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Comment by edmundsauto | Hacker News Reader

Another argument would be that advertising allowed the internet to develop as it is, to the scale it is. It's impossible to separate the accessibility, progress, UX, and information available from the core business model that enabled so much of it.

If ads had never been allowed, would search be more like AOl's keywords? Would we still be limited to 10MB in email storage? Think what you will, but Google has developed a ton of impressive technology and open sourced quite a bit of it; they have been much more open stewards than I would expect if AOL and IBM and Microsoft built out the internet.

(They have also given everyone a ton of value without asking for money from users -- it's important to not underestimate how far we've come on the backs of the ad dollar).

It might be a faustian bargain, or it might not be.

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IBM and Microsoft both contribute more to open source than Google. In fact, the explosion of the internet occured during their primes moreso than Google.

What Google really pushed forward was SaaS and the free price tag was a trick to make it seem as good as open source.

But when it comes down to it, Gmail is worse than Windows 7 when it comes to user power. At least you can use windows 7 without a constant connection to Microsoft.

These are valid counter-arguments; my intention wasn't to litigate the merits of each claim, just to mention that as the parent had trouble conceiving of other options than 1.

I will say, however, that your claims would be challenging to verify or refute -- quantity of contributions may not be a good metric, and it appears your Gmail/Win7 comparison is based on a single dimension (user power) which is further limited to one dimension of that dimension (whether it requires a constant connection).

You may be correct, but your comment didn't provide much of an argument to get me to think more of the problem. It just seemed like you needed to negate my (also unsubstantiated but admittedly devil's advocate position) out of some sense of anti-google sentiment.

I think you really had a good piece of feedback going until you made it personal in the last paragraph. It does not endear you to the reader and from an intellectual perspective I don't understand why you'd finish an otherwise well-structured response like that. If it was out of anger, I would expect it in the front. Can you explain what made you write it like this?

Microsoft is in the open source game to domimate it. They want to be in a position where you can't realistically run an open source project without their involvement. Their recent moves around github all point in that direction.

IBM has more of a consultancy perspective: they want rheur business customers to pay for services provided on top of existing solutions. And open source platforms make it easier to sell custom extensions.

> If ads had never been allowed, would search be more like AOl's keywords?

Not sure how that's related to ads. I've been online since 1996, and AOL wasn't available in my country, although did get those AOL trial diskettes with my copy of C&C: Red Alert.

Xcite, Yahoo, Altavista, Askjeeves and others simply had a search box and an alphabetical directory of sites. I didn't hear about Google until 1999 when I came across a Time Magazine article about it, and there were ads on the internet well before then.

> Would we still be limited to 10MB in email storage?

Are you sure ads are related?

If you calculate the cost of 10MB of hard drive space in the good old days of Yahoo mail, adjust for inflation, calculate how much hard drives you can buy now for that money, you’ll get at least 100GB. I don’t think average gmail mailbox approaches that size.

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