Google’s Dominance Is No Longer a Sure Thing | Hacker News Reader

Google’s Dominance Is No Longer a Sure Thing

wsj.com

91 pointsspking124 comments

To some degree this is probably wishful thinking, but I feel the growing contempt for Google's dismal stance on privacy (eg recent changes to Chrome) may eventually harm their market share. This is especially true if it turns out that personalized ads have less value than thought. For me, the change in perception was certainly the reasom to switch from full on Google disciple to deleting my accounts.

I argue this has certainly affected facebook already.

Then again, lots of wishful thinking, i admit.

Removing an API that let's any extension peep at every single request you make is many things, but I don't see how it's "a dismal stance on privacy". FWIW it's how Safari does it, and everyone always cheers Apple for their stance on privacy, but then Google does it it's suddenly a dismal stance...

Apple has equally gotten a lot of pushback for the adblocker. Safari's approach is clearly inferior and has a lot of the same problems - compared to uBlock Origin. When Apple blocked alternative approaches, everyone here on hackernews was suspecting its because Apple's move into the ad business. I think no one applauded Apple for trying to control what ads can be blocked. I strongly suspect that Safari is much more vulnerable to tracking and anti-ad-blocker scripts. Certainly if they come from Apple. I don't use it for that reason. So no, this is not a distinction.

but Google also logs everything on phones and basically sells access to that data. And every week they find new ways to pull a fast one on users who thought they had disabled these "features". That's why Google is hated more.

> Removing an API that let's any extension peep at every single request you make is many things, but I don't see how it's "a dismal stance on privacy".

I've seen this argument come up multiple times on HN. The V3 Manifest doesn't have anything to do with whether or not extensions can monitor network requests.

Google isn't removing the observation abilities of the webRequest API, just the blocking abilities[0]. All of your extensions will still be able to spy on you after these changes in exactly the same ways they did before. The point of this change is (ostensibly, at least) to increase performance, not privacy.

Safari on the other hand completely removed the entire webRequest API. This was not actually widely regarded as an uncontroversial, positive move, and today ad blocking extensions on Safari are almost universally less effective than their equivalents on Chrome and Firefox. But at least Safari's change did actually improve privacy by some metrics because it deprecated everything, not just the blocking bits.

[0]: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nPu6Wy4LWR66EFLeYInl3Nzz...

One thing I have learned about business is that this is not true at all. Hurting social norms or political ideas does not harm most businesses. People care about the benefits to themselves individually. They don't care about anything more than maybe a passing thought or an online venting if they really care.

It's not dismal, it's calculated. Monopolies can afford that.

That doesn't mean it can't be dismal too.

Fairly enough. Although I want to live in the illusion that Google at least likes money more than anything else, and they weight their options. The alternative is scary.

Today was the first day the quality of Google search results pushed me to another search company (duck duck go). I was trying to find info on the Virginia Beach shooting. And every query I tried brought the exact same results. 'Virginia Beach shooting reddit' brought no reddit, only the same ~6 news sources. I wasn't even in a personalized algorithm bubble (using an anonymous browser). The propaganda potential of Google seems to be actualizing rapidly (or maybe just my cognizance of it).

The reason they did this was fear of attack from the media. You can find dozens of articles saying how Google & Facebook are "promoting the alt-right", the end result being mainstream media sources more promoted than ever. Go figure.

You can see the same thing on YouTube.

As a company Google can be very hard to work with.

A few months ago a few different software packages all were erroneously flagged as malicious by Chrome, which then was picked up by Firefox. Bunches of small vendors had nothing, there was no clear appeal process, there was no one at Google to reach out to.

All there was, was a link to a message board staffed by volunteers, not Google employees.

The lack of meaningful support is a huge gap in our scale-at-all-costs and automate-everything tech culture.

It is just frustrating because the entire business relies on downloads/sales. And with a flip of an algorithm you are shut out of 80% of desktop market share.

Not only that, if I Was presented with the message, I would be hesitant to ever come back to that site, the reputational damage is lasting for the user.

"a few different software packages all were erroneously flagged as malicious by Chrome" is that something you could sue them for?

http://archive.is/XGaPs

Heads up for 1.1.1.1 users, archive.is DNS servers answer with bad address, so you won't be able to view this page.

This isnt true, you just get redirected to archive.fo

It's[0] known[1] issue[2].

[0] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is-error-1001/182...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317

[2] https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680

not necessarily. I'm using 1.1.1.1 as well and I get no response.

or just append "?mod=rsswn" (without quotes) to original URL.

Thank you for your help

Thanks mate!

Rupert Murdoch has had it out for Google for the last 5 years and the WSJ is the vanguard of his effort.

https://www.google.com/search?q=rupert+murdoch+google

Sounds like pr when Google is under antitrust investigation

Other than the clickbait headline, does this paywalled article add anything not covered in previous discussions of the antitrust investigation of Google?

Suggestions that Google's position in the marketplace was already slipping due to competition.

> Yet recent developments have demonstrated that even Google isn’t invulnerable. Alphabet’s most recent quarterly results showed a significant—and surprising—slowdown in Google’s ad business.

They suggest Amazon is eating into the advert industry, and it's hurting Google in a big way, and that AWS and Azure are burning them on the cloud front.

> And Google trails both Amazon and Microsoft by a wide margin in the fast-growing market for cloud computing services.

”showed a significant—and surprising—slowdown in Google’s ad business."

Cleverly written by the WSJ to be misleading. It was actually a slowdown in the growth of their ad revenue. They still made more $ than previous period.

I personally think google's inability to move past the their search and advertising business model is because of their workforce and the incentives to get promoted within the company. Blind hiring of programmers based on algorithmic questions and blind promotion of people for launching new and often poorly designed products has crippled the company.

The major issues with their hiring process have been known for a long time, look at all the HN/reddit discussions, blogs, twitter posts, and many others. The impact of their poor promotion/incentive structure is very publicly visible, look at their complete failure in the messaging space, giving up a huge lead they had with Google Talk and Hangouts. They could've dominated this space. And all the other popular products that were cancelled. Their poor customer support is well known by everyone, the algorithmic shutdown of Google accounts due to false positives with no recourse.

These major public failures would've caused massive culture shift in most companies. But nothing changed at Google. The reason why? Success hides all failures. For a long time, the ad business was so lucrative and successful, nothing else mattered.

But now with the ad business showing signs of faltering, the impact of those failures will start to become very noticeable. They will try to focus on greatly expanding new revenue streams like Google Cloud. But here, their poor reputation with customer support will hinder making any progress against AWS and Azure. They will try to launch new products, but years of burning customer goodwill by shutting down products (again, look at their messaging apps) will make it difficult for anything to become popular. And with decreasing profit and revenue, they will have to decrease their total compensation packages. Then their hiring pipeline will completely collapse. High total comp is the only thing keeping their hiring going. And even that isn't enough for many senior engineers in the industry because they have angered so many with their arrogant and stupid hiring process. Without the high total comp, they have nothing. And when they start missing the targets during quarterly earnings reports, those fat bonuses, RSUs, free food, other perks, signing bonuses, will be among the first to go. Then come the layoffs.

> The major issues with their hiring process have been known for a long time

Does Google have a major issue with their hiring process? They seem to be able to hire the talented people they need. I guess it's an issue for the individuals that get rejected, but not for Google, who seems to get as many people as they want.

If these people are so “talented” and not people who can memorize leetCode, where are the profitable products?

Google has gone from zero to three quarters of a trillion dollars in 20 years. The people there didn't do that by memorising code.

And Blackberry was also successful for years. Google just announced a year over year decline in net income as their revenues grew less than their traffic acquisition costs. Their entire business is predicated on more people not installing ad blockers and businesses not moving even more toward Facebook and Amazon who have harder to block ads.

I don't think the hiring process is the reason for Google's inability to gain market share in the cloud market. Google's hiring process has ensured that the quality bar has been very high. They have unique offerings like spanner, which other clouds are simply not anywhere near of. Their failure in cloud is mostly because the inability to sell primarily, and secondly maybe because of their support being not as good as other clouds. But both are specific classes of directions taken by their leadership.

The argument isn't that the quality bar is too low, but rather that they're measuring "quality" in the wrong way.

If you'll permit me a joke, if Google was only hiring the tallest 0.1% of people, that's a high bar that might not result in the best products.

But megacorps hire in such volumes that it's simply not possible to ensure any quality at all by any measure. It's all just random people that even perform worse when put in a corporate environment. So overall it's below average quality.

So they should continue to hire by a metric that doesn’t work? Not try anything different at all?

What different metric do you think would work better? Github? I have seen people get job offers by taking someone else's project, editing commit history to make themselves the author, and then push it to GitHub and talk about that project in their interview. Sure, sometimes on drilling deep enough you would know people are faking it, but a lot of time people would pass through.

I just mean to say that all hiring criterion have tradeoffs, and none is strictly better than the others.

Nope, don’t give me the “oh there is no better way so let’s continue using our shitty way” excuse. Citing another poor way of hiring does not make the existing one better.

And I don’t know what a new process should be. Google has the data from literally millions of applications and has decided to just ignore them or not to try different ways of hiring? Give me a break.

Or maybe "the data from literally millions of applications" has made Google realize that their current way is the best among all the others possible? Who knows.

Or one day when Google isn't doing well there is a sudden phase transition to say the current way is the worst among all the possible.

We assume somebody competent is looking at this, but for all we know they are using the same dumb myopic evaluation as they use for promotions. I mean the same people came up with both.

How have Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon managed to diversify?

At least Microsoft and Amazon have the same interview style as google. The questions might not be as hard, but the interview style is same. All sorts of DS and algos. Infact, one of my friends once went to a microsoft interview, where even the interviewer had a leetcode like website open on his browser and asking questions from there directly.

Everybody follows the reputational leader. You can say Google ruined tech interviews.

Google didn't invent whiteboard interviews. Microsoft was doing it way back in the early nineties.

>So they should continue to hire by a metric that doesn’t work? Not try anything different at all?

If they're making money, then it works, and they should stick to it.

That's their actual metric, not developer competence in itself.

Blackberry’s highest revenue quarters were around 2010. Three years after the iPhone was introduced. Profits are a trailing indicator. But even if you don’t buy that, Google’s net income was down last quarter. Revenue was up but traffic acquisition costs were up even more.

What if Apple had stuck to just selling iPods in 2007? Just like Blackberry, more iPods were sold in 2007 than ever before - the same year the iPhone was introduced.

What if Netflix had kept shipping DVDs or more recently didn’t invest in its own content years before other providers started pulling theirs?

>What if Apple had stuck to just selling iPods in 2007? Just like Blackberry, more iPods were sold in 2008 than ever before - the same year the iPhone was introduced.

Sure, but how are those things relevant? Those are strategic decisions, not decisions made by developers -- and don't concern what we're discussing, if the devs they hire are good for the company.

If somebody at Google C-level decided "let's close down Search and Ads, and just make kitchen juicers" their profits would also tank.

But that's not related to if the devs they hire are good for them. Unless their profit is hampered by dev output (and not one of the other reasons it can go down), their devs are fine for them.

Who do you think gets promoted within Google what are their incentives? If engineers slowly move up the ranks based on the same culture and incentives - creating products that are soon abandoned. The entire culture of Google is not conducive to the diversification they need as ad sales become less profitable.

The culture is shaped from the leadership. There's no requirement a company needs to promote developers to strategic thinking positions.

There isn’t a requirement but from the outside it looks like that’s what’s happening.

Making money is one metric. How about diversified revenue stream? Do you think they should be concerned about that?

They probably should. But it's not the concern of their developers.

That's my take, too. Google is good at designing and building software systems. They are also just fine at running them. Where they tend to have trouble is sales and customer support. I expect that's a product of where they had their biggest success: in help-yourself ad sales. I makes perfect sense that an organization would double down on its strengths.

What good is “building software systems” if you can’t produce products that people and businesses want? After all of these years and all of the initiatives, still almost all of their profits come from ad sales.

It's entirely possible that this state of things will continue. Google will continue to be a/the leader in online ad sales, and periodically they will try to expand into some other lines of business, never with any particular success. That's not the best possible place to be, but it is a good one, particularly since ad sales are so very lucrative.

As long as the trend of blocking ads doesn’t increase and as long ad buyers don’t see Facebook as being better at targeting.

Ads on the FB app are almost impossible to block.

I think it goes even a little deeper than that: "help yourself" can be scaled to a level of profitability that is objectively impossible to reach once you put humans in the loop. I don't think that Google is interested in diluting their existing high profitability activities with lower profitability, so whenever they enter a new market like cloud computing they effectively limit themselves to the subset of that market that is open to absence of human support. Just like on the other end of the scale, Oracle is limiting themselves to the subset of their market that will gladly pay extra for the privilege of getting overrun by salespersons.

edit: in other words, I think Google would rather have a highly profitable slice of the market than dominate it and have all the gains eaten up by a greedy sales org.

I think all companies would want to "have a highly profitable slice of the market than dominate it", since it ensures higher profits and frees you from monopoly accusations, but only few have managed to work it in a good way (e.g, Apple). In most markets where Google succeeded, they ended up being dominant.

Apple didn’t do that by reducing cost. They have hundreds of physical retail stores where they hire people directly (not contractors). They did it by offering a product that people were willing to pay a premium for.

Does anyone think that GCP is successful by any metric compared to Azure and AWS?

The real question is, does Google really need to dominate to be successful? We should be rating success by the quality of a product and market share is a relatively poor proxy for that.

The quality of the product especially for enterprise products has a lot to do with the quality of support. Google also lags there.

And this is attitude is the issue. You have a lot of geeks who know nothing about what businesses need to succeed because the hiring process is optimized for those who can memorize leetCode.

Why is it the jobs of engineers of the company to know what businesses need to succeed? Why do companies hire and VPs and directors for. Sure principal engineers and above do get a say in what to build, but I don't think they are hired via red black trees. It is the job of the leadership to assess the market and focus the company. The job of most engineers to build and at most have say in the product, not in what market to tackle.

Because the entire aim of every employee at the company is to either make the company money or to save the company money. The engineers are so busy “doing cool stuff” that none of Google’s products outside of ad sales have made any money.

And before someone mentions Android, according to information that came out during the Oracle trial (that Google tried to keep redacted), Android has only made Google $22 Billion in profit during its entire existence up until then.

Exactly this. Google products always feel like they weren’t designed by someone who carefully thought about and empathizes with the end user (thinking of Google cloud specifically).

Off course the end game of every employee at the company is to make money. But people are hired for specific focused areas for a reason. If you expect your engineers to do your VPs and director's jobs too, you should fire all you senior leadership. The employees aren't doing cool stuff because they don't care about the directions from above. If the product directions are wrong, it is a fault of senior leadership more than anyone else.

Android has made sure google will survive. If iOS and windows phone were the two dominant platforms, they could change the default search engine at any time, and give Google a huge shock. In the post PC world, without Android google would have been at the mercy of the mobile vendors. A lot of search income should be direct result of android, which the above figure doesn't acknowledge.

And in the end, Google still has to pay Apple a reported $9 billion a year to be the default search engine so they don’t lose the statistically more affluent iOS users.

What does it say about Android that even Eric Schmidt refused to use one years after it was introduced?

https://www.cnet.com/news/googles-eric-schmidt-why-i-love-my...

Can you imagine the CEO of Apple telling reporters how much he loves his Android phone?

The problem is that the VPs were former engineers.

Yes google is still paying Apple for iOS. But if iOS was 50% of the market and other 50% dominated by let's say microsoft, Google would be paying Apple a lot more, along with possibly not being the default search engine on Windows Phone. The difference is gigantic. Paying Apple 9B$ should be fine for Google as long as they are making proportional money from iOS.

> $22 billion in profit

I mean, "only" is relative here.

Total after 8 years? Apple makes a larger profit than that on iPhones in one or two quarters. That’s probably less profitable than the Apple Watch will be after its first 7 years.

The majority of Android's value to Google is indirect - by having people view their ads through their platforms and the developer mindshare that comes with the platform. It's exactly the same strategy as Chrome. It is very telling how difficult it must be for developers on the Play Store though.

Back then they didn't sell hardware which is where most iPhone revenue comes from.

> I don't think they are hired via red black trees

No, they were hired long ago via red-black trees and got promoted for building google plus.

Exactly. People seem to be missing that these engineers that are memorizing red black trees to get hired are seeping into the rest of the organization.

You’re oversimplifying why they’re failing in the cloud.

* _Immmature Product Offering_: No good, cost effective SQL solution (cloudsql is a terrible solution), small list of managed services (managed sftp please? It would take maybe a month for a team of Google engineers to spin one up)

* _Support Sucks_; except if you pay for premium support in which case it’s decent.

* _Shitty IAM_: too coarse, too confusing. Custom roles don’t always work. IAM roles can be granted on a project, bucket and ... subnet? (Yeah, really).

There are other things I could go in detail if someone bought me a beer. The only saving grace is that GKE is actually a pretty cool managed k8s offering, perhaps the best in the market.

There is another very large factor in what has set Azure apart from Google. Google is more of a pure play competitor to AWS. Azure got a big jumpstart due to the Windows enterprise market adopting them as a natural home. From there Azure has gradually leveraged itself into taking some share of the Linux market. The Windows business segment provides a lucrative, lower competition base for Azure. Realistically, Google poses zero potential threat to the large Windows cloud business that Azure will yield billions in annual profit off of in time.

Also, here's a list of reasons why investment in Google's cloud might be hard for third parties - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Discontinued_Google_s...

It's the promotion process moreso than the hiring process.

You can only be promoted if you fit a pattern that your job ladder's promo committee recognizes and if you are already performing at the level you're going to be promoted to. May have worked well in a 10000 employee company but it’s extremely conservative in a company of Google's size. It knee caps recognizing innovation outside whatever's considered "traditional" for your ladder, and it is blind to any roles which require cross-ladder, cross-organizational OKRs and accomplishments.

Source: not a Googler, will never be a Googler, but friends of many NYC based Googlers who all seem to be looking to leave out of frustration with the promo process.

In my experience, the category of comp. sci. grads that these riddle based interviews select are often very smart, but have difficulty in developing novel solutions to real world problems. Not sure why the industry still relies on these methods so heavily...

Some of the smartest and most creative people I ever met were when I worked at Google. The problem has far more to do with perverse promoting incentives, poor management, and corporate inertia than some "hiring process"

> The problem has far more to do with perverse promoting incentives

As a Googler, I agree. The promo system is fucked up here, and everyone is micro-optimizing for promos. Nobody gives a fuck for developing long-term, stable and scalable solutions. People just want to fling shit on the wall, and if it doesn't stick fling some more. Sooner or later something will stick and they'll be basking in the glow of L_{N+1}, before starting the process all over again. Google is very top-heavy now, with 1000s of people sitting at levels 7+ doing absolutely nothing (since you don't get demoted for lack of production).

Hah, sounds a lot like Big Blue. Boat loads of seniors who do “design” but can’t code anymore. They set the “agenda” and the grunts are supposed to just follow that advice. Stay there long enough and you begin to think you have no agency, nothing that you think matters since nobody is listening anyways.

The difference I think maybe that Seniors at google may actually be super smart, just not engaged.

If you're smart and do nothing, what difference does it make?

Excellent point. It doesn't really.

I wonder if, looking at these examples, BigCo's are actually doing Tech a disservice by promoting the fuck out of high performers until they reach such a senior level that they don't need to do anything no more. I guess my concern is that these folks could have been accelerating the pace of tech even more, but are basically sitting out committees, managing others, and in general not making the kind of ground breaking progress they would have made otherwise.

Kind of reminds me of Feynman's view of the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study; he viewed the institution as the place where good people went and stagnated.

I wonder why some of those very senior engineers don't leave. Anyone who got to Senior Staff or Principal at Google has some very impressive accomplishments to their name. Transitioning to a CTO role in a smaller company wouldn't be difficult. Why settle for stasis?

I finally stopped hiding my contempt for this sort of hiring process.

The massive majority of positions out there are perfectly fine with a generalist that doesn't have photographic memory of their old college algorithms book but can code their way out of a variety of bag materials.

Maybe one day AIs will replace that level of software engineering, but we're still far away.

IMO, AI has a better chance of replacing the other kind

ITT: a massive roll-call for sour grapes.

P.S. Life would be easier if you just bit the bullet and finally learned those algorithms. It ain't that hard.

Personal attacks, which this is, will get you banned here. Would you please review the site guidelines and follow them when posting to HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

When I interviewed at Google I knew all the algorithms, and when I got rejected they said I should contribute to more open source projects to raise my profile instead.

This isnt the case, I work in quantitative finance in NYC. We occasionally interview engineers coming out of google. Often times their compensation does not match the level of engineering skill that they bring to the table. It's my belief that google is overpaying for the people they hire.

It's possible they're looking elsewhere for a reason. In other words, selection bias.

And still, develop poorly designed or executed software projects?

Come on don't add your echo to the chamber of the nuisance of the IT industry which is causing a gatekeeping to brilliant talent from other fields. It's what actually causing a stale in innovation now.

Anyone with sufficient study and grit can master those and come up with excellent implementations. Now what I will consider too stupid is if I ask someone to prove that "knowledge" to me in less than 1 hour.

[Disclosure: I am learning and working on those algorithms on a pretty much daily basis, just from a perspective of broadening your thinking & logical skills during your learning curve (Why we need to learn Pythagoras theorem, if we are not going to ever use it?: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10154359309646005 ) they don't serve many purposes except developer's ego. Not to mention that there have been better implementations of these algorithms out there. And you can always pick and choose.]

Could someone please post a link to a non-paywalled article?

I don't know why, but appending "?mod=rsswn" to a WSJ link does the trick.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-dominance-is-no-longer-...

Here in HN you have to fight to read a WSJ article. WSJ articles are pure quality, and for you normal human, to lay eyes on that supreme piece of journalism, clicking "web" and playing with the referrer is not enough.

Jokes aside, can't bypass the paywall either.

Does the web link work for anybody? Hasn't worked for me in a long time.

Disabling JS for the site seems to work for me.

https://subscription.wsj.com/wsj-com-wall-street-journal/

That's a lot of money for one article.

We need a better payment model for this environment where we're all reading a few articles each from lots of different publications. Maybe a micropayment per article (pushing the pay button is less work than getting around paywalls), or a consortium model where a lot of publications team up and divide your subscription money according to how much you read each one.

I subscribe to what I read most, but I'm not going to subscribe to thirty different magazines and newspapers.

That’s totally fair, but you can just not read articles in publications you don’t want to buy, right?

I could, but since the publisher doesn't get my money either way, and showing me the article costs about the same as showing me a paywall page, I don't see the point.

Bypassing paywalls seems to me about as offensive as going to a bookstore and looking through a magazine without buying it. Maybe I end up buying a magazine, but I'm not going to buy every magazine I pick up, and basically everybody thinks that's fine.

I’d say bypassing a paywall is like tearing the plastic off a sealed magazine. If the publisher was okay with you thumbing through it they wouldn’t have sealed it in plastic. Same with a paywall. Publishers have the option of a nag screen instead if they want to go that route.

Google who inspired me to create then invited me out to demo and spit in my face SUCKS!

I met/was invited by many other huge tech companies who similarly no deal was made but they were respectful and professional unlike arrogant/ignorant Google! They have a history of doing this to those dreamers they inspired to create.

Glad to see they are on the hot seat and I seldom use Google search anymore! All my friends/peers/family/etc members know what I mean when I say I DDG(ed) instead Googled it. Some start using DDG too cause they say Google sucks too!!!

I wish I could get away from their other services!

In what way did they "spit in your face"? Sounds like an interesting story.

See my comment to this story in which an MIT student went for an interview with them in which she declined their offer yet google went ahead and patented her work. I met with those same scuzbags myself and back her story up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929

Wonder why my comment here is being downvoted? It is relevant to what Google is today ....run by arrogance and ignorance that’s catching up them!!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com