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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>My hunch is Google never psychologically recovered from Facebook absolutely wiping out G+, and they have been on a mission to ensure nothing like that ever happens again.

That's an orthogonal issue to me. IMHO, modern Google never really cared about social media platforms because it never really understood them. Otherwise it would have bought Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Tiktok, Twitter, early on before they became industry titans, the same way they bought Youtube, Maps, etc in the early days.

They've been coasting for so long on the search ad revenue money printer, that they're blind to everything else going on around them, so they're always reacting instead of proactive, but always too late.

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> That's an orthogonal issue to me. IMHO, modern Google never really cared about social media platforms because it never really understood them.

Caring (or at least wanting in) and not understanding are perfectly compatible.

I know for a fact that a number of old googlers are still frustrated over Google Video got stomped, and Google having to buy Youtube in the end.

> Otherwise it would have bought Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Tiktok, Twitter, early on before they became industry titans

That only works if:

1. they see it coming

2. the in-house competition effort does not remain politically unassailable

3. until the competitor is too big for google to realistically acquire it

>That only works if: 1. they see it coming

Zuckerberg saw them coming though. That's why he owns a social media empire now, and wants to either own or destroy Tiktok as well. Musk saw it coming with Twatter, hell, even Bezos saw it coming, that why Amazon bought Twitch.

Google leadership just doesn't understand social media, otherwise they would have bought a rising platform instead of building one from scratch that flopped with zero user base. Social media platforms are all about the existing user base, not about the tech behind it. That's why G+ failed despite being technically superior in some aspects.

>I know for a fact that a number of old googlers are still frustrated over Google Video got stomped, and Google having to buy Youtube in the end

It's irrelevant what old googlers think. Google has a responsibility to their shareholders to make line go up, not make some of their programmers feel good by keeping them working on dying platforms with no user base wile their competitors steam ahead. Buying youtube was the right business decision because it was the more popular platform, instead of trying to make Google Video happen, as it would have had the same faith as G+, and those old googlers would have probably been laid off instead of being moved to work on Youtube. Programmers don't always make good business decisions.

> Zuckerberg saw them coming though [...] even Bezos saw it coming, that why Amazon bought Twitch.

Which pertains to my reply... how?

> Musk saw it coming with Twatter

Musk saw nothing coming. He bought twitter in 2022 after getting baited into making a binding offer. Twitter was a household name at least a decade before that: news networks had direct twitter interactions and mentions at least as far back as the 2012 election.

And although it's been turned private and delisted, it's estimated to be worth just a fraction of what he paid for it.

> Google leadership just doesn't understand social media

Have you considered actually reading replies instead of going off with whatever your pet assertions are?

> That's irrelevant what old googlers think.

It's very relevant to your assertion that "google never really cared".

> Google has a responsibility to their shareholders to make line go up, not make some of their programmers feel good by keeping them working on platforms with no user base wile their competitors steam ahead.

That has nothing whatsoever to do with what I'm replying to.

> > Musk saw it coming with Twatter

> And although it's been turned private and delisted, it's estimated to be worth just a fraction of what he paid for it.

I'd just stick with "he tried to back out of it and had to be sued to buy it" as evidence that musk didn't forsee anything. It is a bit (darkly) amusing that the document required him to buy the company buy not pay the severance listed in it when firing people.

Although if Grok was a standalone company I think it's hard to argue it'd valued less than 44 billion so Musk really lucked into a great deal. He also really lucked into Biden not stepping down earlier so the Democrats would run an actual competitive primary.

Grok is from xAI, a company he separately funded. It wasn’t part of the acquisition of Twitter.

> [1] xAI was founded by Musk on March 9, 2023

> [2] Elon Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter in October 2022

xAI would've just been an AI division of Twitter if Musk wasn't worried that Twitter was going to go bankrupt and take the company (xAI) with it (Twitter). It's extremely suspicious that Grok was available to paying X subscribers and not some other arrangement.

"Separately" funded is pretty thin. It's the same group of people funding xAI [3] as Twitter acquisition [4].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XAI_(company)

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter#2022%E2%80%93present

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XAI_(company)#Financial_histor...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...

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