Their advertising business was built on a number of acquisitions (DoubleClick, AdMob) - strategic acquisitions, surely, and they improved on them since - but it is not as if they bult the business from the ground up. The same goes for video streaming (YouTube - after attempting to create their own), and mobile OS (Android).
With Android in particular it can be argued that it would not be what it is today without them, but they also heavily leveraged their other services to promote and maintain control over Android.
They did. But youtube.com wasn't that big when they bought it. In fact by definition most of the things they bought (like maps.google.com) weren't big. The obvious corollary is Google is very good buy scaling something up while keeping it rock solid.
And, they are. Examples of original things that did come out of Google are Kubernetes, the Site Reliability Engineering Handbook, and pulling off something I thought was impossible: Spanner, a global distributed ACID database. From what I can tell they have constructed the fastest, most reliable distributed computing platform on the planet.
They are the Toyota's of the computing landscape: nothing particularly outstanding in any particular model of car, the secret sauce is the infrastructure and processes they've developed to manufacture those cars that ensures they are both cheap and reliable. And so it is with Google. They aren't particularly good at coming up with new products. In fact they often buy them. But then those products get moved onto best computing infrastructure on the planet. If the products are any good, they seemingly grow without effort to become a dominant player.
YouTube then wasn't then anything like it is now, but it was by far the largest video website of its type. I felt like they bought it because Google Video failed to compete with it.
The same applies to FB and Instagram as well, fwiw. Though imo, not as much for WhatsApp, which already had 400MM users and would have organically reached 1B+ users on its own.
YouTube had 65 employees when they were acquired.
I do agree that they were not a startup. This word should only be used for companies that are starting up; getting their legal structure together, hiring, and initial R&D. Once you are offering widgets (ad space), you are no longer a startup. Profitability is immaterial to startup status.
Not every company that's successful and has millions of users needs to have a bloated org
The Android acquisition is a redherring - manufacturers started adopting Android en mass because it was royalty free(ish) and they had to compete against Apple's new app store mostly with feature phone OSes entirely unfit for the job.
Neither Youtube nor Google's selfless "donation" to the consumer electronics industry would have been possible without the ad business. IANAL but that looks like textbook predatory pricing (and in Android's case, can't be defended by pointing at Apple, since they don't participate in the smartphone OS market).
Step 1, in 1997, was to build the world's best search engine.
Step 2, was that running the world's best search engine allowed them to create an ad network that most accurately knew what the largest number of viewers were looking for, best ad platform and massive revenue. All others follow from that.
Steps 3 and on were to start an email service (what are people talking about), create an image search tool (shows what pictures people are looking for), acquire/develop a mapping application (where are people and where are they going), acquire a video hosting platform (what are people watching), create a mobile OS (get more people on the Internet and especially on their parts of it), create a web browser (get more people on the internet and especially on their parts of it), etc. etc. etc. Those other properties only work because they're financed by and create value for Google's ad network.
IMO the main problem is the existence of an institution that is (arguably) more powerful than any government in the world.
That's not necessarily a problem on its own.
It becomes a problem when those same institutions have a very small number of people with specially concocted classes of shares that give people like Zuckerberg majority control of the company despite owning < 30% of actual shares.
I don't want to live in a world where 1 person can have such immense and unchecked power. Especially when that 1 person is immune from, for example, being removed as CEO.
I'm not sure if it's still the case today, but I believe Sergy / Larry had 51%+ control of the company despite only owning ~10% of shares.
Which is why the US government has been collecting all the data they can from google. It's a perfect means to perform mass surveillance on everyone and google has no power to refuse to hand that data over or even to tell anyone about it.
They only way I can think of to solve this would be to limit the amount of data that companies are allowed to collect, but can we expect the government to vote for that until google does start to abuse what they have on us? Right now they can take that data and benefit from it as well.
People are worried by their power.
Too much power is dangerous.
Google works at global scale, if even the US want to stop them from becoming even more powerful there must mean something.
If you think about it the NBA draft was invented to avoid that the best team chose the best players year after year
It's what you call "punish their success"
I cal it "enable competition"
Google is king of the keywords (products and services), Facebook is king of targeting (brand awareness)
But they are not really competing against each other on the contrary the gap is widening
Google made 61 billions more than FB in 2018 and 65 more in 2019
That's why FB is moving towards a marketplace based on their own cryptocurrency
Also, there's the issue of public trust. We have no choice but to trust Google not to skew its search results. It's not obvious this trust is justified.
Google can literally make individuals, companies, and events disappear from the Internet. You can put up your site or your business and if Google removes you from search you might as well not exist.
A moment's thought will suggest that this is exactly the same as the YouTube problem, but on a larger scale. And that's an unhealthy amount of power for a corporation that isn't subject to any oversight or accountability.
Most people prefer this. What you're suggesting is to subsidize the rich by removing free products thus making everyone share the costs for the premium services.
I.e., this is not a local maximum preventing the global utopia of premium services for the rich. The current design serves the world better than that exclusionary, elitist dream. (Though the market is actually open for such elite products as well, when the rich actually want to pay their own fees; Hey.com is a thing.)
We're very much at risk of being a world in which people either have to be rich or not participate in society to avoid privacy invasion by companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. If you're poor, you can have a free email address, but that comes at a cost of allowing Google to read your email (and pass it to their ad customers) so they can serve you ads. The answer to this hegemony is not "Well, Google provides free email addresses, better let them keep doing what they're doing so we don't discriminate against the poor", it's to regulate them so they're not allowed to read your emails, or otherwise provide some alternative service that can provide email addresses for cost plus a small profit margin.
And yes, I know that in this particular example there are other free or inexpensive email providers, but they're not world-dominating products; the market is distorted because the few willing to pay are signalling something pretty strong by rejecting the free, high-quality option offered by Google.
Google doesn't show ads based on email contents.
"When you open Gmail, you'll see ads that were selected to show you the most useful and relevant ads. The process of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is fully automated. These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads."
> otherwise provide some alternative service that can provide email addresses for cost plus a small profit margin.
As I said, for email specifically, because we already have the necessary interop, there are solutions such as hey.com. What more do you want?
PS: It's much more efficient for your government to just subsidize open-source solutions based on their usage levels.
We don't know if they make the best services. Perhaps there would be much better mobile OS or search engines made by others, if it were not for Google's dominant position discouraging new entrants or crushing them in their infancy.
No it's not. The best XXX run by a single company, is super-effective! Allowing it, we know from all of human history, is anti-consumer.
They bought Android in 2005, Youtube in 2004? and all of their other, non-search successes.
So yes, Google did purchase Android but Google didn't purchase their mobile success story by purchasing Android.
They prevented Windows Phone users from being able to access Google Maps by checking User Agents.
They didn't release a native Youtube app for Windows phone, and when Microsoft wanted to make one themselves they restricted them to HTML5 and non-native access. This penalized battery life on Windows Phone platforms for 2 very large and important services.
Google got success with Android by frankly bullying every other viable competitor out of the market (Amazon Fire, Windows Phone) by again bullying in regards to play store services.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As for "the bias on HN"—when it comes to $BigCo arguments, it's very much in the eye of the beholder. The people with opposite views to yours (for example, who like G and dislike A) complain of exactly the opposite "bias".
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
It's different if a company like Google establishes its dominance via one great product (search) and then wields that power to artificially protect its other lines of business through e.g. contracts, the same way Microsoft did with OEMs.
Sure, nothing "illegal" about it, but ultimately, it fits the de facto understanding of antitrust being about "consumer welfare." A company leveraging its dominance in one business to exert control over others =/= a company having success because it built the best products.