influence public thought, manufacture consent, hide facism, nudge elections, lobby congress for unfair playing grounds, etc.

Companies like Google, Facebook & Apple are big, but in a lopsided way. Too much power to do harm, but not really a 'catastrophic' effect on daily lives of people, in the long term. They are important, but not structural. They provide jobs, but are not irreplaceable. Their power to do good is substantial, but their goal to increase shareholder value comes first.

In my view, big tech companies ought to be churned, by force if necessary, to prevent monopolistic or oligopolistic entities.

Imagine what havoc Facebook can wreak with society, if it actively starts promoting one political spectrum, and suppresses the other. The sad part is, it may already be doing that and we just can't damn know.

I think you're drastically underestimating the scale (and number - you missed Google Maps, which is bordering on an essential service) of these systems, the degree to which people rely on them - both businesses and individuals - and the difficulty of replacing them.

If Google failed overnight it would be a macro-economically significant event.

Also, you seem to forget that there are other mapping companies out there. Google Maps itself came into picture after crushing Satnav systems like Garmin, and Nokia Maps.

If Google Maps were to be dead today, again, it is inconvenience, but people would move on.

As to stepping into the most biggest services? What are they? Google search? I am sure venture capital would flow into other companies that are technically capable to provide internet search. You have Bing, DDG, etc. Sure, they are crap, but they are not end of the world. And they will improve. Google Mail? I can live without it. I can choose other providers. There are hundreds out there. Heck, I will setup my own mail server.

People do rely on many Google services, but people can also get by without any of that.

In an event of Google failing right now, it would sure be a macro-economically significant event, but for a very tiny section of the population. And they too would move on.

Until it fails, people will talk and talk and talk about big, size, impact, and other nonsense.

Just see when it fails. It's going to be a collective shrug from 99% of the population.

They aren't, though. Google's search is no longer the undisputed best by any fair and comprehensive assessment.

Here's a recent search I actually made:

https://i.imgur.com/9A4ORwo.png

Google's page might be better-looking and have more sophisticated features than DuckDuckGo, but in terms of the quality of the service I am trying to use? Google is unquestionably inferior to DDG.

Fun fact, on my android device, Google has ZERO results visible at first. I have to scroll past an ad to get to the results. (Often, there are multiple ads that must be scrolled past to get to the content).

Maybe only dinosaurs like me actually use web search to search for web pages rather than to have a guided AI-driven experience, but that's the product I'm looking for. DDG delivers that, Google does not.

This is all outside the greater issue of the web in general and searched-web especially becoming massively clogged with low-quality, overly ad-laden content. If anyone remembers the state of the web when Google first came onto the scene, the problems were similar. Most advertising was obnoxious, intrusive, and costly in an era when bandwidth was scarce. Google came on the scene offering (a) the best search product and (b) discreet, polite, often relevant ads that didn't trigger all sane people to install ad-blockers.

The difference is that in 2000, the internet ad market was tiny compared to today. The audiences were different, also.

I don't know how old you are but I suspect this is an age thing. I remember the world before Google, before smartphones, before mobile phones even. It actually worked pretty well. People had jobs, traveled, communicated over long distances, read the news, invested in shares, organised events with friends, bought products, and everything else. Google at vast cost has made some of those things marginally more convenient, as well as introducing a whole raft of new problems. They could go away and it would be a blip nothing more. As for Google Maps I also remember when everyone owned an "A-Z" and found their way around cities with it, and that was OK too, and there was very little misleading information in an A-Z nor squabbles over who "owned" which business and could write about it!

If Google failed overnight it would be a macro-economically significant event.

Other than their shareholders and a bunch of sleazy adtech merchants without which the world would be better off anyway, very few would be negatively impacted beyond a minor inconvenience for a few weeks.

Google Maps is much better.

But you’re missing my point, and also the specific thing I was replying to. My point was not that things didn’t work before Google, obviously they did - we’re here, now. The universe didn’t start with Google. My point is that so many businesses and people today are directly, constantly, relying on the multitude of Google services that if Google went away overnight it would be a catastrophe for them. Google going away overnight is the thing that was posited in the post I replied to.

I also made no assertion about whether Google is a net good or not, so again you’re replying to something I didn’t say.

(For the record I do believe sum of the services provided by Google and the cost at which they provide them is a net good for the world. No, In not interested in debating that)

I wouldn't worry about it too much. What's the worst that could happen in YT is dead now, people go back to not wasting time on YT Binges.

I’m not convinced a start up can get to the same level of quality as these big four within a year or so—and that dip in quality will have palpable economic effects, sure it may not cause a collapse, but you’d experience a slow down of the economic engine for sure, and it'd last longer than a year—basically it’d last as long as it took for some other company to reach monopoly size—concentration of wealth and economic power is a flaw internal to the structure of capitalism itself and is the inevitable telos of capitalistic structure.

I think a better way to place limits on the social and political power of these companies is to put in greater data protections. Make these companies pay for user data, make it incredibly difficult for them to abuse data or users, that would help restrict their influence and open up avenues for competition—a smaller company may not have as great of a service but if they offer users greater compensation for their data they can draw in customers.

(I just wonder if microsoft has some sort of method of identifying or matching queries with actual people)

Also, what happens to all that data in stowed away in other services? What happens, with Gmail if it's separated from the ads division? Do they suddenly start charging everyone to use it? Can they still run ads in Gmail? Would they have access to the infra serving those ads? If they flame out completely do we lose all our data? Will they give us a chance to export it? In what format?....

I just can't help but feel these sorts of breaks would be extremely difficult to get right.

Speaking as one who worked with many who'd cheared Microsoft over IBM, who myself once saw Google, and later Apple, as just deserts for Microsoft's own monopoly abuses, and presently relies principally on DDG for Web search, and acknowledges that it too relies heavily, though not exclusively, on Microsoft's Bing.

Providing a useful tech capacity without winner-take-all monopolies should be the goal. And result.

All of them would be ad supported too, thanks to the fact that we in the software industry have conditioned users to expect things for "free" and advertisers would also want to put the bulk of their ad dollars toward the most effective search engine to get the most bang for the buck, again reinforcing the trend toward monopoly.

The only alternative that comes to mind is to make search a government run public utility but, as I'm sure a number of you are thinking rather loudly right now, that comes with its own set of problems.

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

This reminds me of the article where the newspapers know when a senator or congressman is reading their article. Maybe these are seasoned politicians, but I wonder how much subtle influence will wend its way into government going forward.

> 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.

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.

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?).

Don't forget that GoogleApps/Gmail (and google classroom) is also rather popular in education.

Given: thickness of paper 0.0039 inches Lets say each email is at least a page

0.0039 inches * 300*10^9 pages to km = 29,718 (km)

Maybe if some emails are more than a page its not too far off.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Rockefeller ran the company as its chairman, until his retirement in 1897. He remained the major shareholder, and in 1911, with the dissolution of the Standard Oil trust into 34 smaller companies, Rockefeller became the richest person in modern history, as the initial income of these individual enterprises proved to be much bigger than that of a single larger company."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil

It's true that once a company gets a lot of market power, either as a buyer or a seller, it causes problems. But by this logic, why not breakup Walmart first? There's lots of documentation on how they push supplier cost so low that suppliers are practically going out of business selling to WalMart. Google seems less problematic than lots of companies.

Age of Amazon is just a narrative which is no way to decide monopoly.

That's not all of retail. It's certain categories in retail. It's significant, but Amazon has a much broader selection of products and competes in far more sectors of the retail industry than Walmart does. Also, looking forward, over the next 10-20 years and given the changes in the marketplace, who do you think is best poised to dominate retail for the foreseeable future: Walmart or Amazon?

https://blog.pipecandy.com/walmart-market-share-story/

As Peter Thiel said in Zero to One, monopolies seek to define their sectors in the broadest terms possible in order to avoid being classified as such.

Yes, and it's not a secret that the other way to unleash value is to merge companies. See for example AT&T or Exxon & Mobil.

The same does not seem to be true for any of the Alphabet companies, except in the sense of being able to leverage shared user data for better targeted ads. Perhaps that does make it worth it to remain one company, but it's debatable, especially for something like Waymo which likely won't benefit from having access to search data.

This goes all the way back to the most basic theories of organization - why do companies even exist? Why is everyone not effectively a contractor? Why do companies not outsource every non-core function? And there are good reasons why companies exist - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm External transaction costs are real and breaking Google up could significantly increase those.

Someone from Siemens once told me "Siemens is an investment bank that happens to own all of the companies it has invested in." I'm not sure whether that's true or not, but it's a good description of conglomerates in general.

Others might say a better justification was the cheap corporate credit available to some (but not all) firms, and thus the competitive advantage of conglomerates was access to credit, rather than management. The smaller firms and individuals did not have the same access to credit.

But in the 80s, the pendulum began to swing the other way. The problem from the perspective of the credit markets -- whether shareholders or bondholders -- was the difficulty in obtaining detailed operational information from these large conglomerates. They became very opaque, as they could use the losses of one firm to subsidize another, and it was hard to drill down and figure out what was happening by looking at the financial statements. So then began a wave of slicing these companies up and selling off the pieces.

Or from a completely different perspective, it was the extension of new types of credit such as junk bonds that allowed insiders to do leveraged buyouts, which tipped the scales away from the conglomerates and led to a lot of asset sales that "unlocked value" while other operations were shutdown.

Not saying who is right, just offering some perspective that these arguments have been engaged with 60 years ago, and ended up with mixed results.

All conglomerates are like this, the clearest example is Berkshire Hathaway.

Maybe you could ask from the opposite perspective, why aren't all mutual funds organized like BRK?

There is one profitable part (ads). The other parts are supported by that part or at least require deep integration with that part.

Maybe you could split of Google Cloud, but I bet it would just become a digital REIT.

Who knows, this might even make Google more competitive at the end of the day. If anything, it could make the "ROI" and financial metrics of their individual products more explicit instead of nebulous "cross-subsidizing" centers.

If size was the only thing that mattered you'd never see small companies beat big companies, in countries or across them. This is generally not the case. Healthy ecosystems seem to be more important long term than short-term dominance.

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...

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.

Doing things you’re really good at brings lots of people joy. Those people are really good at running companies. A 75 year old artist or novelist who keeps working doesn’t get too many people asking why, not does anyone ask Arnold why he’s still on the steroids, steak and gym plan. Overwhelmingly the people who are the best on the world at something enjoy it.

I can't stop laughing at this line.

Honestly though 75 is a few years away from death for the average person. Go throw a baseball with your offspring.

No offence but if you ask such questions you probably wont become a billionaire. These guys have a different drive and ambition, you dont just lose it when you become old (and still be healthy)

That's kind of what I was thinking. You have full control over one of the world's largest corporations and war chests, what better chance will anyone ever get to try to fix the world?

I appreciate that some may just decide that they'd rather do something else, but I feel that's a little sad. There's really no small things you want to do, small positive changes you could make, with all that power?

I think in the case of microsoft, there was also an angle that, yeah, on some level microsoft itself had been a changing-the-world-for-the-better venture in and of itself, but Gates' own agency within that was no longer important, because the core part of it was already done.

Sometimes the job of a "visionary CEO" is just to bring the horse to water; to riff on Netscape, for example, someone had to build the first mass-market web browser, and it was very technically hard, and had to be done well enough on the first go to dodge the nintendo virtual-boy trap, which meant that for a while, it had to be a really successful business. But once someone made a really well-made web browser, and accultured a large number of people that "a web browser and a a world-wide-web" are important things for humanity to have - after that, it was likely that the building of web browsers would become a self-sustaining reaction constantly pulling in really smart people, much better qualified than the original developers.

At that point the original guys could choose to die at the chalkboard, but they can practically just sit back and watch, and sometimes even if you stay involved, its smart to take a backseat role and let the folks who will be your successors get used to the role (in fact, a lot of times, it's much better to focus on training them, and make sure lots of the intangibles you may have only done "incidentally" are also getting passed on).

You don't hear about what they're up to because they can afford what they've taken from everyone else: Privacy.

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.

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...

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

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.

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).

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.

Here's how I would counter: What many of these Congresspeople understand is business. And these are technology companies, but ultimately, they're companies using illegal business strategies. Congresswoman Jayapal explained for instance, how Google's ad market is effectively an example of insider trading, because Google controlled the buyer side, seller side, and the exchange itself, drawing on her experience with Wall Street. Technology didn't matter there, but business did.

And more intriguingly, the most common response from the tech CEOs there was "I don't know". If there's one really good case for breaking up big tech, it's that nobody running them understands the details of the operation well enough to be responsible for it. Their business models have bad effects on society that their CEOs don't know about. Their businesses make illegal decisions that their CEOs can't vouch for.

Big tech is a runaway train.

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.

That doesn’t mean I dont want oversight. I think there may be a role for regulation in the public interest, but blindly chopping YouTube up into a hundred geographically separated chunks would be unbelievably dumb. Is ‘competition’ really going to compensate for the loss of convenience? There have always been competing video upload sites, but people go where the scale is because they like the scale. They want the scale. It has value to them.

The same goes for the App Store. I’m a happy Apple customer. I like the App Store and I think it works well, but I’m not entirely against government scrutiny of how it operates, in principle. Yes I’m concerned Apple could abuse its power, but killing the App Store or mandating by law that Apple has to implement policies that will tear the App Store into bits benefits me how? Will it make it easier for me to find and install Apps? Will it improve their quality? Will fragmented app stores make it easier for developers to connect with customers and earn revenue? I’m not convinced.

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.

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.

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.

The biggest problem there is that all the hosts want you to use their search and do what they can to get in the way of any third party turning them into a dumb pipe. But this is where some kind of P2P service could really have an advantage, because it doesn't have to care about that -- let it be a dumb pipe on purpose and it wins, because there are a thousand companies who would love to be in the video search/discovery business and not have to pay the cost of hosting the videos or worry about a centralized third party host locking them out next week.

The Constitution of the USA prevents states from erecting barriers to inter-state commerce, so I suspect if there were legal barriers, they would have to be at the national level.

Therefore, I highly doubt any legislation would ever be passed for this. (even though it may end up being much better for the consumer)

I feel like for that to happen a much deeper cultural transformation in how we share information and global inequalities would have to come as well. The reason there's so much content in english is not because it's been constructed solely by authors who speak english natively (albeit probably the most common native language amongst blog authors, etc), but because many authors feel like they have to write it in english in order to speak to a broader, global audience.

A fragmented market prevents competition, so I don't understand what you're trying to say. Like with your friendly local cable company.

There was a memory etched in my mind of a clueless Congressman questioning the General Counsel of Alphabet/Google in a committee hearing (perhaps during the SOPA fiasco). The congressman said something to the effect of "Google can do anything! They store a copy of the entire internet. Why can't you just identify all of the copyrighted material and not show it without approval?"

I was dumbfounded by how this grown man seemed to think Google basically ran on "tech magic" and how little comprehension he seemed to have for what intellectual property is and how it's registered/identified.

You don't think banking is dysfunctional? Banking is one of the most privacy-invasive industries in existence, the rules are the reason the internet runs on advertising because they make it nigh impossible to make a functioning anonymous micropayments system and companies that try to innovate with e.g. a debit card that keeps your account balance invested in securities get booed off the stage by incumbents who don't want the competition.

There are a lot of legitimate things to complain about with banking and its regulations but despite the many misconduct scandals in banking they are still better than unregulated parabanks. The scandals haven't been in the form of "and the head ran off with all of the money and nobody can find it or them".

Regulations certainly could be improved in multiple directions but dysfunction is not a binary.

What kinds of improvements would improve the state of banking today that don't also throw the baby out with the bathwater?

I think for tech, "monopolies" are natural and they stem from the lack of investment needed by the consumer which allows us to choose the best/coolest product at every moment.

For tech it makes more sense to have 1 search engine, 1 social platform, 1 video sharing platform. If cars were easy to change as you wish, I think everyone will gravitate towards a single car brand.

Even my deliberately stupid as possible answers like "Turn away visitors once they get above 200 million connections with a landing screen" and "register Youtubes A-Z with seperate data bins and watch traffic migrate in a daft social experiment" are better answers than any I have seen from users of the talking point.

Specifically in the case of YT, as an extreme example, if all video available online in a country had to be moderated by a human, YouTube couldn't operate at it's current scale. It doesn't have a right to skip those regulations because of it's scale.

If a company can't scale and still comply with regulations the answer isn't automatically to get rid of the regulations. The inverse is also true, if a society decides that a company operating in a given environment has to adhere to new regulations, being so big those regulations fundamentally affect your business model doesn't excuse the company from complying.

What you're missing is that the vast majority of emails aren't sent individually from one person to another; they're sent by programs. In addition to spam, we're talking about stuff like newsletters, promotions, notifications, updates, mailing lists, etc. Looking through my emails now I have an incredible volume of GitHub notifications and various other auto-generated emails. In total I definitely receive hundreds of emails per day.

And I don't actually do that many Google searches per day (maybe only a couple dozen) mainly because I tend to go back to the same websites over and over again, and the browser URL bar autocompletes the name rather than performing a Google search on the name of the site. You really have to go out of your way these days to perform a Google search on the name of a site rather than just go to the site directly.

Much of that flow could be replaced by RSS-based notifications and the like. E-mail might be justified when you want your stuff to be auto-archived, but perhaps any message you would delete immediately after skimming it should just not be sent in the first place.

Bill Gates famously said "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need on a computer" in the 1980s. We could probably do most of what modern computers do with far less than 32GB of RAM, but that assumes that our software is much more optimized for compact runtime than they are.

Then again just imagine how fantastically useful 40 years worth of video a day could be to a historian 200 years from now. I think the most important technology going forward will be analysis and indexing software, to make searching videos like this possible. Ted Chiang wrote a short story about that, where you could search like "that time I got in a fight with my wife about the toilet seat being up," and you'd get a video from the incident.

When people say “everyone’s different” I’m quite fond of saying things like “well, there’s 7.8 billion of us, surely we’re not all that different?”

It’s interesting to think that YouTube content is only a “two in a million” reflection of human life. Averaged out, that’s about 1 minute per person per year.

It also wasn’t an urgent problem as experiments like http were unlikely to reach broad usage due to critical failures like the one way links.

I mention this not to mock your “‘almost’ impossible” statement but to point out that you’re in good company

I think this is one area where general purpose search engines are failing users currently. We should be able to tell Google "that one tweet from yesterday" and have it return something meaningful to us. Of course I understand that this is hard and becoming harder as social media companies hold on to their walled gardens, but clearly (to me anyway) the status quo is to the detriment of the user.

Here's a nice one with many public instances you can try: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

Anyway, for archival purposes you don't need to save the plethora of formats Youtube keeps at hand for each video, you just need one size in one codec, and it probably doesn't have to be 4K or 8K, which probably reduces the storage requirements by one order of magnitude or so.

It's only 45 years of video per day. That is very, very possible to save. That's roughly 600 terabytes of storage space a day. Which means that per month you're generating a long term storage bill that is about $18k more per month.

So after a decade of operation your monthly bill is about $2.1m which is far, far, far cheaper than what we spend on plenty of things. Like I said above: This is not impossible. In fact, I bet the NSA is probably already doing it. At least for public videos. This truly is peanuts.

edit: for example the average net worth of an American is 76,000$ but toss a couple billionaires in the mix, whose net worth is larger by such an enormous factor, that the "average" is misleading

(Of course, boiling a wide distribution of values down to a single value, no matter by which process, is fraught with problems.)

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23393293

2: I think I heard this use case predicted on some NPR thing I can't find, but this one https://www.npr.org/2013/01/24/170082404/shall-i-encode-thee... says “Agilent waived the cost of DNA synthesis for this project, but the researchers estimate it would normally cost about $12,400 per megabyte.

"It's an unthinkably large amount of money ... at the moment," Goldman says.”

I believe the first hard drive cost about $100K/MB in today's money.

Wouldn't want your only ice cube to melt

But I guess that's the price to pay to be able to be "friends" with big media.

Then, begin tracking what new content those "bad viewers" view while also identifying new users who follow a similar viewing pattern and categorizing them as bad viewers. Once you get a large enough data set, you can begin to things based on what percentage of bad users view new content. If some new account uploads a few videos and 75%+ of views are from bad users all in the same category of not allowed material, what is the chance the material belongs in that category? And what I'm describing is the version 0.0.0.1 variant. You would also track things like length of view, timing of views, sentiment analysis of any comments made on the video (and potentially of any speech in the video), etc.

1: https://www.postandcourier.com/news/google-s-controversial-g...

2: https://www.sbsun.com/2014/08/18/emerging-solar-plants-in-mo...

"Once built, U.S. government biologists found the plant's superheated mirrors were killing birds. In April, biologists working for the state estimated that 3,500 birds died at Ivanpah in the span of a year, many of them burned alive while flying through a part of the solar installment where air temperatures can reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit." — https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-tech-solar-projects-fail-t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility#B...

Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.

Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one “streamer” every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version.

They do seem to have reduced some of the more dramatic deaths by unfocusing the beams when the plant is idle and clearing even more land around it to keep birds away, although there were still thousands of deaths every year afterwards.

IIUC, they're not (extremely) rare in the traditional sense; it's more that it's hard to economically extract them from ore. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element#:~:text=The....