This is basically Samsung asking Google to pay up. Google needs to pay Apple / iOS for Default Search Engine, and paying Samsung for staying on Android with Google Search.
Basically Google is being squeezed left and right. So the only way to increase revenue or profits to satisfy the money they spend on Apple and Samsung? More Ads on Youtube and Google Search. The more Ads they serve, the worse UX they have. All while completely fail to compete against AWS or Azure.
When I saw the title it reminded me of the 20+ years we'd see almost bi-annual news articles about how Dell was considering adding AMD chips to their line-up.
They'd do that, Intel would offer them a discount, and that'd be the last we'd hear of it for a year or so, until that discount would be expiring.
IIRC someone at Intel once said that Dell is the “best friend money can buy” in an internal email that came out when Intel was being investigated for anti-competitive practices.
Is GCP really a failure? I think the product is OK and they seem to have some big customers. They're maybe #3 in the space, but you can make a lot of money without being #1.
Yes, we all hate their support structure (it goes through SADA), but the price is right. At my last company with 4 engineers we were paying AWS ~$1000/month for support. At my current company back when we had a cloud service on GCP, we got weekly calls with support for $0/month. Folks at Google also seemed to approve my weird resource requests (tons of GPUs in the midst of a GPU shortage, etc.) without me going through any back channels. I didn't find it terrible to work with at all, and it was much cheaper than AWS.
I'd call being half of Azure's market share today a failure. Hell, they were better-positioned than Amazon to offer an AWS-like product when AWS itself came out.
Honestly, with any vendor not named AWS, it's incredibly difficult to parse their actual "cloud" revenue. I believe Microsoft bundles in their Office 365 revenue just as Google does Docs. IBM stuffs in all sorts of seemingly unrelated stuff to make their numbers sound bigger. It's actually difficult to compare apples-to-apples because of all the gamesmanship.
Companies think they are simplifying things by using Azure since they already rely so heavily on MS software. That's pretty much the only reason Azure is more popular. GCP is a far better platform.
Apparently not. According to Steve Yegge's letter about Google+ (copy at https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611), one of the mandates Jeff have asked is to ensure that "All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.", while on the same letter his impression of Google is basically on the other side of Amazon's spectrum, even describing how bad Google's documentation at the time compared to Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.
Its way easier to define exactly what kind of instances you need in GCP in my experience. Need more RAM? Just add a bit more RAM, don't need to completely double it along with double the CPU and double the networking and what not. Just need one more CPU core? Done.
Then the reliability of GCP is a good bit higher. gp3 has 99.8% durability. I've seen several EBS volumes just disappear. Not deleted, just become permanently gone due to hardware failures. Compare that to 99.999% durability on GCP. You're spending several times for extra redundancy and complexity per gig on AWS just to come close to the durability to GCP.
If I have a choice between AWS and GCP, and unless I've got some specific product need for AWS, I'd probably go with GCP every time. It's such a better product IMO.
> Yes, we all hate their support structure (it goes through SADA)
SADA (and their competitor DoIT) are just resellers. Support doesn't inherently go through them. That's a decision your company makes. It's generally not a great decision either, in my opinion, as those resellers add a lot of opacity between you and your cloud provider. Google recommends them because it's easier for them.
The frenemy status of Google-Samsung is once again on display. Samsung probably hasn't been happy with the Google's continued Pixel phone push :p
But why is Google paying Apple to be the default search engine on iOS devices?
It seems a waste of money as Apple would be stupid to default to any other search engine given the lower search quality results. End users would notice if there was a result degradation and likely switch their default. Google seems to be playing the "Intel Inside" part without reaping the marketing benefits and only paying the traffic acquisition costs.
If Samsung really wasn't happy, they wouldn't be manufacturing Google's phones and providing custom silicon. I think the Pixel phones are a blip on Samsung's radar in terms of competition.
Samsung also tried to push their own mobile OS for a long while after android become dominant. Samsung is large enough that it's hard to tell overarching strategy though.
Apple may not consider any other default search engine only in the absence of a search engine other than google offering a pot of money to be the default search engine.
Why can't they do it? A tiny boot strapped company like Kagi has already made a much better search engine than Google. Are no good engineers working at Apple, or what is missing in the equation?
> but what would be gained?
People needing to buy an Apple device to reap the benefits of the internet, as Google continues to sink into their SEO-optimized malware swamp.
That’s more because it was a bet on the wrong horse. If you know how to install Firefox you probably know what search engine you are using and how to switch the default search engine.
It's not the default browser on most devices. I think the parent comment is stating that if you're technical enough to install a 3rd party browser, you're technical enough to pick your own search engine. So people chose Firefox and chose away from Yahoo
I think Firefox users have now reduced to geeks and some 'real FOSS' enthusiasts etc. I still use Firefox as my primary browser, but I haven't seen any non-tech person installing it for a long time now. They all just search for Chrome and download, install that. So in today's times if someone's installing Firefox I'd say they'd mostly know their way around.
If Samsung is smart, then they ensure that their users gets access to new Bing as default, which means that even if people switch back (read get their nerdy friends to switch them back) they will find that Google is missing quite a lot.
As far as investor buzz is concerned, Microsoft has a lot of positive sentiment compared to Google.
Perhaps ironically it’s because Google’s search tailors it’s results to show me those results that paint MSFT in a positive light.
I can also see Generative AI providing some real amazing features with near OS level integration. Imagine being able to quickly draft business emails from your mobile device?
I don’t think Apple will have anything that amazing anytime soon so us iOS users will be stuck with using 3rd party apps, but I could see Samsung trying to distinguish their handsets with additional software capabilities not found in Android.
Google makes a shit ton of money from Search, Microsoft doesn't.
If Bing had more users the Microsoft would make more money from it, and vice verse for Google. Their respective sizes are a reason for Microsoft to grow Bing, not a reason to turn Samsung away.
Microsoft are investing $10b in OpenAI partly to make Bing better. That is not a sign they're happy with Bing's market share. They're coming for Google, albeit with an oblique strategy rather than competing directly.
how much can they afford to throw into this pit before investors start being worried
A lot, for a really long time. Microsoft have plenty of money and a history of playing a long game successfully. Have a look at Xbox if you want an example of Microsoft spending a lot of money for a very long time and coming out ahead in the end.
Google's offers to Android OEMs often mix search revenue, app store revenue, and ad revenue... a tying nightmare. Google is now under significantly increased scrutiny for how they manage these deals, they've gotten in trouble for destroying evidence and will now have even more incriminating evidence for future arrangements... it's a great time to press Google for a better deal because their hands are tied.
Google is losing its competitive advantage in the search space. DDG and Bing are very strong competitors for the typical web search usecase.
External forces of economic and technical nature are not in their favor. Internal forces from politics, leadership and management issues are surfacing.
This does not sound good for Google. Almost like it will implode.
> This is basically Samsung asking Google to pay up
True, but Samsung isn't known for user-friendly phones, and they often come with a lot of bloat. At some point, it drives more and more users to Pixel.
Except Samsung sells orders of magnitude more phones than Google does.
I don’t like the Samsung inference either, but millions and millions of people don’t just like it, they prefer it. They buy the phones specifically because they know how to use it. They aren’t loyal to Android, they are loyal to the Galaxy line.
Try a Pixel. None of the Samsung bloat and most importantly, no Bixby constantly getting in the way of the vastly superior Google Assistant already baked into android.
Pixel is known for amount of bugs and issues after the release. Also they release them in a handful of countries. It's not realistically viable alternative to Samsung when most of the world can't get it officially...
I have a recent Samsung Galaxy and haven't once accidentally triggered Bixby. Long press on home button is google assistant. I'm sure I disabled some Bixby settings when I set up the phone but at this point I don't know how to open it even if I tried.
Must have changed in the years since I had one. They had a dedicated Bixby button that you couldn't assign to anything else and updates to Bixby would constantly mess with settings related to activating Google Assistant. Good to know things have gotten better.
That hasn't been my experience at all. If anything, they are more userfriendly than other phones I have used. One thing in particular that is very nice is that everything is accessible on the larger screen sizes, action centers, call logs, messages, everything is designed to be accessible when holding your phone with one hand without having to awkwardly reach the top.
There's a separate Samsung version of every core Google Android app, a separate Samsung account system to sync everything, and a Samsung launcher. Mind you, I personally use none of it (except launcher), but that's basically the definition of Android bloat.
I'd expect bloatware to be unnecessary software. To a user who is not familiar with google's offering, the bloat doesn't exist, they don't see two different softwares. Samsung phones don't have two messaging apps, gallery, or phone app
Not including google's version doesn't equate to bloat. In fact, the opposite is true.
I guess one man's trash is another man's treasure. I like Samsung Health application and use it daily. I even had purchased something called RunKepper but stopped using it in favour of Samsung app.
I was recently in the market for a basic VPS, and Azure is absolutely awful for this use. The most bloated complicated signup and setup process I have experienced in a long time. Google was tolerable. Of the three amazon lightsail was the best, but even that loses to something like digital ocean
I often see products optimise for the "get-started-quick" part, which is often 0.1% of the total experience. For example, reviews of operating systems often focus more than 50% of the content on the upgrade or installation process, even though that's actually a rare operation.
Azure focuses on Microsoft's large enterprise customers. They want guard rails, separation of responsibilities, policy, compliance controls, etc...
Nothing to do with the process required to get 1 VM up and running from scratch, including signing up. Their bread & butter customers have enterprise agreements in place already for Office and Windows licensing!
Most of Android is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. So while the word "owns" is true in a technical legal sense, there is nothing to prevent anyone from forking it and doing their own thing. Unlike with GPL code, they don't even need to license their changes under the same license as long as they abide the terms with respects to the original.
Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google" without switching to the Apple ecosystem. No Google Play (you can install it but I choose not to), FOSS apps only. I don't recommend it for everyone but it made me not hate owning a smart phone for the first time since the "mobile revolution" passed my old grumpy self by.
Look how well Huawei smartphones are selling in the west (not well at all). And that's not because of lack of trying, I've been on a team where everybody agreed that supporting their phones had zero upside outside of the cash Huawei offered for a port of our apps. And we did it, only because they paid so much. And those were laughably unattractive apps (think yellow pages), I can't even start to imagine what they must have spent in other directions.
Because they used to have Google's play store and other services. Parent commenter's point is that a manufacturer having the open source parts of Android isn't necessarily worth much on its own.
Google have done a great job over the last ten years of making Android pretty unusable without Google's proprietary software on it.
Don't have Google Play Services (Proprietary) then no access to push notifications, maps APIs etc etc.
Yes, Vanilla Android works, but it's rough as guts. And who'd want to buy a phone where push messages for Facebook/Instagram etc don't work? Very few people.
> Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google" without switching to the Apple ecosystem. No Google Play (you can install it but I choose not to), FOSS apps only.
This is only valid for power users. Normal users would probably never accept a phone without Google Play Services running on it, with Amazon's devices being the exception (and don't ask me why, because I don't get it.)
Of course this is true, that is why it's a real threat when a company like Samsung, with the resources and money to make these things convenient/unnoticeable to normal users is a real problem to Google
Yes that is ironic. As someone else said, Google made the best de-Google-able phone. But from what I gather they chose it because of the specific hardware features and they need to restrict what they support to keep the project manageable and maintainable.
I bought mine outright and wiped the Pixel version of Android and am pretty happy. To be clear, I wasn't trying to avoid giving Google money ... I just wanted a phone and operating system that I felt like I had control of, without having a ton of bloatware and spyware pre-installed by the vendor etc.
That's correct. It's my understanding that this is for two reasons:
1) google opened api/support for verified boot on the pixels (so you can tell if a border agent hacked your grapheneos phone, for example)
2) it's easier to support fewer phone models (given they are not a large team)
I bought a refurbished pixel 3a last year for a little over $100 and have been thrilled with my grapheneos experience. I don't run google play, but it is my understanding this can be done in a sandbox (allowing for more privacy than usual).
They did and I bought a used pixel6 just to switch to graphene. The problem is that the next pixel will likely be much more difficult to do this with because google is going to not not be evil.
Really?! You mean that my offering additional information and context didn't magically alter the very nature of time itself, thus causing the characters that they typed to change representation in Hacker News' database? You don't say! (do I need a /s indicator?)
And what value, exactly, does your comment add to the conversation?
> paying Samsung for staying on Android with Google Search
> google still owns android
> Personally I use GrapheneOS in order to "de-Google"
It doesn't matter that Google owns Android if Samsung can make their own fork of Android that doesn't use Google stuff by default. Is there something that would prevent Samsung from creating their own app store?
Samsung already has their own app store (Galaxy Store) alongside the Play Store. Have only used it personally to download/update Samsung specific apps however.
> as well as sweeping out crappy "customizations."
huh? Samsung OneUI features have been making their way into mainstream AOSP...particularly the tablet-focused stuff
there is no way Google will ever try to "strong arm" Samsung...Samsung is the Android market, the Pixel line is a rounding error and in no way a competitive threat
> there is no way Google will ever try to "strong arm" Samsung...Samsung is the Android market, the Pixel line is a rounding error and in no way a competitive threat
They've been strong-arming every Android OEM since the start (Google Mobile Services agreement). ("Strong arming" being closer to Apple exerting control vs. the wild west of pre-2007 cellphones.)
It's finally starting to bear fruit with things like Project Mainline and Project Treble, but the political winds have changed and I expect various Gov'ts to claw back the control Google has on OEMs over the next decade. Whether Google can continue their efforts to ensure a stable Android platform is an open question after that.
I can't point to anything specific since I'm rushing this comment, but it should be fairly obvious that Google lets OEMs do things their own way until the dust settles and Google synthesizes the different approaches into the "official" AOSP way.
I'm not sure any actual code from OneUI has made it into Android, that would surprise me. Google really likes doing things "their way" in Android. The Android team takes UI inspiration from everyone, but most of their eyeball time is on Apple.
Only ~56% of Google's revenue is from Search ads - <50% of that comes from Android - and <35% of that comes from Samsung.
<10% of Google's total revenue comes from Samsung devices >40% of Samsung's NET REVENUE comes from selling Android devices.
It's almost as if Samsung is a lot more dependent on Google than the other way around.
At the end of the day - the majority of people you default to Bing search are going to switch back to Google. Samsung will be lucky to get a meaningful amount of money.
MSFT can't outbid Google because they can't make as much money from the searches as Google.
> It's almost as if Samsung is a lot more dependent on Google than the other way around.
in a pinch, Samsung could just fork the AOSP project and continue forward without Google, it would be trivial for app makers to re-publish their apps in a Samsung app store (and many already do)
An extremely second rate phone platform compared to iOS where the customers don’t spend nearly as much money and they have minimal control over their hardware partners.
Then linux should be a second rate platform since no one spend enough money and there is zero control over what it runs on.
Android is also technically more advanced than anything Apple in pure versatility and user control. Apple execs might get nightmares if someone suggested giving more control to their user. I can stay in the walled garden or play outside with naughty apps and emulators. Android's safety model is not based on restricting what the user can do. Security by obscurity is the least one can do.
I understand everyone has a phone choice and some people prefer their phone less sophisticated or less feature rich or more basic.
But just because you prefer something so reduced in functionality that it's a waste of the incredible silicon powering it does not mean you can belittle something far more capable. Especially in a developer oriented website.
Basically Google is being squeezed left and right. So the only way to increase revenue or profits to satisfy the money they spend on Apple and Samsung? More Ads on Youtube and Google Search. The more Ads they serve, the worse UX they have. All while completely fail to compete against AWS or Azure.