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Comment by patrickaljord | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to create a multi-billion business like ads. It's not surprising they could not and probably will never be able to replicate that success. There's a handful of success like these in a century and it rarely comes twice from the same company. I agree with hype of their futurist stuff, they should tone it down if it's just for buzz.

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It's hard now when Google have their market position. For Google it was easy to grab the low hanging fruit.

I wonder if former competitors like Altavista just never though of spying on their users and selling the info or if they assumed it would be illegal and didn't do it?

Yea I thought something similar - executives at the older companies feared jail time for doing some of those tactics so they stayed away. Of course there’s always lawyers to read the fine print, but still...

Ah come on, the truth is not at all that altavista didn't spy, or didn't do ads. It's that they (and exite, yahoo, infoseek, ...) completely overdid the spying and ads and Google instead massively optimized their backend.

And then a crisis came boom no more competitors.

Google was the least obtrusive of all of the search competitors, and the most useful. That was their great strength.

Man thinking about when this happened, it's now some 20 years ago. I'm old.

Altavista had enough issues with trying to become a portal versus being a good search engine (plus being sold multiple times), which probably hobbled them more than anything else.

I was pretty surprised that gmail was successful. I didn't imagine that people wouldn't care that their email wasn't on their own computer. But, there you go.

Well, people had been using hosted email from their ISPs, AOL, Hotmail, etc. long before Gmail.

Gmail came out and offered an insane amount of storage, basically toppling the regime.

So surely Gmail wasn't the one that surprised you. That ship had long sailed before then.

It is... if you don't have Google money, Google brand, Google costumer goodwil, Google P&R team, Google capability to attract talent, Google global outreach, Google datacenters, etc. If you ARE Google, and you have all of that? I think it's more difficult to explain why they failed.

Because they found a better solution through partnership with dexcom.

https://www.wareable.com/health-and-wellbeing/dexcom-g6-cgm-...

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/medical-devices/jpm-dexcom-dis...

Is it a transparent contact lens that you put in the eye?

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