Comment by ColanR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ColanR | Hacker News Reader

So what is this? A big PR piece so we'll feel all sorry for 'that poor Google CEO that's got such a tough job'? (first paragraph, he talks about how he's "not good at multitasking", and some things are "difficult".)

At least, that's what I'm thinking after reading the article. it kinda makes sense, too, that Google is looking for a bit of a breather after this much coming against them. Still, I think the stuff they're dealing with is pretty much what they asked for.

- ads next to "unseemly" youtube videos: this is their core business, and in every other place you buy ads it matters where those ads are placed and who sees them and in what context. This problem is exactly what Google is expected to solve.

- gender inequality: this seems to come with the territory. every other CEO in the US, not to mention North America & Europe (etc.) is dealing with this too.

- staff protest about Trump immigration policy: the CEO was on their side. In his words, "the fight will continue." He doesn't get to say this is a headache he's got to deal with when he takes that kind of approach.

- a big regulatory fine. From what I've heard, it's almost impossible that Google wasn't rather careless in letting this happen. 'ask forgiveness, not permission' seems to be a mantra that Google follows, and this seems to be an instance where they're now asking forgiveness.

- and finally, Google is 'too big' and people are worried about its power. "boo hoo, we were too successful."

[sources for everything are in the main article or linked from it]

Deal with it, Sundar Pichai. You've got the same job every other CEO has got, and the same pressure. Buck up.

Indeed, the public and regulators are not pushing enough, the floor needs to be hotter for the CEO, whoever is in charge.

Google has lost its cute startup image long time ago and people have realized companies are never out there for the social / greater good, just for profits.

It's time to break up Google.

> Google has lost its cute startup image long time ago and people have realized companies are never out there for the social / greater good, just for profits.

It's more than that. Their behavior has changed.

Some years ago everyone was on their side because they were fighting for network neutrality and building Google Fiber and supporting Linux and providing Chilling Effects links to notify users of DMCA censorship and generally sticking it to the MPAA/Comcast/Microsoft.

These days they're not only not really doing that anymore, now they're misidentifying videos with YouTube Content ID and infecting web standards with EME and tracking everyone much more comprehensively than they used to.

People only think you're on their side as long as you continue to do things that show you're on their side.

Aren't they also accomplices on the net neutrality attacks?

They could stop companies from advertising "free" Youtube if they were for net neutrality. Same goes for Facebook and others, of course.

some examples from the 3 big operators in Portugal:

http://www.moche.pt/tarifarios/moche-legend/

https://www.yorn.net/yorn/tarifario/yornx.html

http://www.wtf.pt

Those things are what gets HN riled up, but none of those things are noticed or cared about by mass consumer sentiment.

That's driven by stuff like political stances, ad and content moderation practices, search result ordering, and other much less technical concerns.

> Those things are what gets HN riled up, but none of those things are noticed or cared about by mass consumer sentiment.

People are always forgetting that tech people are the ones involved in decisions about tech stuff.

When a huge corporation is deciding which cloud provider to use, the decision falls to the IT department, not the transportation department.

When Uncle Bob isn't sure which phone to buy, he asks his nephew the programmer instead of his other nephew the geologist.

When a reporter writing a tech story is looking through their contacts for someone to call for background, they choose the professor of Computer Operating Systems over the professor of Russian History.

When the government is involved in tech litigation, the EFF is there, not the ASPCA.

When some tech issue is in Congress, Wikimedia and Mozilla can put it in front of millions of people, not some blogger with a hundred readers.

It is usually unwise to disregard the interests of the people with the strongest influence.

When a huge corporation is deciding which cloud provider to use, the decision falls to the IT departmen

Cute. The decision is made by an executive based on a magazine article they read on a plane, or on what their buddies on the golf course said, then handed down by diktat to the workers. Same with all outsourcing deals.

Agreed, I can't recall a single instance I have seen where a major purchasing decision was influenced by anything out of the tech portion of the company unless the CEO was from the technical side.

> Cute. The decision is made by an executive based on a magazine article they read on a plane, or on what their buddies on the golf course said, then handed down by diktat to the workers.

I'm sure that has happened somewhere at least once. But in general what happens is that the executive reads a magazine article about The Cloud and the IT department gets orders to "do cloud" when the executive doesn't even know what that means. So the details fall to IT, like which provider to use.

And in the cases where the details are decided by people who don't understand the technology, they'll inevitably choose the wrong things and pay five times too much. Which makes it easy for IT to get a lower quote from the provider they actually want.

I mean your argument is essentially that executives are all incompetent and easily swayed by shiny objects and bright colors. But that was sort of the point -- they're as susceptible to being controlled by crafty subordinates as crafty vendors, if not more so.

> It's time to break up Google.

Just like Apple, Facebook and Amazon?

Apple and Amazon actually sell you a product, they are not in the business of selling yourself to others.

Why would that mean they are less deserving of regulation? Microsoft sold products during their regulatory troubles, so did the Rockefeller empire.

You see the warning all over the place:

"If you aren't paying for the product, you are the product" doesn't mean that if you are paying for the product, you're not the product.

This is the first time I've seen someone completely ignore, and even directly contradict, that incredibly common warning.

Amazon both sells you products, and turns you into a product.

Google sells a product, just not to you; they sell to advertisers.

Amazon does both. https://advertising.amazon.com/

In a few more years. Go after the biggest fish first.

Don't forget salesforce, microsoft and oracle.

Apple has < 15% marketshare in EU, so that's low priority for now.

Facebook? Yes.

Amazon? Even more yes.

Apple has 100% market share for Apple users .

By this logic, we should break up BlackBerry.

It was more of a if you own an iPhone you are required to get all your apps through Apple and are charged accordingly so, reducing competition and ultimately being fleeced with pricing.

Yes, and that's an issue, but it's basically irrelevant compared to Google, with over 2 billion users.

Abuse is abuse.

First things first

Yes, but it isn't monopolistic abuse. You can always go to another phone and another ecosystem and probably get the very same apps.

Abuse of dominant position requires dominant position.

When you are forced to use their eco-system it makes them the dominant position by default.

But no one is forced to use their eco-system. You can buy an Android and use their ecosystem. You can buy a Blackberry or Microsoft phone (I think) and use theirs.

So maybe don't buy an iPhone? There are tons of alternatives, and Apple doesn't hold a majority of the market share in any country.

Or maybe instead, we should open up the app market, so as to reduce the monopoly power over that market.

That is a really naive view of market share. The market for phones is tiered, and Apple dominates the tiers it wants: The profitable ones. It doesn't take 51% market saturation to have monopoly control.

Please explain how Apple has monopoly control over high end phones.

Anybody who wants to get out of Apple's system can easily pick up a different high-end phone[0], with different tradeoffs, with few repercussions beyond how their Apple Watch (if they have one) works and the color of their messages when texting iPhone users.

That's not monopoly power.

[0] as a consumer I care about the phone's features, not its profit margin for the manufacturer. There's still a healthy ecosystem of non-Apple companies making phones.

One thing regulators could do is force Apple to support the installation of other operating systems on their hardware and allow OS X to be installed on other systems that are reasonably similar to their hardware (i.e. "hackintosh"). Perhaps even demand that Apple support ways to develop iOS that aren't tied to their platform.

How exactly would this benefit consumers? Arguably it would suck — either it’s not well tested or they spend so much time and money testing they don’t ship as much anymore.

Btw, you can already put Windows on their hardware, or Linux for that matter.

Why should regulators do that though? Are consumers lacking viable alternatives to any Apple product?

Apple aren't a monopoly, they aren't a problem in the way Facebook and Google are.

huh? Facebook and Google are monopolies?

> Apple aren't a monopoly

I'm not sure that's the case; Apple isn't as dominant in share of any intuitively-described market as, say, Google and search ads, but a more relevant test for monopoly is pricing power, and I wouldn't be surprised if they in fact have that for some of their products/services.

Which? What product do they not have an abundance of competition in? I mean they have the minority market share in every category.

Pricing power isn't defined by descriptive categories, it is defined by behavior (whether they can increase prices without sales moving to competitors.)

It's a test that exists because there are an infinite number of ways to construct named categories of products, which can create any appearance you want, but none of them tell you if things in that category are genuinely competing with each other.

More to the point, using the category "iOS app distribution" pretty clearly leads to the conclusion that Apple has pricing power there.

Apple doesn't set prices for the apps they distribute except for their own apps. The developers do.

That's not the price of distribution. The price of distribution is Apple's cut.

Can developers sell you iphone software without Apple in the middle?

Not easily, but they certainly can sell Android software.

The person I was responding to wasn't talking about pricing power, they were talking about monopolies. Apple isn't anywhere near a monopoly in any commodity or service. In fact, they compete with the near monopolies of Microsoft and Google.

Also, being a monopoly isn't in and of itself illegal, it's abusing your monopoly position to harm competition. You have to be a monopoly first.

Pricing power is a test for whether a monopoly exists; it tests for actual practical competition rather than the presence of other participants in a decriptive category which may not actually compete in practice.

It may be a test but having pricing power doesn't mean they're a monopoly. They have pricing power because they deliver more consumer surplus in their products than what they capture. Even in the case of the iPhone business having rising ASPs most of that has come from segmentation of the customer base into higher end models rather than simple price increases.

You don't need to have a monopoly to have pricing power, your product just needs to be differentiated enough.

You don’t get to redefine monopoly to fit your argument.

Google has a natural monopoly. I am a big supporter of penalties for monopoly abuse but not all monopolies are bad. They do all need thorough oversight and regulation. But having a monopoly is not strictly bad. The illegal actions done to maintain them are strictly bad. They should be allowed to come and go as the markets demand.

Monopolies that are allowed to exist (e.g. last mile telecom, utilities) are usually very tightly regulated. Probably to the extent that Google would prefer to be broken up instead.

I'm not sure you could break Google up in a meaningful way without destroying it. Considering the majority of their revenue is search how could you divide up search?

Not destroying it would not actually be the goal. Breaking it up could mean, for instance, splitting one search engine into two.

A "natural monopoly" is something like the water or sewage or electricity provider where is isn't sensible to physically run more than one set of pipes into everyone's house. That dynamic doesn't apply at all to search engines.

They aren't, but they are definitely dragging adoption of progressive web apps behind.

You don’t seem to understand what a monopoly is. Tell me a single category in which apple is a monopoly. High profit margin != monopoly.

I'm surprised no comments talk about reducing regulation to help this problem too. If it were easier for small ISPs to thrive, then there would be more competition. The question is: how many areas is Google thriving in which are prohibitively expensive to enter due to regulations?

Another competing factor is that Google makes most of its money in advertising - so every feature of every product has the opportunity to be compromised for the benefit of advertising. Internet advertising needs another revolution!

That was fun to read. :)

I disagree with first part though, "don't write (like) this." Bloomberg's writing style is a little of old fashioned corporate sounding, but that's just style. It's also OK to write from a certain pov, including a ceo's.

I agree with the rest. All comes with the territory. Good reminder how nuts that territory is.

Glad you enjoyed it. :) I sometimes to use parentheses to indicate rabbit-trails of thought, if that's what your comment was referring to. And yes, I guess it is pretty nuts to be running a big company. Not that many of us would know anything about that. :P

Poor guy might have to "spend more time with his family" and collect a 9 figure golden parachute. ;(

Expect more PR articles for FAANG companies in the coming months. Elephant in the room: http://thehill.com/policy/technology/356170-trump-will-nomin...

Trump probably has Google’s number because it was a big Clinton supporter. Thiel even referred to Google as a utility. I would say Facebook would join them but Thiel is on its board.

Microsoft has been behind all sorts of anti-Google lobbying to have them regulated as a utility, enforce anti-trust regulations against them in EU, etc.

Anyone court watcher or MS watcher around since the late 90s knows they are entirely deserving of suspicion.

Pfft...corporations and biz schools can't produce people who can solve these kind of problems, therefore we will see exactly what happened to HP, IBM, Sun, Nokia etc happen to Google.

There is a long line of pointless CEOs that all these companies produced that nobody remembers today. Why? Cause they are programmed like robots to believe in infinite growth.

agree. i wouldnt be surprised if they weren't paid by google, doing something for a google employee, or invested in google.

Google does not pay for articles, AFAIK. However, having a high profile individual like Sundar Pichai interview with you has huge benefits for cash flow anyways: Your ad revenue will skyrocket, because other major sites will also cite you and link to you as they also post the story. Google does not have to pay a site for the site to profit from promoting Google.

The big thing is, Google will not grant it's exclusive interview treatment to news sources which are heavily critical of them, which means that any news site or blog which gets interviews with Googlers isn't going to risk that revenue source by getting on the Google press folks' bad side. This is why sites like The Verge which regularly get insider treatment, and interviews with Sundar Pichai, Matias Duarte, and Astro Teller will never really write a truly critical article about Google.

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