Google is an advertising company, search is a by-product and has been for a long time.
You're not wrong, but it didn't last. Google jumped the shark in its first decade. I remember giving an internal presentation in 2010 or 2012 about how little of the screen real estate in a Google search result was actually search results.
This should be well known, simple google search:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/why...
AT&T copyrights led to linux, and linux, independent of unix, has been a huge boon for good, and for unixness.
the threat to unix now is all the people who by nature prefer Dave Cutlerness, and can't see that their way is the wrong way, now they are using linux (because it won) and trying to ruin it.
Novell bought UNIX and has some grand plans for "SuperNOS", which also never shipped. It certainly wasn't anything like K8s.
Also I believe that even when working optimally the Darwinian mechanism can't solve certain problems. Some things need to be dealt with by a group of motivated people working for other goals than profit.
Markets gave us compuserve and facebook while CERN gave us the open web, for example.
- Providing a free alternative to Microsoft’s monopolized office suite and desktop OS
- Provide a free alternative to Apple’s mobile OS, spurring a revolution in access to the internet for the world’s poor
- Provide free global maps with streetview sights
- Provide a free to access video platform with invaluable educational resources that allows millions of creators to make a living and that likely wouldn’t exist save for Google’s monumental investments and ability to sustain years of losses
- Research given away for free that ignited the current AI revolution
- Research given away for free that is revolutionizing medicine and drug development
In sum, truly a horrible thing they’ve done
Like for example having youtube be free until they're the only game in town then start charging 14 dollars monthly to avoid 30% ads. Or targeting ads to gmail users so you can artificially provide a cheaper mail service than anyone else.
There's an actual law saying you can't do stuff like that.
Companies getting too big are natural; Letting them get too big is what happens when your state borrows a trillion per semester: Your state is obese, intervening in every little sector of the economy (thus the opposite of liberal), and not playing its regalian role.
You should indeed reduce the size of both the state and the largest companies, to let the economy self-regulate, but then, how would the US govern the rest of the world?
You really have to think about exactly how our modern markets work and why buyouts are such dominant strategy. It's only sometimes about taking what you buy then using it, it's mostly about taking what you buy to stifle competition these days.
Look at twitter and Vine, twitter bought then shut down vine as part of a standard operating procedure just to stifle competition, and they had so little interest in capitalizing on what they bought that it left a market gap so wide TikTok filled it instead. But usually these practices do not leave such big market gaps, usually they simply shut down competition successfully and the buyer wins. Then in many cases if the company owners refuse to be bought out, extreme anti-competitive practices begin to destroy their business, which will not be punished until long after the victims get shut down. So owners need to choose between a huge pay out, or their company getting destroyed. Owners tend to choose the former.
I just given you the deep learning and transformer benefits.
There's a reason why the darling of AI Renaissance namely transformer was not invented at MIT, Stanford or Berkeley.
PageRank
Gmail
Maps
MapReduce
Chrome
Protocol Buffers
Go
MapReduce would be invented anyway (I implemented it from scratch before learning of it’s existence).
Chrome is just a slightly upgraded Firefox (and novadays Safari is just as good if not better with ai)
PageRank was what gave Google monopoly, it’s not a result of monopoly.
Go - I can give you that. ProtoBuf - not my field, but isn’t it just a format that someone else would develop to fill a niche? (unlike say mp3 that had new compression algorithms baked in)
Maps - I can give you that. Some people might argue that it was an acquisition, but without Google’s muscle, Street View would not be feasible.
Wat. It's like saying that an apple is a slightly upgraded orange. I would understand if you mentioned KHTML and Safari as relatives, but "slightly upgraded" does not fit anyway.
> PageRank was what gave Google monopoly
I don't think so. PageRank has been successfully implemented elsewhere, and outmatched. What helped Google build a monopoly was the first mover advantage, the network effects, and the incessant streams of money from AdWords (invented by Google), DoubleClick (acquired) and a bunch of other advertisement tools.
> Maps - I can give you that.
Don't :) Google Maps is an acquisition from 20 years ago. (As is Android, AdSense, and many other core flagship products of the Google brand.)
If you want a relatively recent, successful Google service for general public, it's Google Photos.
I seem to recall that followed the acquisition of Picasa.
This is comical. When Google acquired Android, it was nothing more than a 3000 line JavaScript demo. The Android OS was created entirely at Google.
Not sure about your experience, but I used to subscribe to a lot of mailing lists just so that I can search for mailing list content using gmail, because the search function implemented by those mailing lists were generally worse.
Technically, but it's morphed so much that it doesn't even resemble its former self. I remember when Google Maps first came out and showed AJAX technology, so obviously superior to the competitors at the time like MapQuest. However, these days Google Maps is really more of a business directory with navigation, and it wasn't like that in the early days: you needed an address to navigate to.
Typical HN comment writing off significant thoughtfulness as "not an innovation" lol
- AlphaFold (just won a Nobel prize)
- Transformers (the "T" in GPT)
- Waymo (autonomous vehicles)
- Sycamore (quantum computing)
These are just a few off the top of my head.
If your idea of innovation is a better RSS reader, then sure, I agree with you. But in terms of things that push the forefront of technology, I have a hard time thinking of another company with greater impact in recent years.
“Given that production could be carried on without any organization, Coase asks, 'Why and under what conditions should we expect firms to emerge?' Since modern firms can only emerge when an entrepreneur of some sort begins to hire people, Coase's analysis proceeds by considering the conditions under which it makes sense for an entrepreneur to seek hired help instead of contracting out for some particular task. The traditional economic theory of the time suggested that, because the market is ‘efficient’ (that is, those who are best at providing each good or service most cheaply are already doing so), it should always be cheaper to contract out than to hire.
Coase noted, however, that there are a number of transaction costs to using the market; the cost of obtaining a good or service via the market is actually more than just the price of the good. Other costs, including search and information costs, bargaining costs, keeping trade secrets, and policing and enforcement costs, can all potentially add to the cost of procuring something via the market. This suggests that firms will arise when they can arrange to produce what they need internally, and somehow avoid these costs.
There is a natural limit to what can be produced internally, however. Coase notices ‘decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function’, including increasing overhead costs and increasing propensity for an overwhelmed manager to make mistakes in resource allocation. This is a countervailing cost to the use of the firm.
Coase argues that the size of a firm (as measured by how many contractual relations are ‘internal’ to the firm and how many ‘external’) is a result of finding an optimal balance between the competing tendencies of the costs outlined above. In general, making the firm larger will initially be advantageous, but the decreasing returns indicated above will eventually kick in, preventing the firm from growing indefinitely.”
>”Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”
Have these people even read the white papers that Google releases? They are mostly marketing pieces.
When systems and technologies are not publicly reproducible, why should scientists and (most) engineers care? I will not take Google at its word and would not recommend it to others.
When you talk to a researcher, do they strike you as someone who chases handsome amounts of money, or someone who chases ideas?
You bring up research labs. I listened to Alan Kay's numerous talks over the years (as an example of a prominent CS researcher), not once does he mention that he joined for the money at Xerox PARC. Yes, he was paid, but the main advantage was being given free reign to conduct research with the best experts in their fields, i.e. to invent and pursue ideas.
The important part from a financial perspective, is to be able to have finances to back a research division, where you can spend billions on building a new type of technology, if need be, that may not pan out. You don't need a monopoly to accomplish that.
You know who does chase handsome amounts of money? Day traders and everyone gambling on the stock market.
A company in an industry with very tight margins has much less money to invest in fundamental research. All the recent growth in generative AI has been driven by companies with very high margins; Google, Facebook, Amazon. If all those FANG were in tightly competitive markets and hence had low margins, they wouldn't have had billions of dollars to spend on the GPU compute necessary to develop modern language models. Which is evidenced by the fact that no companies in more competitive sectors have produced any large language models.
OpenAI has raised almost $18bn to date [1]. That puts it in the top 10 corporate R&D spenders globally, ahead of Intel and the entirety of big pharma [2]. (And OpenAI's gross margins for its API business are estimated around 40% [3]. Standard fare for tech. If anything, OpenAI subsidising its business with Apple and ChatGPT is behaving more like a tech giant than a start-up.)
The top of that list are the big 5 American tech companies, spending about $200bn annually on R&D. By coincidence, that's roughly the pace of U.S. VC spend [4]. The depth of American private capital markets make a solid case against favouring housing these long-shot bets inside tech giants. (Particularly absent non-compete and IP reform.)
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/02/openai-raises-6-6b-and-is-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_by_research_...
[3] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/a-peek-behind-openai...
[4] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/ai-deals-lift-us-ve...
It'd be way more efficient and cost effective to just set up a well-funded government labs to do that research.
It's not about building and owning the next best thing, it's about preventing someone else building and owning the next best thing.
Innovation is a lot easier when you have a lot of money to spend on R&D. In order to get that money, you can't compete on price b/c that's a race to the bottom. Instead, you want to focus on quality and/or customer service so that you become a monopoly and then can use monopoly profits to innovate to higher quality products and services.
Clip: https://www.tiktok.com/@rorysutherlandclips/video/7314765561...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/live/L_QaZk5iJOA?si=ZkxBe1CHgagmcBcW...
Competition is a prerequisite for healthy Capitalism. Lack of competition is the Achilles heel.
Is it the free maps? free mobile OS? free email? free cloud storage? free video service? free office suite? free desktop OS? free AI chat?
We saw this with AT&T Bell research labs with their inventions of transistor and Unix, among others. The same thing happened with Google research with (arguably) deep learning and transformer.
Split them up at your own (US) perils, not unlike killing own Golden Goose.