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Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

> The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy.

On the outset, you might think with such ridiculously high compensation there would be an expectation of quality, but I think that's an error.

Google operates as an ad-company that happens to employ ridiculous amounts of exhorbitantly compensated individuals to engage in market and technological research, particularly to open or expand markets for their ads.

They didn't create mail, docs, drive et al in order to create productivity apps, they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same. They don't really care what content is in the browser so long as it is browser-based content the user consumes and not native apps. The more browser time spent, the higher the likelihood of being served Google ads, or providing Google with data, and similar.

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mail, docs, drive et al ... they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising

This seems obviously false. Google clearly monetizes gsuite as a paid service, and "everyone uses the same service at home that they do at work" has clear advantages, whether or not there is advertising in your gmail. Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite (or "google apps for domains", as they called it then - horrible).

> Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite

This is clearly false. The screenshots in this Time article show gmail having advertising from day one.

https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/

Completely accurate. The ads were even touted as somewhat of a feature. Something along the lines of "Gmail has ads, just like the other services, but our ads will be relevant to your interests."

It’s accurate and inaccurate. Ads were there but many users saw none for a long time.

IMO ads were a distraction to enable the data harvesting, which drove Adsense targeting. Even today, the ads I see on GMail are pretty low quality. Some lovelorn guy used my email address unintentionally to sign up for a 55+ dating site 3 years ago. The most targeted ads I get are for similar sites.

Of course YMMV.

They actually stopped targeting by email contents a while back https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-email...

My early adopter google apps account is still free and has no ads.

When using GSuite it is used in a browser, and this is key to the Google strategy. The goal is to get more users spending more time in their browsers, in order to funnel them to Google Ads and to serve Google their browsing data.

GSuite exists, at least in part, to break down the model of the walled corporate intranet. There are just too many people behind the corporate veil to ignore; and as a bonus, the browsing and cloud app usage habits they develop at work will tend to translate to their usage habits at home.

Also, as noted by another responder, GMail has had ads since launch. I was a beta user from day 1, and I recall the ads.

Edit: worth noting the historical difficulty of getting open source software into the business environment because corporate purchasers were wary of anything that was "free"; putting a price on something makes it more palatable to corporate adoption.

I can’t imagine that being true. Gmail had “relevant” ads based off their other ad tech from the get go. That was a point vs other majors having banner ads.

> This seems obviously false. Google clearly monetizes gsuite

It's not obviously false when advertising makes up something like 80%+ of their revenue:

https://theatlas.com/charts/n8ea9MPE0

Gmail very quickly introduced advertising in your mailbox. There was a huge outcry because they would scan your mails to provide contextual advertising.

This was before other GSuite components even existed.

And the reason they probably want to stay an ad company is so they don't get stuck with IBM sized workforce.

Their lack of customer support is border line criminal.

Lol, no. They have >100k employees.

Google has 118,899 employees.

IBM has 352,600 which is about 3x the number of employees that Google has.

If you count on-site, full time contractors at Google you get closer to 250,000.

Give it time. My guess is Google will be well over 300,000 by 2030.

You're comparing a 900lbs Gorilla to a 300lbs Gorilla and sort of overlooking that they're both Gorillas.

I think the argument is that the 300lb gorilla is actually an overweight chimp.

Imagine all the tech support you could buy with 200k employees.

> _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same

Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product". And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data.

This applies to many companies, but to Google most of all.

Also, the further they keep users away from Win10 (where MS siphons everything) and they keep them locked in Android/Chrome operating systems, then it's +1 for them and -1 for the competition.

> Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product"

So, when I am using Libreoffice, who sees me as their product ?

It's a rule of thumb. No, not every costless product is monetizing your use of it. FOSS is especially counter to this rule.

In the case of web-based tools that are owned and operated by big advertising companies, I think it's a fairly safe bet. As always, think critically about each instance and consider the implications of the software and products you use.

You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free.

The quote is pithy but assumes some context - the [something] is being provided below the marginal cost to produce and therefore being provided with an expectation of benefit for the provider.

Acquiring LibreOffice is not $0 marginal cost but they have a big "DONATE" button top-right corner of the website and The Document Foundation turns a small profit from donations.

> You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free.

That's silly. Paid office suites use just as many computing resources, and Google docs use plenty resources through your browser as well.

I think the "if you don't pay for it, you're the product" quote is fine. You just have to exclude free and open source software.

Excluding free software from a quote that starts "When something is free..." is equally silly. The quote stops being about anything.

But yeah, good point that my argument didn't make sense.

There is free as in Freedom as well as free as in beer. The quote seems to apply to things that are free as in beer but not free as in freedom. It'd be valid given that distinction.

> The quote stops being about anything.

It is still about stuff other than open source software.

You can't expect some Internet quote to apply universally. Just know the exceptions and use it when it applies.

Originally this product knwn as StarOffice ws not free. It only became so after Sun aquired it and reeased it as OpenOffice. This was basically a loss-leader not just fr sun but for other companies as well to break Microsoft's capture of the Knowledege Worker productivity which they leveraged into other areas.

So the idea was you were the product, "sold" to the non-MS-Windows/Intel companies in te hopes of you being retained or transferred to a non-MS stack.

LibreOffice is post Oracle's acquisition of Sun, but the idea is still the same.

Nobody called them “knowledge workers” outside of Page Mill Dr. when StarOffice was made and Sun didn’t compete in that space as much though Microsoft was starting to eat their lunch in other areas, like academia, government, military, and high end computation.

I worked on a Sun at NOAA in the 90s in Hawaii and the computer we used for bathymetry imaging was a Sun and the ships used Suns.

Most of that equipment was replaced with a little Linux and Windows Servers.

Same experience, maybe few years earlier . We all had the Sun pizzaboxes that had replaced Lisp Machines, and 2 years later we all had Mac's and later PC's.

Latex still had it's place in academia, and would continue to dominate academic publishing for quite some time, but for 'ordinary' daily productivity needs first MacWrite and MacDraw, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and later Word and Excel were becoming the staples.

With both software being ported to the PC/Mac platforms, and Linux starting to make inroads into the Unix compute workloads, Sun needed an answer fast to stop the bleeding.

Their inability to transform their high tough / high margin business model would do them in eventually as the commodity / thin margin model of the PC ecosystem grinded them into dust. But before that, they would try several things one of which was an attempt to 'complete' the offering of a single box solution which would have to include an 'office' package so as to keep the Mac / PC of the desks.

For open source, you kind of are in a weird way. Open source projects need contributions, for example in the form of bug reports, feature requests, proof reading and (in the rare case) source code. Many ousers provide these benefits to open source projects, which make them thrive.

On the other hand, looking at the coin from the other side you could also argue you’re paying with your time and effort and not your money.

It's not a good comparison.

StarOffice was developed by a company that was trying to sell it the old fashioned way but became Open Source because Sun was trying to keep its Unix workstations viable (no way we'd see "Office for SPARC") and also challenging Microsoft with Java.

Oracle bought Sun. Oracle kept Sun products alive because they know one reason people $$$ for Oracle is support.

Once it got renamed and spun out of Oracle, LibreOffice has been kept alive by various stakeholders such as companies that have big fleets of heavily hacked instances, Eurocrats who wish they could break the hold of American software monopolies, linux distros who want another piece of shovelware to list on the box, etc.

A typical end user might not perceive that leaving an issue on GitHub is not good customer service, even if some people enjoy the liberty of fixing things for themselves.

---

More seriously, Libreoffice is software you run on a computer you control (e.g. your desktop, a cloud server, whatever, ...) Since you are paying for the computer, you don't have conflicts about how generously to provision hardware.

Libreoffice is a ship in a bottle. 1000 years from now somebody might dig up an optical disk from a landfill and boot Libreoffice, but it is hard to believe Google Docs will last that long.

Who does Google sell your docs and drive data to?

They aggregate what they learn about each user across all their properties. (Their hope was the plus would make this easier). So while I seriously doubt they tell advertisers, “joshuamorton writes about JavaScript, metallurgy and anime”, whatever they learn from the enormous number of places they are collecting info increases the probability that you might see an ad on gmail relating to anime.

And they are quite public about scanning documents written using the free drive service, as they are proud that they take down documents with content they or the government consider inappropriate, as discussed on HN recently.

So your contention is that because they check hashes of documents stored on drive for unlawful material, we'll say, that this proves that Google is lying about how it uses data from docs and drive?

Or are you saying they don't actually share any data learned from docs and drive

how would they check the HASH of a document for unlawful material?

I think the complaint was they scan your entire doc, for all it's content.

> HASH of a document for unlawful material

This is ~super common with things like copyright violations and child porn. You store a database of hashes of copyrighted or pornographic data. And specifically you can use visual-similarity hashing to detect even somewhat perturbed documents.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA)

What does checking hashes of documents mean? Isn’t stuff either encrypted or not?

This might not be a good look for me to be confused by this as a web dev/programmer, but I does that mean they are securely or otherwise hashing everything they store on all users? Drive, Gmail and other Google services have tons of data. After THats they are also still only checking hashes?

Checking a hash of a document unavoidably necessitates reading the entirety of that document.

They needn't sell it at all. The important thing is that you're using a browser more often to do things that were traditionally done with native apps.

For using Gmail, Drive and Docs you will have a Google account and you'll be logged in often or all the time. Quite useful for targeting you outside those tools.

they don't sell it, they use it to profile you

From docs and drive? Which stuff?

Everything searchable is indexed. Everything indexed and associated with a user is used to profile that user in order to provide superior search results.

> And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data.

I am a vocal Google critic, but I have yet to see any evidence of them selling my data. Unlike a number of other companies and organizations Google serms to have realized long ago that they are totally dependent on user trust.

I'm not saying they are smart (judging by the ads they have sent me the last 13 years, the killing off of Reader, the nymwars and then killing off Google+ after it turned out to be nice) or nice (the way they keep trying to crush the open web, the "embrace, extend, extinguish" model of pushing Chrome relentlessly until they almost have monopoly, then try to remove the possibility to run adblockers etc etc)

I guess throwing away your key asset is not in the interest of Google or Facebook. I presume Cambridge Analytica only got so far with Facebook because Facebook didn't realize the potential value of its user data till then. Now they'll engage in the same act themselves.

"_open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same."

No, I think they wanted to make money from it directly via Enterprise sales.

MS Office is the #1 source of profit for MS for a long while.

In the 2000's it seemed 'everything was going cloud', naturally Google thought they could leapfrog MS into that space.

But it didn't work out.

Well, obviously, if Google was going to have to take an actual phone call from somebody when things went pear-shaped, that was never going to work out.

And that even though MSFT started creating Office Online much later and also had to basically create a whole new product. And yet they now have the by far superior product.

Notice every G product with a decent level of ongoing support & development is in some form or another an ad platform.

To be fair, DFP sucks too.

Tsk tsk. You mean Ad Manager :rolls eyes:

Google didn't create Docs, they bought it.

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