Another example, the default routing rules page in the admin console defaults to only showing 10 rules. Every time you add a rule, the pagination is reset, so you get lost where you are and can't even see the rule you literally just added.
And as an identity platform, Google is nothing compared to Okta or AAD. Whilst it's wonderful that Google login is everywhere now, I can't for example, request the user do 2FA for particular apps.
Even the admin console only requires 2FA once a month, it's ridiculous.
And don't get me started on "groups" still being attached to distribution lists out of the 60s [1]. Or the inability to have shared mailboxes.
No one should ever choose Google Workspace over Office 365.
I'm trying to talk my boss into dumping Gmail and switching to Outlook. It's such a waste running 365 and Google.
I've specifically been using Azure as my "source of truth" because I think it's more likely we'll dump Google than we'll ever dump things like on-prem AD or Azure.
And it isn't because they didn't try Sheets. Lol. Nobody I know likes Google Sheets.
They basically copied the UX of Office 2003 and did nothing to improve upon it since it's initial release over a decade ago.
It's awful.
Shit, it still doesn't have the concept of tables like Excel does and you need to manually paint rows, manually find the hidden filter creation option for cells and manually refresh the table because the fitlers are kludged such that they don't automatically re-filter when you edit a row.
Even Mail Merging is awful. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/samples/automation...
Like, you don't need a programming degree to mail merge in Office but you do for Google Sheets because it's a script instead of built-in feature.
> It's awful.
On the contrary, sounds marvellous.
> Shit, it still doesn't have the concept of tables like Excel does
Sounds utterly weird. Spreadsheets already are tables, so WTF is the use of a “separate concept of tables” within your tables? Seems to be geared towards creating confusion.
(Or are you just taking about some newfangled moniker for named ranges?)
In regards to ChromeOS, it hardly matters outside the US school system and Googleplex.
It makes 100% sense in Schools and other places where you want to be able to reset the OS constantly and stop people from breaking it. I think for facebook machine's it would do well too but again I think alot of people will want to have local storage.
I think people underestimate what ChromeOS can do by a lot. There's the android subsytem coming with it, along with an optional linux subsystem, so all in all it covers a lot of ground.
That said, it's still limited a lot by Google not going the full length and having half baked support for a lot of things. Access to the bluetooth stack is pretty random for android apps for instance. Then Chromebooks are mostly low power machines, so the linux substack only helps that much.
Tablet mode support is too weak to take full advantage of the different form factors. ChromeOS isn't configurable enough to alternative keyboard configs, system wide shortcuts etc.
All in all, it has so much promises, only half delivered. But the half we have now is still pretty decent IMHO.
First impressions are everything.
ChromeOS's first impression was that it's Chrome in OS form with no local compute whatsoever; everything is done via the internet, aka the cloud.
That is not strictly the case anymore, but changing first impressions simply is not trivial.
Higher end Chromebooks also rival low- to middle-tier Windows laptops in price, and if you're paying top dollar why not buy the latter and have access to the much more capable Windows ecosystem instead?
And even in those, the lilliput SSD sizes make them hardly workable versus w regular laptop for the same price range.
Most of the time it is not possible to enable it.
Chrome being frugal, that is interesting. Maybe Electron devs could take some tips from ChromeOS.
I've had a Pixelbook for 4.5 years -- a Google product, so arguably as it's "meant to be" -- and it has 128GB of local storage, and I believe you can get them with up to 512GB. Coding locally using Linux VMs/containers is actually pretty pleasant IME (albeit I don't do frontend work).
The only benefit, and it may be a big one, is real time collaboration and document sharing.
I understand that some might see offline storage and editing as advantages, but I've only seen it create chaos. It makes the file save dialog much more complex and I constantly have non-technical users mail files around like it's the 90s because they don't understand how to share it properly.
https://www.saasgenius.com/blog/why-office-365-is-overtaking...
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move...
> Google grew its share of the productivity software market to 10.3% in 2020, according to research from Gartner, taking about 2% from Microsoft. Microsoft is still the clear leader however, with 89.2%. Overall, the productivity software suite market grew 18.2% during 2020.
Ask me how many times I've effed up the battery and sleep configuration upgrading Linux on a desktop vs a laptop.
Relative to desktops, laptops tend to be quirky little things because the heavy constraints of form factor, power, and weight result in engineering trade-offs and outright hacks that aren't necessary in the desktop ecosystem.
The features and functionally of Google office are very limited, especially when you compare Sheets to Excel
It seems that the sticky moat is Excel (and to a lesser extent but gaining somewhat rapidly, the Teams integration into 365. Google has blown it on being the enterprise chat solution).
Seems Google could chase this to close this, but Microsoft Excel is just absolutely sticky
That said, I think Excel is the exponentially higher case and hardest to replace. The niches filled by Word that Google Docs can't fill readily are pretty small comparatively. Excel has grown to mean so much more than just spreadsheets. Its pretty much a first line database to a huge amount of the business community, and still relied on across entire industries to do work, from wealth management to accounting to payroll to inventory etc.
I have, upon thinking about it as well, to hear any raised point about PowerPoint vs Google Slides where PowerPoint does something so niche that Slides doesn't and its a deal breaker, actually.
It wouldn't be an OS, it would be a casino full of flashy ads. The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes, email - ok, anything else - never. They get away with Android because it's mostly a consumer market.
Having used Android as my daily driver since Android 1.3, again, the default experience is pretty much ad-free. I've even used Android in "desktop mode" where you connect a display, keyboard and mouse and used windowed Android apps. When you start installing apps, or if you buy a device with non-default apps installed (i.e. the mobile carrier install as infested crap). In that case you can disable or uninstall that app and move on.
> The worst company for anything business critical. Ads - yes, email - ok, anything else - never.
While Google does have a history of cancelling some well-loved products (like Reader), Google Apps (Word Processing, Spreadsheet, Presentations, etc...) has been solid for a decade. The live, multiuser, real-time editing and versioning is a wonderful feature for collaboration. Also, Google has been very reasonable on pricing, and after six years of running three companies on Google Worplace/Apps, I'm very impressed with the reliability of Google Workplace (what they are now calling Apps).
Ironically Windows is the OS that is full of shit ads these days, not Google's OS.
Canonical doesn't really make any things that are considered part of a desktop OS. Ubuntu is just a package (and some argue a bad one) of things made by other people.
There's very little value in the Linux desktop and I don't see that changing anytime soon. You're probably best re-inventing the wheel if you want a Windows competitor, like Google did with ChromeOS.
But in reality, the hardware support is in the kernel, so any distro with a more up2date kernel would fare at least as good. As for the software Canonical produces, I'm not great friends with anything. Snap is crap, Netplan is just a renderer to systemd-networkd or networkmanager, MAAS is a pile of garbage, Juju never caught on, upstart failed, Unity failed etc...
We're running a lot of Canonical at work and I'm not particularly impressed.
There is a reason why Canonical was the first option when Microsoft introduced WSL.
There's a tremendous amount of value in the Linux desktop. It's used to do amazing things every day.
What you mean is that it's very hard to turn it into a business model, which I'd agree with. But these are not the same in the world.
To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop. Where it works, it is the exception, not the norm.
Taking linux and turning it into a business model can be done - see valve and the steam deck. Granted, that is gaming-only but it can be done. The #1 problem with the linux desktop is that there is no single linux desktop and things break far too often.
"You and me" is actually not a small or meaningless demographic. It includes my thousands of colleagues at Mercedes-Benz who use Linux desktops to do engineering work, and millions of other developers. It means a lot of scientists, for example at NASA and CERN. It means a lot of school students and government employees in educational and other municipal deployments.
A lot of the places where Linux is used is for roles that act as multiplicators, e.g. in the development and production of end-user products, or research/science/RD that will lead to new ones, or in educating the people who will one day make new ones.
All of this is a lot of value if you sum it up. There may be no single shining CEO and his shareholders getting rich off of the Linux desktop in the way we're used to fawning over in the tech hustle news cycle. But the world at large almost certainly is. I submit that's a fine success metric.
> To the average user, linux is not in any state to be a useable, daily driver desktop.
For many users it's today more reliable than contemporary Windows. Ten years ago, the Linux desktop experience for a non-technical user was death by a thousand papercuts. Today there are still some gaps in HW support that can create unsolvables, but if your machine is well-supported, things work just fine.
What's mainly keeping it back is many other factors, from channel availability to software availability.
> see valve and the steam deck
:-) I worked on the Steam Deck as CTO of one of Valve's contractors on the project. Glad you like it.
My first attempt on Linux was 20 years ago, before I was a technical user. It was a nightmare. Getting my mouse to work was impossible. Even figuring out how to turn the computer off so I could reinstall Windows was a pain.
I came back to Linux some 8 years ago, already as a Developer. Installed Ubuntu. Everything hardware worked well, no need to tinker around. Usability was good and somewhat intuitive, but it took me some time to adjust. I enjoyed it for programming, but not being able to play most games I care about limited my use, and I kept Windows in dual boot.
Nowadays I use Linux Mint as my only OS. It's objectively better than Windows in every way. For regular usage I don't even need to tinker with anything. Although I like the terminal and prefer using it, I can totally see how an average user can get by without touching it at all. I need only to tinker a little to get certain games running, and that's all.
Not who you're responding to, but I am extremely grateful for the work that was put to make gaming on Linux possible.
I may not own a Steam Deck, but it's development allowed me to switch entirely to Linux without looking back.
I've switched about a dozen average users to Linux from Windows, and they have all been happy with the change and have not switched back.
Based on that, I say that Linux absolutely is usable as a daily driver desktop. The only place I can see where Linux might not be the right choice is with a certain class of gamer -- but those gamers are not "average users".
> The #1 problem with the linux desktop is that there is no single linux desktop
That's a strength, not a weakness. For the user want a windows-like desktop? Done. Does the user want something more to their style of working? Done. Not being locked into the desktop means that if your objection to desktop linux is the UX, there's probably a different desktop that will make you happier.
For it to be ready to be a mainstream desktop, it needs to just work.
How many average users install Windows by themselves? Most people just take their Windows laptop to a store/service provider for maintenance, buy a new PC because "the old one is slow now" or have their nerdy fam member once a year remove mal/spy/adware and run a reg cleaner. And yes, show them things.
Like OP, I've converted many family members over the years to Linux desktops, and as the resident nerdy family member, the amount of maintenance and assistance I need to provide has gone down very decently vs. supporting family Windows sytems.
My 70+ mother in law has no problems using a Linux desktop to run her book club and other things she needs to do, but is far less likely to accidentally install malware. I used to come back to these systems a year later and find a system tray full of 20 new icons, a stack of 5 new browser toolbars, ad popups and "install new version" popups galore and other horrific stuff that needed hours to clean up or required a wipe and reinstall.
There's a lot of Windows users on the fence about Linux that absolutely underestimate how technical they are and how much active and passive maintenance they do on their Windows systems. Are you a tech user who reads The Verge or Ars Technica and knows in advance about that bad new option in the new Win11 update that you will switch of day 0? Do you have your mental laundry list of five settings you change in every new Windows system you acquire? Most Windows users are and do not.
The truth is, a lot of people have a working body of knowledge about how to admin and keep alive a Windows system, and a Linux switch requires re-learning and re-acquiring similar knowledge at times. And it's absolutely fine if you don't have the time to do that. There's value to that existing body of knowledge, and there is a switching cost. Some people have better things to do than installing Linux. But Windows is not magically maintenance/upkeep/difficulty-free.
Installing Windows is a more complicated and confusing job than installing Linux. The people who have to be shown how to install Linux also have to be shown how to install Windows.
The fact is that I don't really show them how to install and configure this stuff -- it's really very easy. What I do is hold their hand to get them past the fear of the unknown.
Only because no-one has disrupted the market. Typical case of “Who would pay for a Mantis open-source bugtracker”, then Jira appear and companies purchase it.
What you mean is, who would pay for Ubuntu. But I’d pay for an open-source macOS, with online backups, video editing and SSO for my IT fleet, anything that doesn’t look like Ubuntu.
Android and iOS work like that too of course. So maybe they should just switch to something like Dex instead as now you can run android apps in chromeos, so what’s the difference?
Windows is hopelessly overkill for most people.
Sure, they also play Pokemon Go... although partially because they are not sitting in front of their PCs. Large market by volume, but more so for alternative situations.
"Wine-aunt" is new to me too, and funny (after looking up what it means).
Stop conflating yourself with a “normal person”. It’s quite clear from your comment that you’re anything but.
Is ChromeOS really leagues ahead of Linux on the desktop? And other than Linux, how many other desktop OSes are there?
For more "standard" users though, ChromeOS is very simple, has excelent touch support, battery management, a half baked but functional tablet mode, covers a lot of its ecosystem issues with the android subsytem, is fast to learn yet gives access to more power user features (including linux VMs). And it's of course very forgiving, as every regular apps are sandboxed. In that respect I see it succeeding where linux has been struggling for so long. TBH I was hoping Google made a decent iPad pro competitor based on ChromeOS, but I'm not holding my breath.
It's of course not perfect, far from it, but it's a pretty good computer experience IMHO. Linux has progressed a lot, but I still don't see the simplicity, versatility and forgiveness trio in a linux machine anytime soon.
On the other OSes, I didn't see it as desktop only, and iOS could have been a nice alternative, if Apple could have bothered (same for android and DEX). I actually think ChromeOS is a better choice than windows for light computer users, assuming Google doesn't throw the towel..
>making any product that lasts
that's a tough chance for OS.
it wouldn't hit growth targets after n-th year and would be remotely disabled by google worldwide.
Microsoft Office has a lot of network effect surrounding it. Organizations use MS Office because the people who pay them (e.g., government or large corporations) use MS Office. I've tried switching away to LibreOffice or Google Docs/Sheets/Slides, and those are very likely to mangle layout and formatting when saving to DOCX/XLSX/PPTX. Not worth the hassle trying to troubleshoot why my government program managers aren't seeing what I'm seeing on the document I sent them.
Also, how does Google want people to use their new services if they keep closing them down after their "failure" (a.k.a Google completely forgeting about them and proceeding to close them down).
Why they still rely on search/advertising is well known - Replacing a 150 Billion $$$ source of revenue is not a simple thing.
Its like trying to replace everything ppl do in a midsized rich country with something else.
And compared to Facebook which is still 99% dependent on Ads, Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs, google play, all the alphabet experiments etc. And most importantly half the worlds online advertising (exchanges/ auctions etc) uses Google ad tech. So Google is not going anywhere.
They just look at the world through a very different lens due to their size. I am guessing they dont see the point of keeping businesses that produce a few hundred million in revenue running, cause they really need businesses that produce a few hundred billion to keep all their free stuff (search, email, chat, chrome, android, video, r&d for other stuff etc) afloat.
... not if it threatens their cash cow they won't. It's not a technical challenge, its a business model challenge
Google could be in deep trouble in five years.
You just described The Innovators Dilemma. You'd hope Google, considering how everyone reveres how well run it is would find ways to avoid it, but they didn't not. You know who used to avoid the Innovators Dilemma amazingly well? Apple. You know who does it really well now? Microsoft. They literally killed their OS revenue to grow the company. That's the equivalent of Google killing their search revenue for something new. It's hard to do, but you have to do it in tech.
>>And compared to Facebook which is still 99% dependent on Ads, Google is much more diversified (total revenue is north of 250 billion). They have cloud, youtube, docs, google play, all the alphabet experiments etc.
In 2022, Google was 80%+ directly dependent on Ads for revenue, and 10.3% indirectly dependent on it. Sure, Google does a lot of things but 90.3% of the actual money that keeps the lights on is advertising. Their revenue mix is extremely similar to Meta.
People kind of dont realize a large chunk of their Ad Tech is not Search related. Its the tooling for the Publishers to sell ad real estate on their sites. Its the tooling for Advertisers to target that real estate based on data collected. Its the ad auctions. Its the ad exchanges. There is ton of shit of going on that no one on the planet is anywhere close to replicating.
I assume the 10.3% is "Google Other". That's things like YouTube Premium, Play Store and hardware. How is any of that even indirectly dependent on ads?
They've had a while now, and all they've come up with is Bard.
Over 80% of that revenue is still just ads though, not really very diversified. And even with GCP they are in a distant 3rd to AWS / Azure.
Do read their 10-K: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2022Q4_alphabet_earnings...
The only thing that realistically brings in money is ads. All other things are just subsidised by them.
For example Google Cloud (which includes both GCP and workspace offerings aka docs)? Well, it lost 6 billion dollars.
> cause they really need businesses that produce a few hundred billion to keep all their free stuff
The only such business they have is ads.
It’s like the curse of oil. Google found a revenue stream early on that was so massive it covered up all their other sins. They dealt with their problems belatedly at best.
Now that revenue stream is under attack and they are scrambling. To put it politely.
Remember when the person who created homebrew couldn't get a job at google. That person created software used by a lot of people. He saw something that "needed fixing" and he fixed it. He fixed it so well a bunch of other people started using his fix. That's a wonderful engineer. Created a project used (and loved?) by many people. That's the kind of person you want helping to create products at your company.
Google puts so much emphasis on (coding) skills that aren't needed for the majority of the work done, and doesn't emphasize selecting for the ability to create things that people want to use. I also find the coding skills selection kind of amusing since they had to create a simplified programming language (Go) because so many of their 'leet coding new graduates couldn't handle C++ correctly. Perhaps being able to 'leet code in your sleep doesn't really make you a "wonderful" engineer either.
They have their place in the org, but I don't see much creativity from them.
Product Managers are the modern day bureaucrats created to reduce the individual impact on product and make PMs hot swappable like engineers (who I also think are better when they they have the aforementioned skills).
Google should be considered in object lesson in the problems of trying to bureaucratize product creation.
Truly great products e.g. the original iPhone, rarely have PMs
In regards to engineering, the quality of engineering is largely overrated and isn't even that well understood in the first place. Most systems are poorly engineered, and many engineering teams are inefficient, not because of the years of experience of the engineers or even so much their talent but because of bad management. Senior and lead engineers can massage a junior writing l33t code into only submitting PRs that are competently written. But if management gives engineering lip service while undermining their ability to write quality code, and the engineers who actually care end up leaving as a result, then all you're going to get is endless duct-taping and half-assed projects. Worse yet, you get almost nothing but makework projects that go nowhere because project manager #8,592 needs to look important to save their job.
The problem is that companies get really good at solving yesterday's problems. In Intel's case, that was making great CPUs for desktop PCs and servers. I have no doubt that the absolute pinnacle of desktop PC CPU engineering, was done at Intel in the last ~10 years.
The problem is, the world changes. Growth shifts from PC to mobile. People in datacenters start worrying more about cost and energy efficiency and build their own ARM parts. The landscape shifts, and the company is still fighting yesterday's battle. But it doesn't matter anymore-the basis of competition has shifted.
I think it's very difficult to pivot a company's core "basis of competition", or as you've elegantly put it, "self-image". What are we best at? Why are people getting promoted? Who's in leadership roles? The answers to these things need to shift over time, but most companies can't. This is why companies rise and fall.
I think a big problem with Google overall, is that their self-image isn't really customer-oriented. It's more inward-looking, "we're great engineers", "we're not evil", "we build the best distributed systems". The meta lesson is perhaps, orientation around serving your customers is the only thing you can fix, long-term. Amazon gets this. The problem is, it's way more nebulous and hard to pin down, than some of the more specific things Google has anchored on for the past years.
For Amazon (at least in the classic retail sense), the customer is clear and obvious: the person buying a thing from your website, who wants good-selection, cheap and fast/delivered to their door. It's relatively easy to orient your entire company around the question of: "but is this actually good for The Customer?" That is, until you feel you've established your business model well enough, that you no longer need to focus on creating customer value, and instead turn towards growing your business value (i.e. the shift of 3p sellers going from "gee this is a cool way to expand selection for customers beyond what Amazon 1p offers by itself", into "wow this is just a cesspool for fakes and fraud, but who cares since they all pay fees to Amazon").
For Google, with the nature of the search business and the fact that it is their primary cash cow, the incentives are "mixed" to put it mildly. The true customer of Google is not the users, but the advertisers. The users are simply an ingredient to be fed into the advertising engine -- any decisions you make to benefit the user, are only from the perspective of, not pissing them off so much that they leave your platform (and even that, is a sliding scale depending on the viability of alternatives -- Bing along wasn't very viable, but Bing + ChatGPT might be...).
In a twisted way, maybe comparing Google to Amazon is more like this:
- G's search users = A's warehouse workers
- G's advertisers = A's shoppers
How well does Amazon treat its warehouse workers? Only as well as needed to achieve 2 goals: not break employment laws too egregiously, and not churn through the entire employable labor pool too quickly.
Wtf is Google doing? They don’t make good products and they don’t invent that much useful stuff. They’re like the rich kid with a bunch of money trying random different things without focusing on one thing to get good at it.
I’m sure at this point Google is just a system to finally pay engineers a lot of money so they can retire earlier. Everyone that I’ve ever known that wants to work for Google is doing it to cash out, myself included.
Had Intel maintained its competency in designing and manufacturing CPUs, their situation would have been much better.
They surrendered the process technology lead to TSMC, and let Apple make far superior laptop CPUs without a good response for years.
They failed in what was supposed to be their core competency.
And, of course, in anything outside CPUs and Chipset, Intel is comically bad.
There is a lot of stuff that you see come out of google and you have to wonder. Why is this successful in this environment? They have a lot of people that I would say it's fair to claim they're high IQ, but low on experience and the ability to build something wonderful. (Which is why it's frustrating to see their arch [and AWS for the matter] build weird components and force their practices in the industry)
What would be great to see.. foster an engineering culture based on experience there. Encourage their engineers to contribute to the world. (Rather than waiting and spinning out large projects like K8s)
Homebrew may be a wonderful product, but that doesn't make the creator a wonderful engineer. Useful things can be poorly created. And this is not to shit on either Homebrew or Max Howell. I personally do not know if Howell is a wonderful engineer or not. He's obviously competent enough to ship working software. That's not nothing.
And everyone has an idea on how to improve everything. Sometimes we're right, sometimes we're wrong. And even when we're right, it doesn't make us right all the time. You can't really select for "the ability to create things that people want to use". No one's track record is flawless. It's very nearly a crapshoot.
Basically, you're putting Howell on a pedestal, in much the same manner you're accusing others of doing so with Google employees.
I think traveler01 does have a valid question. Essentially, with all of their engineers, why is Google so limited? And I don't think it's a matter of not being able to ship stuff that people use. Google Drive, GMail, etc. They just don't seem to be able to monetize beyond ads. Maybe their fault isn't in pure engineering.
And to be fair to the hiring process at Google at the time he interviewed, Google was an "all yes" kind of place. If anyone had any sort of hesitation, that could cause a candidate to be rejected. Their philosophy was that it was better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one. So all he had to do was have one off hour, and that could have killed his entire interview. I personally don't think being rejected by Google's hiring committee is a mark against anyone. To get even that far requires a certain level of skill and/or talent.
Google's non-ads businesses are about $60 billion / year revenue. That seems like quite a lot!
To put it in context, that non-ads business would be in the top 20 for all tech companies by revenue. More than e.g. Oracle or Cisco. Roughly the same as IBM or HP. A bit smaller than Intel. Those are not small or unsuccessful companies (e.g. Oracle has 140k employees).
It actually seems pretty amazing that what HN thinks is Google's failed side hustle is comparable to the entire business of what would have been considered tech giants a few years ago.
But it is true that the vast bulk of their revenue does come from ads. So it gets complicated.
If you were to take away their non-ad revenue, Google would be fine-ish. If you were to take away their ad revenue, Google would be in serious trouble.
Compare with Microsoft. Their biggest revenue source is Cloud services. And that's only about a third of their total revenue. And it also includes "server products".
Why is Google unable to diversify to the level of Microsoft? The products are ostensibly there, they just can't make money from them. Or the only money they can make from them are by virtue of selling ads on them.
Microsoft already had diverse businesses 40 years ago, and have "just" needed to maintain that. They're now diverse by default as long as not too many of those existing lines of business fail. No matter how successful a new business of theirs is, it's really hard for it to grow fast enough to threaten that diversity.
Because it all pales in comparison to what actually powers Google: ads. To the point that there are persistent and growing rumours that GCP may be if not on the chopping block, but greatly de-prioritised (it's part of the 26-billion Google Cloud).
It's also weird to me that people always look at revenue only. As if net income doesn't matter.
For example [1], non-ad business may have brought in 60 billion in revenue, but what it is I see: "The increase in other cost of revenues from 2021 to 2022 was primarily due to increases in data center costs and other operations costs as well as hardware costs." And that cost is 77 billion.
Guess what Google's the non-ad businesses are: "Google other revenues increased ... from 2021 to 2022 primarily driven by growth in YouTube non- advertising and hardware revenues", "Google Cloud's infrastructure and platform services were the largest drivers of growth in Google Cloud Platform."
So a large chunk of that revenue is eaten by the costs of generating that revenue. Google cloud lost 3 billion, other bets lost 6 billion etc.
Meanwhile all other costs of revenue are a 49 billion, compared to over 200 billion in revenue from ads.
So how do those businesses inderectly depend on ads? Ads business subsidises them. Despite the size of those other businesses very few, if any, are successful (as in: actually earn money).
[1] All quotes and numbers from Google's own 10-K: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/20230203_alphabet_10K.pd...
It's just that they aren't building things that people want to use, but that's a failure of management and incentives.
I even recall watching some comments of sad people who would need another gaming streaming service because they used Stadia for their gaming needs. It was a ridiculous decision that nobody understood why. They also screwed up game devs who were porting their games to Stadia, which will for sure have repercusions in future services.
That tree reverse meme?
he made it up
Go is a great first-class language on its own merits.
I get the essence of the comment and agree somewhat, but also feel;
There are plenty of other areas driving big revenue like adsense, youtube, play store, cloud and pixel.
I dont feel its fair to compare revenue to these in the same level of search. Search was a true unicorn business and took over the world, there only so many businesses that will ever reach those heights. If any of these businesses were stand alone they would be impressive. Its like looking at that photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger standing next to Andre the Giant, Arnie is a big guy, but there he doesn't look too significant.
I think, the bigger worry is their chrun and burn is going to limit take-up of future products. They need to do something like run new products in a lab type environment, not put the full weight of the weight of the brand behind them til they earn reasonable thresholds, then make them so they can be split out if teams want to take them independent should they decide to close.
Amazon isn't doing all that well recently, though (check $AMZN). And I'd argue that the product design on their biggest product, the e-commerce bit, is terrible. I know so many people, me included, who no longer buy entire categories of goods on Amazon because you simply can't trust the quality/authenticity of the goods anymore.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this AI wave pushes azure into the forefront.
I don't follow that closely so I might have missed something.
YouTube is still estimated to be barely above break even, GCP is losing money and if you look at the estimated Pixel sells annually of around 5 million a year is about how many iPhones Apple sells in three weeks.
Microsoft is just an investor that got access to a product that OpenAI has been working on for the last 7 years. OpenAI has a single purpose and doesn't have to worry about displaying ads.
For example, the Nexus 5 (2013!) had a bug - if you took 7 photos in quick succession, it wouldn't save photo 3 and 4. For example, you're photographing someone doing a dance, and you want a photo on each beat, so you tap the shutter to the beat of the music.
On a 2022 Pixel 7, 10 years on...... The exact same bug.
Well yea, Google copied old-Microsoft's incentive structure of working on new features for promotions.
I get that people who rarely leave major cities are Google's favorite and most profitable user demographic, but there are still many millions of people outside of that group. Google can get away with sneering at them while they have a profitable monopoly, but once they breaks up they are in deep trouble. Their culture of half-baked and frequently shuttered projects is so ingrained at this point it's going to be enormously difficult to change.
Because they lack product management at the executive level downwards. With no goals set for current and future products, the engineers downstairs are allowed to play....a little too much which means the company as a whole flounders.
Google is supposed to be a technical firebrand and their cloud isn't dominant, and their AI product and market position got punk'd by Microsoft... and he's out there saying things like AI will be a bigger discovery than fire. Which calls into question: so why isn't Google a leader in AI, or seem to be?
It's a bad PR thread for Google, and he lacked any Q factor in those interview clips.
I wouldn't want somebody to give presentations as a head of Google. On the contrary, I hate when people produce vapor.
Microsoft bought their AI solution. We will see if they can successfully integrate it. I am not yet sure about that. I hardly call that innovation though.
Microsoft's strengths, for a long time, have been product. They bought AI, integrated it really quickly, and got people excited about it. That result is what a product org does.
Google is supposed to invent or innovate, but in recent times that hasn't been their forte either. Microsoft is far more interesting as a product company than Google is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
They used to be, but they haven't been that for a long, long time.
those times are gone though and Google definitely needs someone more proactive and focused
That's putting it mildly
> He shouldn’t be doing interviews
He should not be running Google at all, period.
I can generate huge revenues selling $100 bills for $95.
Chrome and Gmail are homegrown but Maps, Youtube, Docs/Drive, the display ad business (ie DoubleClick) and Android are all acquisitions.
Think of it this way: if your ad business generates $100B/year, how do you justify spending billions on something that will generate a farction of that, particularly to start? How does that effort ever compete for resources internally?
And if you are successful it reaches a point where your two efforts can become competing interests.
Good products come through refinement.
But every time you use most Google stuff, it feels like it’s still version 1. When compared to competitors’ products that they’ve been improving time after time, it just falls flat.
I have a slightly different answer than most of the other replies, which is that Google just got too big. I worked there for 10 years (left a year ago for a smaller company) and the amount of inefficiency and waste due to having too many layers of middle management with no real visibility into what was going on was just astounding. Over that decade they paid me millions of dollars in total, while canceling whatever I was working on almost exactly every 18 months like clockwork. Typically due to management issues or corporate politics rather than for any real technical or business reason.
Or if they did internally, why the Board decided to ignore the most loyal and proven.
Googler #1 to #1000 were clearly not fools, and by the 2010s they very likely had enough credibility to be taken seriously if several dozen of them said this.
this is beyond the plane of rationality and the social forces take on a life of their own. it's not a math problem.
Yes I have actually, several times.
It's not easy, and of course it gets exponentially harder as the group grow, but these folks also have access to exponentially greater resources and exponentially greater motivation to do so. (Assuming their desire is to remain loyal shareholders of the company for the long term)
Hmm this sounds like the concern was badly communicated because this phrasing is both unnecessary and not quite correct either. (since it is possible to keep recruiting to a very high standard even during exponential growth via spending exponentially more resources)
The straightforward logic of:
linear increase in organization size = exponential increase in organization complexity = exponential frictional losses
would have been much clearer.
Since when? You're assuming the pool of employees available to recruit is infinite which is clearly not true.
It will breakdown if the company wants to run multiple Manhattan Projects simultaneously, but anything short of that is technically possible.
I claimed it's technically possible with 'exponentially more resources', not that any private organization could feasibly possess the resources or cachet to, in practice, hire a million top notch people.
Maintaining the literal same average quality with Googler #1001 to #10000 would probably have required spending 10x more per hire, compared to hiring #1 to #1000.
The problem is all Google's products use the free-plus-advertising model and this has caused them to drift to serving the advertisers rather than serving the users. And that makes it hard to switch gears to offer more benefits to users.
The main problem is Google shifted from making search better for their users
Technology is not a product. A product that uses technology to solve a number of clearly defined real problems is a product. When Google was saying AI this AI that, I had yet to see any product.
For context, I worked at Google for ~4 years, and have also been at two other FAANGs, as well as done time at VC-funded startups. I'd like to think I have a good gamut of experiences to compare against both in the realm of smaller companies and massive megacorps.
Google's problems are (from most severe IMO to least severe):
- Poor senior management. Other posts touch on the middle-manager-heavy ranks of Google, but IMO that misses the forest for the trees. A bloated middle management layer is but a symptom of a sclerotic upper management. To add some color to this:
- Google has a fundamental ethos that I haven't seen described in other writings and lacks a good term for it. In my head I call it the hypothesis of the free-range engineer. The foundational belief is that upper management's job is to get out of the way of the top talent they've hired. Product ideas should come from the bottom of the company - and even more importantly, they should succeed through intra-company competition. This is probably the singular most impactful organizational cultural belief at Google, and it informs how the entire company is structured. My position: the entire hypothesis is crap, and is a huge part of what holds the company back.
- The net result of Google's culture is that upper management sets very little product direction, in favor of letting individual teams set their own priorities and ship independently. This means a lot of duplicative products and a lot of products that don't integrate with each other (see: Workspace account sign-in and... literally everything). Upper management has a light touch and is extremely loathe to mandate standards, resulting in a really mind-blowing level of product fragmentation. Much of this seems to be a deathly allergy that the company developed after the total and utter failure of Google+, where upper management did exert direct influence over product. The lesson they took from G+'s failure wasn't "have a better top-down product strategy next time" and was instead "top-down product strategy bad".
- Upper management turnover is excessive. All big companies suffer from re-orgs, but Google practically makes re-orgs a sport. In addition to upper management being extremely loathe to give product direction, upper management (by this I mean Director-and-up) rotates alarmingly often, and each time it's accompanied with a re-org where projects are killed or deprioritized. I don't think in my entire time at Google I ever saw a multi-year roadmap actually executed to completion - each and every time some senior leader is replaced and the entire roadmap and strategy rewritten.
- Google has poor product strategy overall. The company tends to swing for a lot of home-runs but structures these endeavors poorly. There are a lot of ambitious PMs advocating for huge multi-year megaprojects that end up being total failures. Upper management is credulous and doesn't demand proof of viability prior to sinking a ton of resources over multiple years into a thing (this feeds the turnover problem above - where inevitably when a multi-year thing flops heads roll, when the real problem is that upper management did not exert scrutiny over the project sooner). Big, ambitious goals are good - but viability needs to be validated quickly and continuously throughout the development process so that requirements can change (and yes, so that the project can be killed expediently if the fundamentals aren't there). Again, a failure of Google's upper management.
- Continuing on that theme, Google's upper management is naive and credulous when it comes to product forecasts. PMs seeking to have their projects approved (especially big megaprojects) will make up absolutely bonkers projections for fundamental success metrics, and are often not seriously challenged on them. Senior leadership is ready to believe numbers that are facially absurd, and then are surprised when the product fails to live up to the unrealistic expectations. This phenomenon also drives the turnover/re-org problem above - since when the product whiffs the metrics by a mile somebody has to get the boot - but the real problem was believing the bad projections to begin with!
- Promotion-driven development is a problem. But unlike most prognostications about Google I don't think it's their main problem. Leadership is at the core of Google's problems and promo-driven development is just an exacerbating factor IMO. But there is a serious problem with how Google structures incentives for ICs and middle management. The biggest concrete effect of this is that after launching, engineering teams empty out rapidly as people sense that no promos are forthcoming for working on the product, and look for greener pastures. This exacerbates the effects from above, where -- through an array of leadership failures -- the product was already on thin ice. The collapse of the engineering teams on it further buries the product and sends it on a death spiral.
Anyway, this is already running way too long. At this point I think there needs to be a fundamental change to how Google pursues product if they hope to turn this boat around.
I wouldn't say so; I mean they like to experiment a lot but their product strategy is good in the long term e.g. Google Search, Google Mail, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Chrome, Android etc. If 5 experiments fail and 1 succeeds and brings billions of dollars in revenue that's win in their book and in my book too.
Basically what Google is doing is building its family of apps to capture more attention and sell more ads. The same thing Facebook does with its family of apps e.g. Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. The goal is to capture as much attention as they can and then sell ads because that's what their business model is all about. Zuck even tried to acquire Twitter back in the day plus Snapchat as well. I doubt he liked the products or the people behind it, he just wanted to get rid of competition which was stealing attention or screen time from his family of apps. The same thing is with Google, that's why they are constantly pushing new apps and services (to gain market share and user attention and then to push ads).
This is a vindication of Google's M&A department and an indictment of Google's actual product orgs. Out of this list of 6 major Earth-shaking products only 3 came from Google itself. YouTube, Android, and Maps were all acquisitions.
And of the homegrown successes the last one of note (Chrome) was released 15 years ago. In other words: Google has been completely unable to produce a mega-hit product for 15 years by itself.
> "If 5 experiments fail and 1 succeeds and brings billions of dollars in revenue that's win in their book and in my book too."
Yes, and this is how all other tech companies operate as well, the problem is that Google experiments incompetently.
Take for example the recent and total failure of Stadia - they sunk truckloads of money into developing the underlying technology, which is legitimately impressive. And then they slapped a substandard (let's be honest, less than substandard) go-to-market strategy around it. And after it predictably floundered they walked away from the thing entirely.
Meanwhile on the other side of the fence Microsoft developed basically the same product, but with a better go-to-market strategy has now carved out a niche for themselves in streaming gaming.
Both companies experimented, one got the product to stick, the other flailed around before declaring the experiment a failure - even though within the competitive landscape it was obviously viable.
Or for something more currently topical - Google literally invented LLMs but failed to productize it. They put in the money and failed to get the result where another company did.
The list goes on and on. The claims of "see what sticks" is a superficial mantra and its practitioners often forget that how you go about experimentation affects your odds of success. Google has IMO one of the worst experimentation processes (or really just what other companies call product strategy) in BigTech.
Google has taken the notion that you can swing at multiple balls that are tossed your way and generalized it to mean that one doesn't have to be any good at hitting the ball, because given a sufficient large N pitches you're gonna get a hit anyway. This is poor business strategy and it's showing.
They tried to compete with YouTube, it didn't work out but hey we have deep pocket, let's buy them. Successful investment because they bought YouTube for $2bn and last year YouTube generated $30bn in revenue. All done and lifted to sky by Google. Android was pre-emptive acquisition against Microsoft and its mobile Windows OS and its search engine Bing. Today Android is the most used OS in the world and it comes with Google apps preinstalled. Also all done by Google because as far as I understood, they built modern Android OS from the ground up with the Linux kernel ofc. I'm not sure about Maps but I bet there was also some long term vision/strategy there as well. You don't have to innovate all the time if you have strong core business and deep pocket for acquisitions, innovation happens elsewhere.
Also turning acquisitions into successful businesses and money making machines is a difficult task. Not every company can do it and some companies even go bankrupt because of acquisitions that gone bad.
>Take for example the recent and total failure of Stadia - they sunk truckloads of money into developing the underlying technology, which is legitimately impressive. And then they slapped a substandard (let's be honest, less than substandard) go-to-market strategy around it. And after it predictably floundered they walked away from the thing entirely.
Stadia was too early in the game, something like Altavista to Google. Cloud gaming market needs to mature and eventually some successful cloud gaming company will pop up. I also don't think they really cared that much about cloud gaming because let's be honest they jumped on the bandwagon of cloud gaming just like they are jumping now on LLMs hype.
>Or for something more currently topical - Google literally invented LLMs but failed to productize it. They put in the money and failed to get the result where another company did.
Too early to judge. We will see in the next couple of years.
Maybe a nitpick, but I think Bing has been profitable on its own for a while now.
(2015) https://time.com/4084975/microsoft-bing-search-engine-profit...
People mock it because its not bringing in obscene amounts that google search does, but it's revenues have consistently been growing for years: https://fourweekmba.com/bing-revenue/
$11.59B is pretty damn good revenue for a 'laughing stock'. Especially Consider that gaming 'only' was $16.23B.
Also on a total sidenote, if you told me 5 years ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google I would have a laughed.
If you had told me 3 months ago that Bing would be a serious threat to Google, I still would have laughed. That's how much impact the ChatGPT integration had for Bing -- overnight.
I’m blown away by the competence of the language model but its willingness to make up facts makes me leary.
I see you haven't met humans
Bing, IIRC, has a way to provide feedback, not sure how useful it is for today's users and if it will be able to solve hallucinations one day.
But I'm generally not interested in asking an average human. I'm interested in asking someone who knows their butt from a hole in the ground in whichever topic I'm asking them about.
When ChatGPT tells me something, I have no idea if it's paraphrasing information gathered from Encyclopedia Britannica, or from a hollow-earther forum.
phind.com has been incredibly good for me.
Is the work of judging the accuracy of a summary not just the work of comprehending the non-summarized field?
For example, a summary could be completely correct and cite its facts exhaustively. Say you're asking about available operating systems: it tells you a bunch of true info about Windows and OSX, but doesn't mention the existence of Linux. Without familiarity with the territory, wouldn't verifying the factuality of each reference still leave you with an incomplete picture?
At a slightly more practical level, do you actually save any time if you've gotta fully verify the sources? I assume you're doing more than just making sure the link doesn't 404, as citing a link that doesn't say what it is made out to be isn't exactly a new problem, but at that point we're mighty close to the traditional experience of running through a SERP.
Finally, even if you're reading all the links in detail, isn't that still a situation prone to automation bias? There's a lot of examples of cases where humans are supposed to check machine output, but if it's usually good enough the checkers fall into a pattern of trusting it too much and skipping work. Maybe I'm just lazy, but I think I'd eventually get less gung-ho about verifying sources and eventually do myself a mischief.
I'm asking because I've been underwhelmed by my own attempts at using LMs for search tasks, so maybe I'm doing it wrong.
Or it's something it just hallucinated out of thin air.
Checking the links is a good practice.
I feel like we just created an interesting novel problem in the world. Looking forward to seeing how this plays out.
“everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge”.
Humans are pretty good bullshitters too!
I've asked BingGPT about myself and it gave me three answers. One was more or less on-point (it found my linkedin profile), and the other two were hallucinations. What happened was Bing found two unrelated pages and GPT has tried and failed to make sense of them.
Either that, or I am a prince whose name means "goose" in Polish.
I really hope they find a way to have it apply context from future conversations such that when it learns the error of its ways it emails you a retraction, but that's probably a ways out because humans can't be trusted to not weaponize such a feature into sending spam.
The weight of phrases like "you are wrong" is in fact so strong, that it fools the chatGPT to apologize for its 'mistakes' even in the scenarios where its text was obviously correct - like telling it 2+2 doesn't equal 4
Sure, grep has never flat out lied to me the way chatGPT does, but it's a statistical model, not a co-worker, so I don't feel betrayed, I just feel... cautioned. It keeps you on your toes, which isn't such a bad state to be in.
Especially when I talk to it about fiction and ask questions about - for example - a specific story and you see it invent whole quotes and characters and so on...it is a masterful bullshitter.
Cold War strategy. Trust but Verify.
Leary is a rare variant spelling of leery.
I mention this, because you seem to care about correctness.
What could be more 2020s than a post-truth search engine?
That said, I'm not a fan of using these tools for search. For me, anyway, they don't even come close to doing what I want when I'm searching the web.
i find chatgpt 3.5 answers better than bing. Also ive had bing end conversion with me on more than one occasion without saying anything offensive
it solves a lot for hallicination and current event problems you have in chatgpt
I'm using it to help me with a library integration, for example. I noticed it was recommending deprecated methods. So I copy/pasted the latest source code, asked it to update itself, and voilá.
It's super smart and learns literally in a second. Just drop recent information at it and ask what you need.
Personally — and having not tried ChatGPT for this — I don't think ChatGPT would do well with resolving the kinds of queries I consider Google "good at."
To me, the place where Google wins over Bing, DDG, etc. is when I know there must exist some page that uniquely talks about some extremely niche overlap of concepts; but I don't know any specific "natural key" keywords to refer to the that overlapped-set-of-concepts, and instead only have a "cloud of highly-correlated keywords for the individual concepts involved" to throw into the search box.
For example, if I'm trying to conjure from the aether a discussion people are having about an issue I'm facing with some buggy behavior in an API — where that buggy behavior doesn't spit out any distinctive error message to use in the search.
I could see ChatGPT being good at a limited version of this problem, where I could give it e.g. several definitions of a word (= correlated keywords), and it could tell me the word that fits those definitions.
But the full version of the problem — pointing you at (or regurgitating) the one unique conversation that most highly correlates with your keyword cloud — essentially implies an Internet-scale "language model": one where there are unique vertices for every unique URL. Which, if you think about it, is what a traditional search engine's index is: a very dumb, but very large correlational language model, where that "dumbness" is a valuable constraint meaning that queries are able to be run map-reduced across many nodes.
Is there something I'm missing here, that makes Bing+ChatGPT better at these types of queries than Google is?
Or are the advantages ChatGPT is bringing to the table here, in areas that have nothing to do with making search engines better at the things they're already "the best tool for the job" at, and instead are in solving problems that could be solved any number of other ways (e.g. querying a search assistant such as Siri/Alexa; or pulling up an encyclopedia article or textbook relevant to the subject and just reading it) such that a search engine wouldn't necessarily be the first tool you'd search for?
No problem for ChatGPT however which was not only able to write the code, but write it in Rust - the target language Iw as going to. Now I've just found it easier to ask ChatGPT first then go go google.
When you're asking generally about a pretty basic topic which you just happen to not be very familiar with, ChatGPT is not too dissimilar from having an expert in the field you can chat with and ask questions to. I find it to be a very effective way of querying the huge database of information that is its training dataset.
Surprisingly, the one thing it's really terrible at but which I would've expected it to be okay at, is writing config files. I sometimes ask it how to write, say, a systemd service file which does a particular thing, and it usually shows me something which looks roughly sensible but doesn't actually do what I wanted. Its nature of fancy autocomplete with no understanding really shines through in those cases. Its biggest downfall is that it has no way to recognize when it doesn't have an answer and is making stuff up.
And apparently you didn't quite notice the particular inefficiency there...
> But instead of doing that, I just asked ChatGPT the specific questions I needed the answer to.
Yeah, sure, if you want to vet hallucinations in stead of just getting the facts.
Just go directly to Wikipedia instead.
B) Your browser (most probably) has a search function.
I'm sure that recipe exists somewhere on the internet but ChatGPT gave something to me in a very succinct format with none of the usual bullshit you deal with when looking through search results. ChatGPT also thankfully did not include the usual recipe backstory.
how to create a multi line string in a bash script. I needed to encode a human-readable JSON string in a curl call and didn’t know how. Google game me crummy tutorial sites, GPT gave me instructions, and when provided with the target, did all the formatting too.
I found it also understands git well. I use git at work, but I almost never use anything beyond push/pull/commit so crazy rebases or merges and stuff I still have to search for instructions to remember them. Now GPT can just explain to me the steps for my particular case. When I googled things, I’d search for keywords and stuff based on my knowledge and piece together the steps myself.
On a counter example, I recently had an intern who botched their config on VsCode and didn’t know what settings to fix. I found it was easier to google search how to reset things than use GPT. Ymmv.
For example, today I asked ChatGPT how to write a class method in Ruby and to explain the class << self idiom. Super simple stuff, but it gives accurate answers and it's way more convenient than Google.
For this class of simple queries there's a lot of overhead to do a Google search and then try to filter out bullshit and padded results vs a super simple prompt to ChatGPT.
Geographical information about a region.
What is the name of a song I have in my mind.
Virtually anything else. I'm studying architecture and read about associations of feelings that cardinal points transmit in a house (north, south, east, west). Like, east is associated with youth because of sunrise. At first it wasn't obvious why, so I asked ChatGPT and it explained everything brilliantly to me.
It takes me an order of magnitude less time to educate myself on ChatGPT comparing to Google.
Spammers will, too, and since OpenAI has access to what they're asking and can easily flag their questions, they can feed misleading guidance to spammers.
For instance: That Microsoft Rewards counter? Ugh.
[0] For example, Google used to have a fairly strictly enforced rule that indexable content had to actually be visible to an unauthenticated user. The current crop of sites that have apparently useful content in snippets but that hide it when loaded would have been penalized, possibly severely.
It does seem like Larry and Sergei are finally back trying to fix the excessively politically sensitive and overly cautious culture. Larry, having disappeared to Fiji for several years, must have been pretty bored or annoyed with running it.
Yesterday night I was trying to recall the name of a particular SCOTUS case that I had (semi-incorrectly) thought was connected to the 14th Amendment.
Bombed out on the SERPs two or three times, so I started looking for an very old article by Thomas Sowell that randomly introduced me to the case a few years back. I knew it was something regarding the unintended consequences of the Civil Rights Act.
Neither Google nor DDG gave me ANY useful results for 3-5 variations on “scholarly critique of the Civil Rights Act”. I eventually remembered the Sowell connection and even adding his name in quotes only got me to a page deboonking the article I was searching for!
I’m very far from being a right winger or whatever so I’ve never really experienced this sort of thing before, but my god is the “no no, you don’t REALLY want to search for THAT” silent censorship out of control. Millions to billions of people use these search engines daily and assume they’re mildly biased but otherwise shining portals to the sum total of human knowledge.
In hindsight, I suspect I would have immediately found the SCOTUS case with my initial search on 2010 era Google. Very much seems like my starter queries were triggering the Bad Think Detected algorithm.
*debunking
https://yandex.com/search/touch/?text=scholarly+critique+of+...
Publishers blamed Google for declining revenue since they had to make their content openly accessible and therefore free in order to be visible to users on search. The EU tried to make Facebook and Google pay publishers to account for this. I think allowing paywalled content was a compromise to prevent this legislation from passing.
That being said, I agree with the publishers especially since hypocritically Google and Facebook strictly don't allow scraping of their services and litigate those who do.
Google could easily fix this by putting a symbol or label on paywall-related content so you know not to click it.
People are acting like Bing has created some big market success and Samsung is running to them because the tech is better. But the alternative explanation is simple: vendors are always looking for reasons to put mediocre non-Google search as default on their products, so they can extract more money from search engine providers. Samsung sees the current hype around Bing/Google/AI as a convenient negotiating point, since the media will portray this as “Samsung switches to awesome AI search” rather than “Samsung forces its users to use crummy Bing.”
You mean, so that you can satisfy everybody at the same time?
No, sorry, the world doesn't work this way.
Being the richest gives someone a lot of power to make others look foolish
It already seems poisoned to me. It's popularity over correctness, because LLMs don't know semantics.
The users who the default engine really locks in are the ones who just mostly click ads and have no idea they are ads. When they use Google they are mostly clicking ads anyways, so the search result quality will appear about the same with Bing. Maybe even better if there are fewer ads.
For Microsoft, getting more users on board means higher ad volume which brings more advertisers who are going to spend the time to manage Bing ad campaigns. You can bet they've done the calculations for how much money they can spend at what price. Ultimately that leads to higher monetization and then Microsoft can pay other companies (like Apple) to switch the default engine.
Google is a multi-trillion dollar attention tax that just sucks money from the global economy. They've been wildly mismanaged since Eric Schmidt's CEO tenure ended. It's been a long time coming, but the timer is running out of sand for Google fast. The revenue may take a long time to peak and decline but when they start missing their quarterly earnings it will be a bloodbath for Google's employees.
Every day I enter a few difficult queries on both Google and Bing to see if Bing gives me something better. I'm still laughing that people think Bing is a serious threat.
Truman Capote and Gore Vidal were two American writers who had a long-standing feud with each other. The feud began when Capote wrote an article for Esquire magazine in which he claimed that Vidal had been thrown out of the White House after making a pass at a member of President Kennedy's family². Vidal took Capote to court for libel, where the two traded insults². After the pair settled out of court, their feud continued – even outliving Capote².
I hope that helps!
Source: Conversation with Bing, 4/17/2023(1) The A-Z of Gore Vidal | Gore Vidal | The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/01/the-a-z-gore-v... Accessed 4/17/2023. (2) Why Did Gore Vidal and William Buckley Hate Each Other? - Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-did-gore-vidal-and-william... Accessed 4/17/2023. (3) Feud sensation! Why Vargas Llosa thumped Márquez. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/mar/13/feud... Accessed 4/17/2023. (4) A life in feuds: how Gore Vidal gripped a nation - The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/14/gore-vidal-gri... Accessed 4/17/2023. (5) ‘Just a couple of fags’: Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and celebrity feud. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19392397.2015.1... Accessed 4/17/2023. (6) Truman Capote’s unhappy ending | PBS NewsHour. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/truman-capotes-unhappy-e... Accessed 4/17/2023.
Oh, and references (2) and (3) seem to be hallucinated and are unrelated to the question and response despite being cited inline. The other ref links are valuable but well then it's just a search engine with more noise.
I just asked it about something in today's news and it answered it and provided links to 6 news articles on that topic.
Bing has only 10m+ downloads on Android. Not even a top 200 app.
Samsung switch too Bing will hurt Samsung more than Google.
For search, Bing + ChatGPT is now my driver for search. I still use Google and Duck Duck Go occasionally, but usually I am OK with waiting a short while for Bing + ChatGPT results.
Sorry for the OT question - do you use slime-tramp? And if so, do you have a way to use M-. (slime-edit-definition) without having to re-compile files using the remote paths?
For Common Lisp, running Emacs on a remote server instead of slime-tramp has always been good enough. Would you suggest I try slime-tramp?
Mosh as in "mobile shell"? https://mosh.org/
> Would you suggest I try slime-tramp?
I don't know yet, I've just started trying it out.
What made me want to try it was that I could use GUI Emacs to connect to emacs running on a different machine and still have full access to all the emacs keybindings.
So far, the downsides that I have encountered are that M-. and C-c C-k (slime-compile-and-load-file) don't quite work. The work-around would be to visit each file using the remote path and re-compile them so that the running Lisp image can map what's in the image to a path tramp recognizes. Then M-. and C-c C-k should work.
To recompile, select all then compile (X-c X-p C-c C-c) works, or I think C-c M-k also works. Not a great solution if there are a lot of files, though.
IIUC the problem boils down to M-. eventually calling (xref-find-definitions) which is an emacs built-in, and I think that's why the tramp paths aren't translating until a re-compile is done.
???
PageRank. It was PageRank, and the fact that they didn't rely on the lies put into <meta> tags. There was no feedback loop at that point.
There's no moat in anything AI, but MS gets OpenAI access at a discount and therefore will win
It's more like Google has to change from optimizing for next week's revenue numbers to optimizing for user experience. People have been saying for years that their search results are trash. That we haven't seen a response from Google may be an indicator that they aren't able to return useful search results.
Have they? I hear people say this on Hacker news but i've never heard it anywhere else, people seem to be using the internet just fine with Google as there main search engine, what is the alternative? Bing? It's still trash and Bing Chat is like a worse version of ChatGPT, I don't see it replacing Google currently.
I would bet that a good chunk of users don't know that you can change the default browser or search engine, or at least don't think to do so. They might not like the UX, but they have other things occupying their focus and muddle through a bad experience with their phone or PC, just like they do with many other mediocre interfaces throughout the week.
If I want to find artists, lyrics, locations, results of sporting events, other special events... I'm not sure all the things, but DDG doesn't even compare.
Ah yes, Canonical, land of people attempting to fork the Linux ecosystem and getting shot down by everyone and doubling down.
Would be a perfect fit for Google.
Desktop OS's are not the long term future of computing, is it? But they were astute in acquiring Android. Meanwhile, Microsoft thought that a mobile OS is just a desktop OS squished onto a smaller screen.
I'm always been shocked that Google didn't face antitrust action over using their internet video monopoly to kill Windows Phone. They wouldn't create a Youtube app for Windows Phone, nor would they allow Microsoft to create one themselves.
I can remember Google taking similar actions to lock out Amazon's Echo Show.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16371292/google-youtube-a...
If anything, Google has been too aggressive.
> then eat into Microsoft Office market share by releasing Google Office for Desktop
With their inferior products? Not a chance. Google's apps are so far away from even competing with Microsoft's it's not even funny. Google Sheets doesn't even have proper tables. I wouldn't even be surprised if they cancelled it.
With ChromeOS, they took the route available to them, which was to enter the school market and try to build something from there.
Admittedly Google still has some special sauce left, but in my opinion those special sauce only improves efficiency; it doesn't enable one to do something that's impossible otherwise. (I've been reading about some public research reports about Google's special sauce: they range from special user space networking to new congestion control to custom TPUs etc.)
Wouldn't office suite be a better target? Everyone uses it. Lots of low hanging fruits. Easy to win the heart of geeks. Ample opportunities to integrate with other enterprise services.
As for Google, I am uncertain whether they were prepared for this competition because, firstly, the business terms offered by Microsoft might have been quite strategic, and secondly, the Google search engine has not experienced significant innovation or improvement since PageRank, at least from a user experience perspective rather than complexity. I will regale my descendants with stories of a time when I searched for something and found at least one relevant result among the top 20.
Google on the other hand is always chasing the next big thing. It just doesn’t have the institutional attention span to do anything really big. If a project isn’t an explosive hit right away, Google moves on to the next big idea.
They did one better and made Chrome so good that its the OS for most, for all intents and purposes, now.
Even MS is moving office to being cloud based, so it's not clear business users value local document availability that much - rather the opposite, I've worked in places that like cloud services because locking out their data from a disgruntled or departed employee is one button away.
Google search has just gotten worse and is more ad prone. It's still better, but not golden age google - not even close.
It's their outdated search bringing everything else down it seems.
I haven't opened a MS product in years and my life is better for it. Their Mac product lineup is particularly lackluster.
This is precisely what Microsoft did to Google. They had Bing running in the background for years losing truckloads of money. Now that AI has upset the applecart, they can use Bing to choke off Google's airsupply.
One of the reasons for Google getting so good early on was that they had oodles of usage data to test and improve their search functionality forming a positive feedback loop. Now, with deals such as this, Microsoft will have more data to tune their engine while Google is left on the sidelines.
Let's just hope that the AI driven search revolution does not produce a monopoly.