>Google is the greatest conglomeration of Nobel worthy scientists and engineers in the last century.

IIRC both Microsoft and IBM produce way more research than Google. Let's keep things in perspective.

>And their entire organization is built on advertising.

Similarly the entire government is built on taxation, that doesn't mean everyone in the government wants to work on taxation or is good at it.

>After creating the best search engine and email system

Sure engine, sure. Email system, only if you restrict to web-based without privacy.

>they created the best web browser and most popular operating system in the world

Google didn't create Android, they bought it.

>Google's open source contributions are unmatched

Metrics for this are pretty lame, but even they show this is wrong: https://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2016/09/15/in-your-face-goo...

> Google didn't create Android, they bought it.

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

You'd have a better point if you had pointed to the Linux kernel, the many open source libraries, etc that make it up

> Metrics for this are pretty lame, but even they show this is wrong: https://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2016/09/15/in-your-face-goo...

I doubt GP's claim is correct, but that article is terrible. Those counts are any contributors to repos in an org, not number of contributors from those orgs. And you can see the immediate problem with using orgs when you see both Google and Angular are in the top 10.

Android, Angular, BoringSSL, Chromium, Dart, Go, Kubernete, TensorFlow. Not to mention the cash and services it ploughs into the OSS in various ways, from the Millions it gave to Firefox over the years, to people collaborating over Hangouts, to Project Zero.

I don't think "unmatched" is unreasonable.

Millions to Firefox to be the search engine on the browser.

It wasn't a donation ;)

And they made much more from firefox than what they paid.

How so? If Firefox didn't exist they'd make the same amount from MSIE.

Also the biggest contributors to KVM support in the Linux kernel, which is directly driving most of the container craze.

Also HBase, Hadoop, Guava, GWT, Closure. Tons of others we probably don't know of. I would guess Google has around 500 notable open source projects where they're either major contributors or authors.

You missed one:

>they created the best web browser

opera is not from google

Also I disagree with google search being the best search engine, it used to be very good 15 years ago with pages after pages of relevant results. It has gotten worse over the years to its current state of being terrible and often failing at returning relevant results.

"Nobel worthy scientists and engineers"? You'd never hire one to make you a native ad!

Native ads, integrated or disguised as creative content, are impossible to block. Creative professionals, like film directors, visual artists, writers and even ad executives are the main innovators of native advertising.

I would argue native advertising is where most of the relevant innovation in ads occurs. Not at Google.

Creative content? Not at all Google's expertise. The best engineers are the least equipped to understand appealing creatives.

- Google acquired YouTube, whose basic premise was pirating, not creating, creative content. Despite having the largest video audience in the world, Google could never make something like Netflix's House of Cards.

- They're years away from delivering a compelling experience for Daydream. Never mind a game. Every NYTimes subscriber who received their Cardboard probably threw it away.

- The folks who worked on Make with Code privately describe their Google partners as insufferable.

- The folks who work on Google's creative ad campaigns—video & design—have variously described their Google partners as aloof and stifling.

- Despite its huge penetration, Google Music has no role in music culture. No musician I know thinks about how many plays they get on Google: they worry about Spotify, Hype Machine and other things their manager actually uses. A music manager wouldn't be caught dead with something as uncool as a Google Music subscription.

Indeed, I would argue that Google's culture is toxic to artistic creativity. If they wanted to hire some writers and directors, what would they do: administer a white boarding test? Laughable! That's assuming the people at e.g. ATAP even follow up with their own recruits (which they don't).

Serious creatives are anti-conformist. Google as an institution is something serious creatives criticize and lampoon, not celebrate. Have you seen Silicon Valley? Read Circle?

Listen, I might hate David Eggers's writing. But nobody writes a book about how Netflix is a cult.

While I largely agree with you, I disagree on things like Google Play Music and Movies (includes TV). Their sales platform for other people's content works well. My wife and I used to use Spotify, a good service, but find a $15 / month family plan for YouTube Red (including Play Music) to be a good service and a good deal.

Off topic, but even though I have spent much of the last 30 years working on AI and machine learning, I did work for Disney and Nintendo for a while in the 1990s, and I have a keen amateur's interest in the business side of content production. I never would have predicted the amount of money Amazon, Hulu, Netflicks, and HBO would invest in producing their own content. Interesting that Google does not do the same thing. When I worked at Google as a contractor I enjoyed the visitor talks, and Spike Jone's talk about directing movies and the way he does it was very well received by a large crowd.

I am very glad that there are several large companies competing and not just one or two.

EDIT: I am all for decentralization and small groups/companies, but sadly we live in a world of larger corporations.

YouTube's main tech was contentid, designed to prevent piracy.

Youtube had no tech and was built on piracy to grow quickly and seize the market as fast as possible in order to reach their objective of being bought by one of the giant corp.

Contentid is from google after they bought youtube and was added as an afterthought to deal with the "we own this content, pay us now" industry.

I believe that distinction still goes to University of Chicago.

Right. There is no Nobel Prize for mathematics, computer science, or engineering, which are Google's primary fields.

Although Google deserves an Economics prize for essentially inventing adtech

Google didn't invent adtech, the only thing you can credit them for is to have resisted from contracting a third party ad network and becoming an ad network on their own to be able to keep control on the form their ads take: read less annoying and intrusive: no image, no moving parts, only text thus not alienating their user base and killing their business as other website had been doing.

Funnily from here the primary fields for google seem to be surveillance, tracking, profiling, lobbying, tax evasion, abuse of dominant position, killing useful services people actually use, buying competitors to close them, killing other businesses by making a competitor product available with no price tag (you pay with your personal data being collected), evading anti-monopoly law, and other things in the same vein.

Ads on the Internet existed well ahead of Google. Google simply captured search intent and bought out DoubleClick.

I am sorry, but I do not get the reference? What does it point to?

U of C has the most people that have won the Nobel prize historically which points toward people part of the university to win more Nobel Prizes.

is that because of the psuedo-nobel for economics? i don't think that should count towards the tally, and in any case i would have guessed it was the manhattan project

edit: for those who are downvoting, you might not be aware that the 'nobel' for economics is not issued by the nobel committee but rather the swedish central bank, using the nobel name to appropriate prestige from the better-known prize presented by the norwegian nobel committee. it is not affiliated with the nobel peace prize.

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is issued by the Nobel Foundation and chosen by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, just like the Physics and Chemistry prizes. The difference is that it was not endowed by Alfred Nobel in his will, but later by the Sveriges Riksbank.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econ...

> edit: for those who are downvoting, you might not be aware that the 'nobel' for economics is not issued by the nobel committee but rather the swedish central bank, using the nobel name to appropriate prestige from the better-known prize presented by the norwegian nobel committee. it is not affiliated with the nobel peace prize.

There are more Nobel prizes than just the economics and peace prizes, only the peace prize comes from Norway.

Wasn't Alfred Nobel the son of an arms dealer, himself an industrial arms dealer who made a fortune out of wars and killing ? IIRC he was dubbed the merchant of death, and he got shunned by this woman he loved because she was a pacifist and refused to be with someone who makes (tons of) money on war and killing.

Trying to PR himself into having a good reputation after his death does not change the fact that he is responsible for countless deaths and made a huge profit out of it.

So a pseudo nobel is imho way better than an actual nobel.

Maybe the downvoters think you're Dick from the internet http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-04-02

> Google is the greatest conglomeration of Nobel worthy scientists and engineers in the last century.

And they are probably all wondering when the first Nobel prize will be issued for "the advancement of ad technology".

There is always a way to avoid ads if you want to. There always will be ways to counteract ad tech, in spite of Google's intelligence. If this makes advertising better in the process, that's very good. As much as people hate ads, they usually welcome the less than 0.01% good ads.

as you say, the search engine, email system, and web browser are the best, but the operating system is merely the most popular.

that does sound about right.