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Comment by educar | Hacker News Reader

So, Google makes fantastic products. Much of our online interaction involves Google in some way or the other. And the only way these guys have figured to make money is ads.

Why can't they sell products and be like an Apple, Oracle, Microsoft. I am guessing it's too much work to grow in such a massive pace without ads. Ads are a marketers/sales persons dream and these marketers are very likely to spend money.

This ad economy is so very sad and it's killed many nice things. Everyone is just giving out things for free and nobody wants to pay for anything thanks to this whole ad economy. News reporting has gone to the dogs because nobody wants to pay. Email will no see decent progress thanks to gmail.

Anyway, I feel Google will be a much better company if it can get rid of dependence on ads but I guess it's too late now since it has to answer to shareholders and show never ending growth.

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>>Email will no see decent progress thanks to gmail.

I remember how great email was before GMail:

1. Every few days I had delete emails so that I can get new email.

2. Delete sent mail immediately to make space for new emails.

3. More than 50% of emails received are spam.

Yeah right GMail was one that stopped progress of email :)

As I noted, Google makes great products including gmail. My point was that with gmail being free and good enough, there is nobody to compete with gmail. In 2016, nobody will start an email company even though there are lots of advancements that can be made.

It was acquired and shut down, but https://www.mailboxapp.com/ was a thing recently.

I'll note here that the email startup Acompli, started in 2013, was acquired in 2014 for $200m. Their product is now Outlook Mobile.

Gmail hasn't had nearly the stifling effect that one might assume!

I don't agree with this. Google competes against Gmail with Inbox (a very advanced email product.) I also see people paying for Fastmail and some of the encrypted email products. Yahoo and Microsoft have also been improving their email services. I always like to see more competition, though.

>>even though there are lots of advancements that can be made.

Such as?

My company, my school, and just about every person I know uses Office 365 for their business email. Tons of people pay for email.

Future progress though...may be very different....security and privacy considerations are hardly a good thing for GMail as a revenue source...

You honestly had really shitty spam blocking before. That's all. Nothing more. They didn't invent spam free email.

My morning routine involves marking at least ten emails as spam on my gmail account. They really aren't the be all and end all of spam blocking.

My non-gmail account (on an address that has been around for almost a decade before gmail existed) running a more modern anti spam solution, not nearly as bad.

    Why can't they sell products and be
    like an Apple, Oracle, Microsoft.

Econ 101 on HN again.

Aside from what Google's doing. You're assuming that the value someone personally derives from using something is the value other people derive from pushing it to them.

I.e. you have ads on Google, some of which cost >$10. To the companies paying for them that makes sense, because they might be selling a product that costs $500-1000, with say 10% conversion.

But a user is never going to be persuaded to pay >$10 simply to click a link.

So yes, there are some things Google does for free that they could be selling, but a) they may not be easy to sell directly b) even if people bought them it wouldn't make up the difference they make from ads, because the value isn't on the consumer side, it's on the advertiser's side.

Nobody was questioning the economics, it's obvious why they do what they do. I was questioning the kind of company Google wants to be. It can be greater (in my eyes anyway). For example, Apple can still generate phenomenal profits just on the basis of their product and doesn't need to resort to putting ads everywhere.

When you have optimized your company structure, culture etc for one type of output, it is not easy to do things that are entirely different. It will either deliver a compromised "new" output, or (even worse), compromise the output that is the mainstay of the company.

Google could not just become a wildly profitable Apple-style "hardware first" company overnight (or, arguably, ever).

Conversely, we have all seen Apple struggling to deliver cloud services that are reliable and desirable (beyond their integration into Apple's ecosystem) since the days of iTools and MobileMe..

Are the companies paying $10 per click? Otherwise I'm not sure you're making the appropriate comparison.

$10 per click for Google's US search traffic is not outrageous.

Yes, they are: http://www.wordstream.com/articles/most-expensive-keywords

#20 is "cord blood"?! TIL that some people preserve their children’s umbilical cord blood in case the stem cells become medically useful someday.

Wait until you learn about placenta teddy bears: http://www.inhabitots.com/doing-it-for-the-kids-design-exhib...

(for the people who don't want to eat them)

Interesting, even though it's now 5 years old. I'd be interested in the evolution. Also, a pie chart? Really? I can't fathom who thought it'd be a good idea…

"mesothelioma attorneys" is $50+ per click.

Expected value of a class-action asbestos lawsuit = Millions? 10s of millions?

That, and its really hard to lose those cases. Shooting fish in a barrel.

Not even class-action, just individual lawsuits.

For mesothelioma, an in-person referral from a doctor to an attorney is worth well over $10,000. Of course the doctor doesn't get paid until after the successful suit - but even discounting the time value of money, it's easy to see how advertising at $50/click could work out.

"Anyway, I feel Google will be a much better company if it can get rid of dependence on ads"

Do you feel like the NFL will be a better company once it rids itself of that pesky "football" dependence ?

Will McDonalds finally break free of the hamburger racket and flourish as a company ?

Google isn't some company that just happens to make a bunch of money from ads - they are an advertising company. Period. The end. Online ads stemming from search results is the thing they do.

It sure sounds neat to bootstrap a world-beating conglomerate and dominate all market spheres with your plexes full of big brains, but it's not going to happen.

It's not going to happen.

They will live and die with the search ads. They will not disrupt the car industry. They will not launch rockets to mars. They will not solve homelessness.

While I upvoted you, it is still possible to pivot to another industry. Nintendo after all started out by selling playing cards.

The problem is not that nobody wants to pay, but that in the digital economy, content and many software products are relatively easy to copy. And once you got that, you know that the cheapest guy will win and take most of your customers, so why not be the cheapest guy, especially if it pays very well ?

The other option is to make your product hard to copy by network effects or data collection, but again, here it's natural for the cheapest guy to win.

I don't think it's easy to copy. I can understand that the search market is ad driven. But they have put ads in everything now. Why does gmail have ads? It's not easily copyable and people will take years to build a decent gmail competitor.

And good products that didn't have ads like google reader get shutdown :/

Agreed, I actually moved to Fastmail recently and it costs me annually but the lack of being the product and actually a customer feels nice.

Another customer of Fastmail. It has served my well and overall has been a much better experience than Google Apps.

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