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Comment by anyfoo | Hacker News Reader

This is of course extremely subjective, and I have no knowledge of what Google was and is on the inside except for a short internship almost 10 years ago: I somehow always felt that Google with Eric Schmidt as a CEO was a much different Google than later on. Under Eric Schmidt, Google seemed like this extremely innovative company with the brightest minds in the industry. Afterwards, it seemed to instead grow into just another corporation.

Though maybe that's just what growth does in general.

EDIT: I singled out Larry Page before, but that's a bit skewed, given that he founded Google and was its CEO for the first few years.

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The other big thing was Larry pushed social on the company without really understanding social as a product, and was absolutely unable to handle the huge negative response both internally and externally to that push. This all happened at the same time Microsoft and Amazon committed to Cloud (which Google has only tepidly adopted).

The one time I met with Schmidt to explain my cloud project, he was delighted and encouraging and helped shape the design in a way that made it much more effective. He was a very effective leader (although not everybody agrees- some people think he's an arrogant asshole).

I think Page had the right idea, because if you look nowadays at people under 30 for them the Internet is represented by social networks, be it Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or even Snapchat, the internet/web represented by the browser and by visiting different websites via Google is no longer that important. I think Page realized that if Google doesn't hop on the social train they'll end up looking from the outside at a flowering walled garden in which they will have almost no relevance.

I think they had a similar idea after Apple's iPhone started gaining traction, it's only that in the case of Android Google's execution was an order of magnitude better compared to what they did with Google+. I wouldn't put the blame for the failure of Google+ on Page only, I'd also assign it to Gundotra, after all he was the man directly in charge of it all, Page's fault is that he chose and supported the wrong man for the job.

None of G+ was Page's idea. There was a product manager (who left for facebook!) who did the big pitch deck that got it rolling. Then they put Vic Gundotra in charge and gave him carte blanche to modify multiple products. I agree that was the wrong person for the job. But you can't even imagine the amount of groupthink and ego that Vic surrounded himself with.

I don't think it was super-obvious 10 years ago, but social has turned out to be a growth product that led to a minefield for the successful companies (look at Twitter and Facebook now) because the growth strategies were so sketchy that people and the government ultimately had to reject them.

Ultimately, it's on Page, though. He stood up at TGIF and told all the player to "get along" when Search had made a coherent argument that coupling the Social brand with search was brand suicide. I think Google could have made a much less obnoxious social network, maybe it would have been good, but without aggressive growth strategies, it wouldn't have been popular (a lot changed since the Orkut days, most people forget Google had a social network with half a billion users at one point!)

The "trouble" with Orkut was the large majority of those users were outside the United States. Brazil and later India made up the majority.

Those eyeballs weren't worth as much to advertisers, and I don't think Google valued the product highly because of it.

> Those eyeballs weren't worth as much to intelligence agencies

Where on the 10-Q is revenue from intelligence agencies? I seemed to have missed that line.

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

The argument structure there 'a related to b related to c, therefore c works for a', isn't far from what they use on Ancient Aliens.

So, where's the actual profit? Or is this all mind control, friend-of-a-friend illuminati stuff that's assumed to make Google want to do this stuff?

You have a short attention span for a finance guy...

Argue the points, or don't bother addressing the writeup. Good grief.

Going ad-hominem now? What points? You posted URLs. Neither of the URLs showed a revenue stream to Google.

That was because you couldn't "sign up" for Orkut. You had to receive an invitation from someone who already has an account. Therefore it spread in regions where people knew one another, instead of spreading smoothly.

The reason why they kept it like that was because of the processing power that was needed to serve the pages. That was more than search. Every individual had to be served a different page. And computing at that time weren't as cheap.

Facebook was the first large practical social network among these where you can actually go and signup an account on your own when it was fully open. And they did it by heavily optimizing their code and hardware. That was a separate challenge, which seemed to me Google was unwilling to take for Orkut or anything social at that time.

That's what I felt was happening as an outsider.

> Facebook was the first social network where you can actually go and signup an account on your own

Myspace, Friendster, Bebo…

And Hi5 - I remember kids using that before FB took over.

>Facebook was the first social network where you can actually go and signup an account on your own.

That's doubly false :)

First, all social networks that preceded it (LiveJournal and MySpace were big amongst my peers) had open sign-ups.

Second, Facebook became popular because the sign-up was not open. You needed to have an .edu email address to sign up. This was a feature, as it kept parents and younger siblings off the networks. Having a FB account was a literal right of passage, something you can only get once you go to college. It spread because of that; those were the great days of FB.

Minor remark - LiveJournal had a closed invite (or pay to play) system for a few years, before doing open access again. :)

Indeed. But you get the point.

> Therefore it spread in regions where people knew one another, instead of spreading smoothly.

I laughed far harder than I should have.

They are beautiful regions. Have you had the chance to visit?

No way does a social network require more compute than searching the entire internet. That is ridiculous.

They cut Orkut because Brazilians aren't worth much in advertising. Plain and simple.

> Google could have made a much less obnoxious social network

Even today, I think YouTube has a great potential for becoming a better social network, than G+ ever was.

YouTube has been a bustling social network for years. Not everyone gets involved with the social part of it, but it's there.

Very interesting. Social media today is a much more refined offering than google+. Google feels like microsoft nowadays. It’s something for adults to get things done. Your personal stuff happens on DM’s, instagram, snapchat, tiktok... much more so for young people. Therefore keeping search and social separated was a good thing.

Reductio ad Microsoftium.

In some ways, ms is more progressive than the goog at the moment. Office 365 is pretty good imho. Win 10 feels flakey though.

> None of G+ was Page's idea. There was a product manager (who left for facebook!)

Didn't know that, it's cool to learn about it.

About Twitter and FB being on a minefield I agree, but I don't think that will lead to any serious consequences for them, because there's almost no political will to make things right and that happens because the voters themselves (those FB and Twitter users) have almost no interest in how those companies reached their present size. In the end any skilled politician can smell that there's no sense in going to war against a company (or against a communication medium) that consumes at least 3 or 4 hours per day, on average, of their voters' time, it's like a US politician going to war against television in the 1960s, backed when TV had just emerged, it would be public opinion suicide.

Retrospectively I still do think that Page had the right idea to try and force Social (back at that time I also thought it as a crazy idea), like I said, I think that he had sensed that Search will be of almost no use in a world where the internet/web is not represented by websites anymore. I do agree though that even as seen from the outside Page could have done a much better job of getting the Google employees behind him and behind his idea, I think that that wood and arrows metaphor he used was really, really poor and, frankly speaking, quite condescending.

Nah. Larry doesn't get a pass on this one. I was there at the time, and this (unlike, say, Cloud) clearly was one of "his" projects, something he pushed relentlessly and cared about a lot. That's why G+ was where you went if you wanted a quick and easy promo: you could launch a total embarrassing turd and just because Larry liked G+ that turd would be promotion worthy nevertheless.

Seeing the FB revenue figures today I can see why he cared, but I think he undermined the long term prospects of the company with this shit quite a bit, and distracted it from more valuable pursuits as well. That's all on him, not on Gundotra.

Google is not going to sell every g*damn email you ever sent for $$$, but Facebook will and does. So there was never as much profit there for Google as for Facebook because Google was run more ethically.

Never say never. Companies pretty routinely do surprisingly underhanded/unethical things once they begin to experience financial difficulties, if not on their own then under pressure from investors.

Did you miss the time that google was showing ads targeted based on the content of your emails?

Wait, how does FB have my sent emails? I'd think sent emails were one of the few things they don't have access to

That’s interesting. I think Google would have been better aiming for something closer to Twitter instead of trying to copy and mimic Facebook with Google+. Google’s core strength has been organizing information as a data first company versus facilating social connections.

The original pitch deck for G+ (https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-presentation-that-...) really laid out a compelling view for a social network that worked well for people who had multiple distinct subnetworks ad they didn't want to cross the streams. Personally I thought the presentation was brilliant and I was behind the general strategy until Vic took over and started to wield the plus-hammer.

That strategy is dumb because in practice people don't mind or prefer using distinct apps for each of their subnetworks; and when these networks start overlapping in the same app, they start posting less (Facebook's problem), creating multiple accounts ("finstas" on Instagram), or bifurcating their real friends to another app (Snapchat 3 years ago).

Hell the fact that Snapchat succeeded in growing a credible threat to Facebook with a fraction of the engineering and marketing resources as Google+ should tell you how wrong that strategy was...

Each of the networks grew initially by providing an insanely better experience specific to a subnetwork (FB for alumni networks, Insta for narcissistic hobby photographers with its filters, Snapchat for horny teens who want to send nude pics, or who want to be goofy with its funny face filters...)

There were a few niches where Google+ unintentionally ended up being successful, such as internal to enterprise, and for pro photographers who liked that pictures had an option to be hosted uncompressed. But the vision overall had poor market fit and would never have latched on to a dense enough subnetwork to succeed IMO.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz

> I think Google would have been better aiming for something closer to Twitter instead of trying to copy and mimic Facebook with Google+.

Google Buzz was closer to Twitter, and came and failed before G+ was a thing.

"if you look nowadays at people under 30 for them the Internet is represented by social networks, be it Facebook"

I'm not under 30, and can't really say, but I've read frequently in the media that young people don't use Facebook. I use it to a limited extent, and I think everyone I know that uses it is 30-40ish.

Young people use it to interact with family. Their friends are all on other networks.

Why did you cut off the quote there? OP also mentioned Instagram and WhatsApp. Most people under 30 are on Instagram.

Yes, a Page fault.

;-)

But Google completely failed at "hopping on the social train". Are they now irrelevant? It seems now that that "realization" was just wrong.

I for one would like to thank Larry for messing this up.

While current situation is far from perfect (looking at you Mark Z), I don't think having the Borg being the top dog on both Search and Social would have been a great thing at all.

You mean: "the top dog in search, online videos, web analytics, web ads, and social".

It could have been a bit worse. It could have been a lot better as well: google already has one of its fingers on about half the pages of the Internet.

Exactly, thank you for fixing my mistake.

Uncle G has already too much grasp on the web as it is.

Yes, but imagine what could have happened if Google had gone all-in on cloud instead of social in 2011. Instead of seeing some lackluster earnings from a still totally dominated-by-ads-revenue Google, we would have seen a roaring revenue engine fuelled by cloud growth. TBH that was really Google's market to win because they had all the infrastructure to do it in 2011, but didn't want to expand in cloud because it was perceived as low-profit-margin compared to ads.

I'm sure Larry Page is a smart guy, and Page Rank was clever, but I'm not really sure there's any particular reason to believe he knows where any industry is moving. Schmidt could predict technology trends well, while Page seems to just throw acquisitions at a wall, see what sticks, then sunset anything that doesn't.

most of pagerank predates larry; several people were already looking at using centrality measures for page ranking before him. And I think Brin contributed a lot more of the math and theory than Page ever did.

Yeah, Sergey was better with numbers. Like that time when a PM was showing a new payment product on stage and he asked "was that your real credit card number?". She confirmed it was, to which he replied "Anyone could have memorized it... [starts reciting the digits, with the demo already at the next screen]".

> He was a very effective leader (although not everybody agrees- some people think he's an arrogant asshole).

Those two are not at all in conflict, they're orthogonal.

Remember that Larry was CEO twice: 1998-2001 and 2011-2015. During the first period Google was exceptionally innovative. During the second, Google attempted to be exceptionally innovative but largely fell flat on its face.

I'd blame size and market position more. Google was left as one of very few profitable giants standing when the dot-com crash hit, and yet they were young enough to not have the institutional inertia of Amazon, E-bay, and Yahoo. That left them exceptionally well positioned to capitalize on the Internet's deployment phase, where the technology got good enough and widespread enough to really build huge businesses off it. They managed to own the next platform (mobile) but were too large, slow, and entrenched to really understand the implications of it, and they're not even attempting to play in the cryptoverse.

> cryptoverse

What exactly is this and what business is doing well in it?

I am assuming he is referring to cryptocurrencies & blockchain tech. There are plenty of businesses doing well but that's irrelevant. Waiting for established businesses in a growing space before jumping in isn't very innovative.

This is an interesting point: is it innovative to jump into any new thing regardless of its actual potential? You could claim that yes, it is. I would argue that it actually isn't. The key to innovation is to be able to correctly evaluate where there are real opportunities for innovative technologies. It's possible "the cryptoverse" will eventually show that it has such potential, but it has stubbornly refused to do that for the near decade that I've been paying attention to it, despite metric gob-tons of money and hype being thrown at it.

On the other hand, in the same time period (actually in a shorter time period!), machine learning driven technologies like voice and image recognition have gone from sci-fi to commonplace. I ask: which is more innovative?

Jumping into a new thing regardless of its potential is a necessary, not sufficient, component of innovation.

If you wait until it's obvious to everyone that something's a good idea, you're not being innovative, you're just an opportunist. Similarly, if it turns out that it's not actually a good idea, you're not being innovative, you've just wasted a whole lot of time.

Innovation happens at the intersection of contrarian & right. You have to be willing to stake your time, energy, and ego on an idea that many people believe is bad, impossible, or not worth it (otherwise it would've been done already), but you also have to be right in your judgment.

I'm confused by all the assumptions in this thread, including

1. That Google didn't research crypto internally and purposely decide not to pursue it.

2. That crypto is worth staking Google's time, energy, and ego on.

3. That crypto involvement is a direct reason a company is or is not innovative.

Hard lesson learned from a couple of research projects within Google and then again from my first couple years as an entrepreneur:

Internal research is useless.

The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it. People are complex; sometimes they do things that all rational thought says they shouldn't (buying Bitcoin and investing in ICOs would both fit into that category, IMHO), and many times they don't do things that all rational analysis says they should (I participated in research projects while at Google for both micropayments for content and for labeling trustworthy sources on the results, both of which most people would agree are good goals but neither of which has ever worked, and I founded a startup afterwards to provide career guidance to undergrads, which every adult we talked to said "I love what you're doing, and totally wish that existed when I was a student" and every student said "I love that idea and would totally use it", and then promptly never looked at it again once we built it.)

There's no guarantee that external research works either, but at least you've learned something applicable to the next idea.

> The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it.

And then get skewered left and right for shutting down products? You can't have it both ways.

Exactly. I don't think Google is making the wrong choice, given their size and prominence. I do think that making the right choice means that they inevitably lose their ability to innovate, and hence miss out on the next technology choice.

Take a look at Google Reader, though. They got skewered for dumping that. But despite being shuttered years after RSS was a thing, even then it was limited to RSS wonks like a lot of us who were the only ones lamenting it (and the decline of RSS).

Fast forward to today and 10x to 1000x the number of us wonks are getting an overlapping amount of Reader's value (plus new value) from Twitter. The purging of Reader is a distant memory, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily bad to try a bunch of things and kill the non-viral losers (in a relative sense).

> Internal research is useless.

> The only way to know whether a new idea will work is to try it: put some minimal form of it in front of people and see if they actually get use it.

And in the face of a universe of potential ideas how do you determine whether you invest time into prototyping pre-sneezed tissues? Internal research. You’ve just moved the goal post.

Who is making those assumptions? My comment assumed the opposite of #2 and #3.

Most people, not you :P

a) Opportunism is good business.

b) 'Wasting time' is a part of research. If you never fail, you're missing opportunities. That said, you pick your failures with the hope of getting the right kinds of wins... which brings us to...

c) Giant centralized cloud-based businesses have giant centralized and for-the-most-part trusted datastores. There's no reason to use a blockchain if a standard distributed database suits your needs. From where I sit, blockchains are mainly a solution in search of a problem.

(and just imagine the press cycles if a FAANG company rolled out a blockchain, and thus burnt god-knows how much coal bringing it mainstream...)

Yeah, I totally agree that for the sort of problems that Google or Amazon faces, blockchains are a terrible solution. There are well-known best practices for scalable distributed computing, and blockchains are not them.

I'm equally convinced - and I suspect I disagree with most HNers here - that there are also some problems for which blockchains are the only solution - they just don't work with centralized data stores, mostly because nobody would trust a single entity to manage that data store. Google isn't even looking for those problems. In general, Google does not look for problems, it takes problems that everybody knows about and looks for solutions. There are thousands of entrepreneurs in the cryptoverse who are looking for those problems.

There was a time, early in its history, where Google was willing to take a solution - download the web and keep only the links - and then find the problem (search) for which it was the solution. And then they leveraged that solution into all sorts of other problems - webmail, navigation & directions, news, academic papers, video, etc. But the thing is that this is a risky business: most solutions in search of a problem don't actually solve anything, so the time spent solving them is wasted.

It's just so hard to imagine, at least in the current version of the world, a problem for which a distributed trust algorithm is the right solution, instead of a centralized one, probably state-owned if high levels of trust are needed. This is especially true given the advantages that a trusted authority has over blind consensus (e.g. the ability to revert fraudulent transactions).

> that there are also some problems for which blockchains are the only solution

Name a single actual problem that is only solved by the blockchain.

The forces of capitalism and most existing forms of government are anathema to decentralization (inherent in the crypto-blockchain premise). The idealism of decentralization exists only until it meets the overwhelming real world gravity of money. At which point blockchain tech and crypto could only thrive if carried out by hand-calculated hashes on paper transported by motorcycle and carrier pigeon.

> and just imagine the press cycles if a FAANG company rolled out a blockchain

I'm not sure if you're being facetious, but assuming Amazon is a member of "FAANG": https://aws.amazon.com/managed-blockchain/. Does that count?

Which one is doing well? Which company has actually delivered something? And what is it?

The set of companies & foundations centered around blockchain, cryptocurrency, distributed ledgers, and related technologies. Coinbase, Binance, CoinMarketCap are doing great, Bitmain would be doing great except they made a terrible bet on Bitcoin Cash, a number of other organizations (VeChain, IOTA, Ripple, Stellar, Ethereum) are doing "we'll see", and still others (Bitfinex, Tether, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV) are imploding dramatically.

Looks like the only ones doing well are the traders.

Nah, it's the folks who sell shovels to the traders.

Just like every other gold rush in history. Fortunes get created, but often not for the folks who think they're going to get rich.

The whole space is a pile of scams the entire way down. As we are just now learning, tether, the "stablecoin" that makes up the backbone of the entire crypto economy was basically a fraud.

The tech has had 10 years and so far it has produced absolutely nothing of value. In fact considering the damage it has done to the environment, it has been only contributing negative value to the planet.

I assume this refers to cyptocurrency-related businesses. ICOs ('initial coin offerings') collected around $5.6 billion and most of them never delivered any real product: https://www.coinwire.com/ey-report-finds-most-2017-icos-fail...

One could argue that getting enormous amounts of money without needing to produce any results for it is the very definition of "doing well".

I hope there aren't too many people who define "doing well" that way. Seems like it would lead to a total breakdown of the social fabric.

Cryptocurrencies. For example Coinbase is doing well—raised $300M on a $8B valuation: http://fortune.com/2018/10/30/coinbase-series-e-funding/

Google's market cap is 850B. The existence of some very successful companies in crypto does not mean that Google made a mistake by not jumping on that train.

Raising a bunch of money at a high valuation isn't enough to make a company "very successful" either.

Coinbase grew from zero to an $8B valuation in just over 6 years. If that isn't "very successful", what is? ;)

Getting to the point where you don't have to sell off parts of your company to get the cash to sustain your growth. Coinbase is certainly on a nice trajectory, but assuming your goal is to build a real business you haven't succeeded yet if you're still talking about your funding rounds rather than how much money you made last year.

They made a billion dollars in revenue in 2017 and about $520M in 2018, in the midst of a massive bear market. For a company whose primary product is software and doesn't need to worry about cost-of-goods-sold the way that sharing economy companies do. Supposedly they made $450M in profit. They're doing way better than Uber and Lyft are, which continue to lose money even after going public.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/04/how-a-major-cryp...

Google also grew to dominate the browser market during 2011-2015.

Through Chrome, which was started internally in 2006 and launched externally in 2008. Though that also was one of those projects where Larry sponsored a couple of talented engineers behind Eric's back and they put out something awesome.

Behind Eric's back? A company that has tens of thousands of employees and you think the co-founder would have to hide a small initial implementation of a project he believed in?

There's no way Google had tens of thousands of employees in 2006. Although it was probably large enough (between 5,000 and 10,000) that your point still stands.

Absolutely. If it isn't hidden, the developers will have to deal with management, credit taking, metrics, attempts to squash the project, jealousy from other employees, unreasonable pressure (surely a browser can be written in 3 months ...) and being treated as a cost center.

All this would happen even if backed by Larry.

It is a miracle that new projects happen at all in companies, though Google of course actually bought many successful projects.

Yes it is quite amazing how they have almost complete browser dominance and video content creation/hosting dominance as well as search dominance but are unable to come up with even a simple in browser tipping system to hedge against the downfall of their almost entirely ad based revenue.

Corporations are not meant to disrupt themselves. It just doesn't happen.

Netflix did.

Apple disrupted itself at least twice.

macOS are the Apple II series iPhone clobbered the iPod.

Both of those are examples of parallel product groups that eventually migrated one set to the other.

The Apple II product line lasted until 1992, by which point the Mac product line had become affordable to the people at which the apple 2 line had been marketed.

The iPod continued as the iPod classic and iPod touch products until 2015, nearly 10 years after the iPhone was released.

You're assuming that an "in browser tipping system" is a viable hedge to the also assumed downfall of their ad based revenue.

Well Patreon is proving to be somewhat successful, I don't see why something similar, or donation/tipping shouldn't be easy to incorporate.

Patreon launched in 2013 and estimates $1 billion in total payments to creators by the end of 2019. That averages out to $166M/year. Google reported $30 billion in ad revenue for Q1 2019, that's 6 years of Patreon transaction activity compressed into 3 days (or their entire 2019 activity of $500M in payments in less than 2 days).

Can you still extrapolate from this that the tipping model is even anywhere near a threat to Google's ad based business model that they should be incorporating it? And is it even an apples to apples comparison? Many creators don't use Patreon in spite of or to replace ads, they use it as a supplement.

Moreover, just because something is technically simple to integrate, doesn't automatically make it the correct business decision to do so.

First of all, I guarantee a native Youtube donation/subscription/tipping service would already have far more users than Patreon even does currently (see twitch.tv for a great model) due the enormous network effect Youtube already has. Second of all, $1 billion and growing rapidly for a third party service. Nearly every quality Youtube channel I am subscribed to has a patreon at this point, and I can only imagine it increasing as a percentage of income the content creator generates.

> Can you still extrapolate from this that the tipping model is even anywhere near a threat to Google's ad based business model that they should be incorporating it?

No, but we can extrapolate from twitch, and guess that it probably would be.

> Many creators don't use Patreon in spite of or to replace ads, they use it as a supplement.

Because it is a third party site, there is no such option. It would be trivial to incorporate an ad-free experience for donations/subscriptions similar to how twitch does.

>> native Youtube donation/subscription/tipping service

This exists, already competes with Twitch, and is part of an even bigger portfolio of media services from Google. You're arguing for Google to do something they have been doing for years.

https://www.youtube.com/premium

https://support.google.com/youtubegaming/answer/6304294

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7277005

Well I use YT nearly every day and didn't know you could become a member of a channel or what the benefits are. Guess it is just poorly marketed. My bad!

Its up to individual channel owners to enable it. If you don't know about it, that's probably because nobody you watch uses it.

Then they should just buy Patreon like they bought YouTube. Why risk failure if that’s actually a good hedge? A: It probably isn’t a good hedge because they know Patreon can’t even remotely scale to the size of the AdWords business. People just generally don’t want to pay much for content. Better would be leveraging subscriptions and then developing a money distribution process to support the content people will come for. I think they are trying with YouTube TV and Red.

Youtube is their content business division and already has tipping, superchat, subscriptions, ecommerce and premium channels. It also has ads and is highly profitable.

You're vastly overestimating what people will actually pay for and underestimating how big and critical the ads industry is.

Are you talking about contributor.google.com?

> unable to come up with even a simple in browser tipping system to hedge against the downfall of their almost entirely ad based revenue

Google has launched multiple micropayment products as replacements for ads. Nobody uses them.

There have been experiments that you probably didn't hear about. I liked the old version of Google Contributor, but apparently few others did.

> they're not even attempting to play in the cryptoverse.

They aren't even attempting to play in snake oil or astrology either

Crypto is 99% woo, but the 1% is interesting. The interesting stuff isn't world-stompingly amazing, so it gets less press. I like the idea of someday being able to take pennies worth of payments from places where transaction fees alone at traditional payment processors represent a huge % of income. Bitcoin won't be the one to do it, but some of the coins that depend on something other than proof of work might.

At least I hope it's not Bitcoin. The power use is obscene.

I'd say it's 80% woo, 1% of what you call interesting and 19% is solving real user problems with breaking the law. Mostly transactions that you can't depend on banks for - like buying drugs.

I think being able to make small transactions with low fees is a human economic problem, not a technical one. How would crypto do anything better or differently, other than the idea of "let's spend power on proof of work instead of trust" which you seem to dislike?

Penny payments will never* be viable.

* Never say never. Basically I don't think it could possibly be viable because it would require the total cost of transaction to be less than pennies. That includes the shopkeepers time to manage the automated store, the electricity used in the transaction, and a bunch of other non zero components.

Hell even transactions with real pennies today are almost a net loss. We eradicated 5c coins in NZ because they cost something like 6c to make.

And to be clear I understand you mean micropayments in general and maybe it is something possible im just not yet convinced the electricity costs will allow it unless it's subsidized in an unsustainable way.

> We eradicated 5c coins in NZ because they cost something like 6c to make.

Why would that matter? A 5c coin is spent thousands, millions of times. Why would there need to be any connection at all between how much it costs to make the coin and the value that coin represents in a transaction?

Possibly the bullion value trending in such a way people might be tempted to start scrapping them in the foreseeable future :)

If the extra cost is labor it's fine, but not if it's material cost. People have been know to melt down coins and sell the metal when the intrinsic value of the coin exceeds its face value. This practice is illegal most places, but avoiding the situation altogether is probably better!

I think it was actually the cost of the metal, i.e. the metal was worth more than the denoted value.

There were other reasons like inflation making 5c coins largely irrelevant (we also had 1, and 2c coins phased out years earlier) (also 1nzd=0.5usd at that time)

NZ has also been largely cashless for at least 20 years now. (Link below has some interesting info/graphs)

https://www.paymentsnz.co.nz/resources/articles/two-sides-of...

I think the only reason this happening was even a big deal at the time was because they replaced all coins at the same time with much smaller, lighter and cheaper versions. I.e. it wasn't a big deal at all but rather the swap over was.

Transaction costs for small payments on Bitcoin are much higher than the 1.5% a credit card processor takes. Crypto has been nothing but dreams (and sadly lots of scams, as I had to personally witness)

>they're not even attempting to play in the cryptoverse.

Which is a good thing considering how much of the population's life is already intertwined with and recorded by Google. I can't imagine anything more dystopian than a Google issued currency.

So, a few years ago, someone mentioned something very similar, and I asked them to elaborate because I was curious.

This was their response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14540332

It's well worth a read.

Google has been an ad company from the time they IPO’d until today when 85% of their revenue is still from ads.

From a business side, they really haven’t done too much.

> From a business side, they really haven’t done too much.

Myopic. They've greatly increased the eyeballs available to them through new products and business relationships

It’s been over 15 years and their net income was down year over year, their traffic acquisition costs were up and their margins were down.

The “eyeballs” they are creating are less valuable and are more expensive to acquire.

Isn’t that the same business plan of every startup? Get “eyeballs” and worry about profit later? What’s going to happen as more people start using ad blockers?

They are still just a one trick pony.

>> They are still just a one trick pony.

Nothing wrong with that when it got them to a trillion dollar valuation. And Google Cloud has the potential to be even bigger than their entire ad business.

Well “valuation” is just what the stock market thinks. Whether a business is sound is based on things like net income.

If “valuatoon” is all that counts, Uber is a successful company.

Google Cloud isn’t exactly capturing the hearts and minds of most companies compared to AWS and Azure.

Regarding Google Cloud, that may be true but 1) they took way too long to figure out what an opportunity it represents and 2) in terms of internal culture and external reputation they are not well suited to take advantage of the opportunity.

The former includes things like not being good at enterprise sales, the history of allowing employees to veto customers, and ADD induced by the wacky promotion system. The latter includes a legion of techies burned product shutdowns and abandonments that will never, ever believe that google really cares about back compat and long term support no matter what kind of contract language it puts out.

What's the evidence to any of that?

What's with the persistent narrative of google not being "just another company" and then (sadly?) becoming one? that's some fairytale nonsense.

There’s plenty of anecdata from the employees. When I first joined Google 9 years ago I was terrified of not being as good to google as google was to me. I bled the google colors.

The last time someone asked me what it’s like to work there, I said “it’s just a job” on instinct.

There is nothing wrong with being "just a job", it most likely always was, the rest was just in your head.

It's better for the company to help the delusional embrace the "it's just a job" mentality ASAP so that they and the rest of us might be spared the weekly public hissy fit.

I worked at Novell while Eric Schmidt was the CEO. I thought he was a great leader and enjoyed working at Novell while he lead the company; in spite of the fact that my direct boss was an oversized tube of ass paste.

I liked Google as a company a lot better during Schmidt's tenure as well. Best of luck to him in his next role.

The growth phase at Google when Eric was A CEO was very different than later when Larry took the helm.

Had nothing to do with Schmidt, it was all timing. Google was young, new & hungry. Conquering and not defending. Google is grown in a new phase, relaxed and now having to play defense to all the new unicorns wanting a piece of her pie.

Larry hasn't been the Google CEO for some time now. I do think the company got caught up in incremental goals and internal PC struggles during Sundar's time, making it feel like yet another large company rather than a powerful disruptor it used to be.

> internal PC struggles

There's plenty of reasons for why they started taking place, that have nothing to do with who is CEO. Societal expectations have changed, formerly unpopular ideas gained both a voice, and mindshare, and Google's influence over the Internet has grown - and with it, expectations that that influence should be wielded responsibly.

Intelligent people strongly disagree as to what 'responsibly' means in this context.

Do you think Oracle encourages the sort of open internal debate culture that precipitated that well-known incident?

The responsibility for corporate culture is ultimately with the CEO and the board.

Do you think Google would have attracted the talent it did with a culture like oracle's?

Just because a CEO decision has consequences doesn't mean it isn't ultimately up to the CEO or the board. Making executive decisions that involve trade-offs is their entire job.

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