Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

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Google doesn't seem anti-fragile to me. They have always seemed every bit as vulnerable as Meta, but with a few extra (yet weak) plates of armor due to an unfair ecosystem they've created to funnel you into Adsense. An ecosystem that many legislators and the DOJ think violates antitrust, and that the EU and other countries are already ruling against.

If Apple begins blocking their trackers (see Google's recent worldwide Chrome ad campaigns - a campaign that likely sees the writing on the wall), they lose all Apple revenue.

If 10B market cap companies begin to campaign for antitrust, and Microsoft negotiates for Bing on Apple, Samsung, and Firefox, Google will lose everywhere else.

I honestly don't even see why Microsoft couldn't play equally dirty and revert Chrome's default search engine on Windows to Bing. It's an equally dirty move to the stuff Google has done.

Google could have a strong cloud product, but they're in distant third and aren't investing enough to take away AWS/Azure market share. Their culture of launching products for promo, launching competing products (eg messengers), and then killing them has severely damaged their reputation.

Google's insane hiring and investment into a gazillion non-ads product areas over the last 10 years tells you that they know this as well.

They've been shoveling their ad revenues desperately into a furnace of "everything but ads", throwing ideas against numerous walls to see what sticks, and copying other company's product roadmaps. Almost none of it has worked out. They're still dependent on that ad revenue firehose for 90-ish percent of their profits.

When that firehose slows, the only way to maintain things will be to cut costs. So in a way I'm glad I got out of working there before that era began. "Fun" times there have been slowing for years, but it's going to get serious, I think.

Not as bad as Facebook, though.

Too bad they now have a reputation of killing every new product. Nobody wants to invest time into using their new shiny, because people assume it’ll be gone in a year or two

It's like to counter that Google's business customers and investors see these shut down stories likely in a different light: they stopped doing something that was a distraction from core business or irrelevant. Stadia was a powerful demonstration what Google is capable of, technology-wise.

So investors can count on Google to ax a product that's underperforming, but can't count on them to make competitive products, lasting brands or keeping loyal customers.

Correct. The companies exist for the shareholders not the customers.

But in the long run they need those customers to generate shareholder value. If someone manages to end around them on online advertising Google could be in trouble. Big caveat being so long as they are part of the smartphone duopoly it gives them a pretty healthy moat.

But at the same time, Stadia was a powerful demonstration that if you start playing Zombie Adventureland 7 on a Google product, one day your savefile will be gone.

They can surely do that but Google search does provide value. Even my mother noticed poor results when her search changed to some random bing-powered one.

Also, Google has Android ie. largest OS in terms of user-base.

Android is shit for monetization, you need 3x as many users to match iOS revenue from ads or subscriptions

No, Android is perfect for Googles monetization. This is why Apple wasn't able to fsck them like they did Meta.

Building their own platforms was a brilliant idea that made Google resilient against competition owning their Ad delivery platforms.

This has nothing to so with the side hobby that's Play Store.

>Building their own platforms was a brilliant idea that made Google resilient against competition owning their Ad delivery platforms.

What platform did they build though?

Android was bought from a third party. YouTube was bought. Chromium was forked from Webkit. Every of Google's in-house projects besides search engine and ad network was a failure.

Google (!) what Android and YouTube were when they were bought, compare them to Android 13 and YouTube of 2022 and you'll have your answer.

Intellectual laziness of your "takedown" reminds me of that dude that pronounced Dropbox pointless because rsync is enough.

Gmail worked. As they use it themselves I imagine they must be unable to ignore feedback, sunset it or turn it into the usual steaming pile of horse poop.

That’s for app store revenue. For ads, it is the best!

Nope, ads too. Our app makes 3x less from ads on Android, even though Android has 3x the userbase.

Yeah, I still have DDG as primary on a few devices, and I really need to change it. It doesn't do a fraction of the stuff I need... pretty much worthless to me, though I know I'm not being very fair.

I think bing is better, but google still actually dominates search with a great product, compared to their competitors.

It does seem a lot of Google's current dominance relies on the idea that Android, YouTube, Google Ads, and Chrome will remain unchallenged. In avenues where they are challenged, they either fold completely (Stadia) or make significantly less than equal counterparts (Play Store v App Store).

Google seems both fragile and sloppy. How they managed to get a bigger/faster slap on the wrist for antitrust in the EU than Apple is a demonstration of this.

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