Advertising is like pornography: lots of technology finds its first application or even invention in either.
https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace
In the short-term anyway (by which I mean 1945 to the present day), the advent of nuclear weaponry seems to have decreased the number of humans killed. And that was certainly the most reasonable rationale for the use of nuclear warheads to end WW2.
Whether there is a net-gain in exchange for an extremely rare potential scenario which every party is massively disincentived from ever pursuing even a minor exchange of 'tactical' nukes... let alone the even smaller probability 'world ending' volleys. War was brutal for centuries and was only getting more destructive until nukes.
As much as Oppenheimer may have regretted his involvement it's still has not turned into the total disaster many predicted. We could certainly do more to minimize the threat by reducing stockpiles but from a pure philosophical view of having nukes or not...eh I see a good argument in favour of it.
Likewise people clicking on ads has generated tons of value for society and is a big foundation of the recent technical progress we've all benefited from. This is the tradeoff we've exchange for the relatively minor downside risk of ads making people engage in meaningless consumerist pursuits or unhealthy behaviour or be lied to slightly more efficiently by politicians.
At the height of Watergate a drunken Nixon was quoted as saying "You know what the difference between us is? I'll tell you, I can walk out of this room right now and give an order and a hour later 80 million people are dead". Cuba was nearer the real deal that either side realised, we've had launch orders ignored and lose weapons that were a fail from going off - which almost certainly would have been interpreted as a strike.
And yet people construct everything as ok.
Sorry, I'm really struggling to take this example seriously, despite the fact it was obviously meant in jest and Nixon was far smarter than most people give him credit for, as it ignores so much context, obvious deterrents, and basic common sense that it hardly changes the equation at all.
Nor does the two potential major known nuclear near-accidents, as I've already conceded that much could be done to minimize the risk. Yet it could still be entirely logical to maintain nuclear weapons as an option going forward and to hold the opinion it was historically ultimately beneficial to society as a whole...
Sadly and wickedly many horrible people all over the world have reached the same conclusion.
Alphabet's Project Loon was providing connectivity to Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. What were the other SV companies, that did nothing to help out, working on?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/how-google-is-us...
If you need a product you will go and look for it. Advertising by definition is to trick you into buying things you don’t need.
Yes, they are trying to diversify for some time now, maybe they will succeed. but they are not there yet. Most of their current brainshare works on products that make money from ads both directly and indirectly.
But the issue is not so black or white. Google/Alphabet is not pouring billions of dollars on free products from the goodness of their heart, they are doing so increase their revenue from ADs. As matter of fact, I would think that most of their ad revenue does not come from direct ad products, but indirectly from other products.
Whether ads are ok or not is a different argument (I don't have any problems with Ads as long as they are not too annoying), but the feeling of righteousness is something I can't understand.
Please understand Google is a for-profit public-traded company, with the only objective of making money for their shareholders (nothing wrong with that), but to imply they have all these free products without any hidden revenue agenda (is, mostly Ads), is just ridiculous.
But the business model is much more complicated than that.
Their product is their vessel for ad money, you can't mention one without talking about the other.
So when someone says: > vast majority of Google's products that aren't ads, like Search, Maps, Android, Gmail.
It's a very simplistic view of how Google business model works. Because AFAIK, only 3 Google products are directly ads related, but ~90% of their other products exist for the sole purpose of driving business to their ads products.
ie, Machine learning in adsense: https://adsense.googleblog.com/2018/02/introducing-adsense-a...
This is flatly false. While certainly, many of the products are used in ads, yes, very few products exist for the sole purpose of driving ads business. A few examples of things that don't: Drive, Docs, Gmail (GSuite/B2B), GCE (B2B again), ML, TF, etc. (again, B2B offerings, as well as being used for all sorts of internal things that have nothing to do with ads), Youtube (Red, TV), etc.
While many things certainly drive ads revenue, there are very few things that you could argue exist solely, or even mostly, to drive ads revenue.
(Am Googler)
We are not talking about B2B or B2C products for obvious reasons.
Outside of B2B and B2C offering (ie, Gsuite and Youtube RED), both youtube and Gmail makes money from ads. Docs is part of the Drive and Drive with Gmail share same free space limit. Drive is free tier to their B2C offering (pay money for more space). Just like Dropbox has a free tier. Docs is a feature of a drive - which they needed to compete with other similar services.
TF is used as a paid service (along with TPU) for their GCE, also TF is a great marketing tool to hire top-notch machine learning enthusiast to their company. Nothing wrong with that.
According to this (not sure how accurate this is): https://www.statista.com/statistics/266471/distribution-of-g...
Google still accounts close to ~90 of their revenue from ads. The good news is that it looks like their diversification plan is working.
I have nothing against Google or their employees, I think it's an awesome company, I would rather live in a world where Google exists. Regardless of their profit motive, it would be hard to ignore their contribution to make the internet a better place.
>but ~90% of their other products exist for the sole purpose of driving business to their ads products.
Machine learning at Google, for example, is a product that exists to, among other things, drive revenue to ads. It is not however a product that exists solely to drive revenue to ads.
As soon as you say "we are not talking about B2B or B2C products", you've made a tautological argument. What you're saying is that "all of the Google products which don't make money via other methods make money via ads". Which is trivially true, but also totally uninteresting.
My point was that the original statement you made was a hyperbole: there are not very many Google products which exist, as you stated, "for the sole purpose of driving business to [ads]". Most Google products have other revenue generation methods. That's all.
What’s that Upton Sinclair quote?