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Comment by alexgartrell | Hacker News Reader

So, I'm kind of torn here. We're watching Google ascend to a position where they can bend numerous markets to their whim, but they aren't really cheating the consumers at all. If anything, they've been great to us. Beyond that, as a college kid with an interest in distributed systems/networks, I should probably be angling to try to work there someday. But still, I'm scared, because it's hard to trust a company that big to do no evil.

Am I just being paranoid? (Not a rhetorical question)

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they aren't really cheating the consumers at all. If anything, they've been great to us

The thing is this: the relationship that exists between me and T-mobile is, I pay them money and they provide me with voice and data and BlackBerry services. Now I'm obviously just one individual, but I am fairly representative of a high-value subset of T-mobile's customer base and as a collective, T-mobile's interests are well aligned with our own. They aren't going to screw me because in doing so they'd screw us (e.g. all BB owners) and we'd migrate en-masse to Vodafone.

The relationship that exists between me and Google is that they provide me with free services so long as I and those like me engage in behaviors that are beneficial to their advertisers. It's difficult as an end user to get support from Google because they don't really care; they'd care only if their quality of customer service could affect my purchasing decisions with their advertisers. If people who couldn't get tech support from Google for their phones switched to Bing for search maybe they'd care, but I doubt anyone does that...

Not exactly. The relationship you have with T-mobile is that they have signed you to a contract that locks you in to their service. At every turn T-mobile's goal is to lock you in, and once you're locked in they don't care about you.

By contrast Google sets things up so that you can switch at any time, and they constantly have to keep you happy.

That's not really true, tho'. Come contract renewal time they are very accomodating. Or call them up and get through to Customer Retention and again, they'll bend over backwards.

But my point stands. T-mobile is interested in keeping me happy, over the long term. Google is interested in keeping its advertisers happy. Given the choice between you or I and them, it will always choose them. That's why it wants all your data, even if they don't sell it directly, it is to monetize it.

Well sure. They'll seem like they'll do anything for you. But if you look at the cold, hard numbers you'll realize that the average phone contract sums out to maybe $1-2k over its life, with a pretty hefty profit margin. Of course they're going to "bend over backwards" for you at contract time.

The used car salesman does the same thing. The rubes fall for the shtick nearly every time and the salesman laughs all the way to the bank.

Keep in mind that these are the same folks who markup a service that costs practically nothing to run to rates 4x higher than the cost of transmitting data from the Hubble space telescope.

Well, sure. Profit isn't a dirty word. But it is a mutual relationship in most cases, cash in return for goods or services. My relationship with Google is far murkier. I can't look at my account and see what is the cash equivalent I've paid them for Gmail this month - and make no mistake, if we weren't providing Google with something of cash value in return, we wouldn't be getting all these "free" services. What am I worth to Google as a "customer"? I've no idea. What level of service do they "owe" me? Well, none actually, there's no contract between us. That's a little disconcerting.

You are oversimplifying Google. Google's philosophy is that doing right by their users is always the best thing to do.

Remember, Google got where it is by doing what they think is right for users, not by doing what advertisers asked for. That philosophy is pretty deeply embedded in the corporate DNA. Humans being human that is sure to change over time, but I think it will take a long time. And until it does, I wouldn't worry about it much.

(Disclaimer, I started at Google about a week ago. This gives me both insight and a predictable amount of enthusiasm.)

Not true. T-Mobile is one of the only carriers (at least in the US) that offers month-to-month service. If you don't like them then you can just switch to a different carrier and pay no penalties other than what you've already paid for that month.

So far I've been very happy with my service, but if a cheaper US nationwide GSM operator came on the scene, you can bet I'm going to switch if T-Mobile doesn't drop their price to match.

How is it really different? If Google don't get you to use and keep using their service, they lose you as a product to sell to their advertising clientele. Users are still indirectly their revenue source.

> Users are still indirectly their revenue source.

It's not clear to me that that's enough. I think that a lot of the current state of the world can be explained by the inability of people—and companies are run by people, and, much as one would hope stupidity would experience destructive interference, it doesn't seem to do so—to pay attention to indirect effects of their actions.

(Maybe Google will avoid this trap—they have so far, emphasising discreet and inoffensive ads over the in-your-face ones that advertisers seem to prefer—but I wouldn't bet on it forever.)

Tech support is one thing but the more problematic thing is that they have an incentive to spy on us to increase value for their actual customers, the advertisers.

But I'm torn, because google also has an incentive to make content available for free, which also makes it available anonymously.

A pretty good point against Google is their user support which isn't that good. I've never been in contact with them personally but I've read a fair amount of complaints. Especially with adwords it's hard to get a fair response from Google.

No, not at all. Worse, Google is a public company, toiling under the requirement (by law no less) to ever increase share holder value. If Google found itself as the main (or sole) player in the cell market there would be a very obvious way to dramatically increase share holder value. And if they play the game properly they will also use this time of dominance to set up so many blocks to market entry that no one will be able to easily do anything about it.

I don't think that's true. Google's multi-class stock system makes them less subject to the immediate whims of the shareholders. Google's main strategy now is to make the internet better. Anything that improves the internet makes them more money. Cell phones are the internet. So if Google improves the cell phone marketplace, they make more money. Google taking advantage of a cell phone monopoly is unlikely if it takes away value from consumers.

Have you read some of the early writings of Bill Gates? It can be difficult to reconcile that with some of the things he did with his company. Maybe Google's main strategy today is to make the Internet better and maybe today providing less value to the customers goes against their goals, but I suspect they're going to exist for a long time. What would make them more money in 15 years when they've killed off every competitor in the space (they may not do this, but they could. They have the resources)?

You have very high expectations of people you don't know, and who wont remain in their current positions forever.

> Cell phones are the internet.

What?

In large parts of the world most people access the internet over their phone, not a computer. For example India.

Even here in the USA people are moving towards using their phone as a primary way to connect with services delivered over the internet.

Sure, I would have bought some statement like “For many people, their cell phones are the way they access the Internet”; but “cell phones are the Internet” seems bizarre.

I didn't know that about India! When I was last there, it was all still Internet cafés. (Well, it was 8 years ago, so I guess it's no surprise that a lot has changed—besides which, I get the impression that the current generation is a lot quicker than Americans to pick up on new tech trends as they become available.)

I meant what I said. I think it only sounds bizarre because you are thinking of the internet as something that is accessed rather than something that exists. Wikipedia defines the Internet as "a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide." Surely a cell phone is one of those interconnected computer networks.

> I think it only sounds bizarre because you are thinking of the internet as something that is accessed rather than something that exists.

Yes, you are mostly right. More precisely, I think of the Internet as consisting of the data on it rather than the machinery that pushes that data around, and this does explain most of why I didn't expect the wording of your comment. Still:

> Surely a cell phone is one of those interconnected computer networks.

Yes, I agree! However, it seems to me that that would be better expressed as kl4m did (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1047752), possibly with ⊆ in place of ∈.

He means "Cell phones ∈ Internet"

I'm not sure that I buy that one, either. Perhaps “Cell phones ⊆ Internet-accessing devices” or, for whimsy, something like “Cell phone :: Person → Internet”?

Yes, thank you.

Until the next Google?

Until now every company has had a weakness. Namely, dominance in some other market could be used to undercut them on price. The way to battle such companies has been to undermine their dominant market, or use the same strategy with a different market. Advertising is so unquantifiable at the moment that you can't undermine Google's market by simply selling advertising more cheaply. You could try to make a better search, but at some point Google wont be so depending on search for their ad revenue.

The thing that is scary about Google is they have unlimited pockets. They can just continue throwing money away until they've taken over every market they care to. And then they can recoup those losses...

Substitute Google with Microsoft and the products with MS products (say, Windows and Office) and you would have a common doomsday monopoly prediction ca. 1998. You can probably do the same with IBM before MS, but I'm too young to know.

20 years from now you'll wonder what you were so afraid of. Google is in its golden age, but it won't last forever.

But MS had exactly the weakness I was talking about. If someone gives away their OS for free what will you do? Giving away advertising for free wont affect anything.

Presumably they have a weakness. As you say, it's hard to quantify what they're doing, but that just means we don't have an easy way to figure it out. It still has statistics, limits and numbers, even if only their accountants have a good handle on what those are.

Well, in this case no one has a handle on the numbers yet. If you don't advertise at all and you have zero customers, then you advertise with google and get 100 customers, then the value is easily quantifiable. But it's never that cut and dry. How much value is e.g. HP getting from google?

If you can't know what the actual value of the service is, how can you make decisions about who is cheaper? Is bing cheaper? Maybe, but what about after you consider the vastly decreased exposure? How much does that matter?

I still think the only way to beat google today is to make a better search engine. Tomorrow that wont work either.

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