This Is How Google Will Collapse
hackernoon.com
hackernoon.com
(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
That seems awfully circumlocutious. It's interesting how the narrative has shifted from "SEO will kill knowledge" to "filter bubbles spread by hostile governments will kill knowledge" to something a little post-capitalist here like... "advertising will kill knowledge"?
What stuck out to me and got me looking for timing information, though, was that it doesn't feel well integrated. There are ways to update old articles so that they are fully current, but this one is mostly taking an old article and adding more examples without thinking about how this affects the overall argument.
Excerpt from the linked article: In these two case studies, all that was changed was the time stamp on the blog post. In both studies, the sample posts received a more than 50% growth in traffic in the weeks following the update.
Dismissing YouTube as unprofitable seems laughable, big media companies are probably kicking themselves for not trying a similar concept earlier. That’s the kind of business where an eventual single digit profit margin will make you tremendously wealthy.
Google Maps is another example of an ad driver that’s not easily replaced by a competitor. Only giants like Apple and Microsoft can compete on that product.
G Suite has made major inroads in the lucrative enterprise productivity space.
Google is also slowly building a devices business, and all you have to do is take a peek at Apple to know how successful that can be.
Google has the #1 web browser with growing market share to alarming Internet Explorer levels with its search engine and tools set as the defaults. Comparisons to Microsoft’s fall from grace assume history will be repeated, but unlike IE6, nobody’s making a faster/noticeably better to the end user browser than Chrome.
As far as the search ads itself, I don’t know that the article makes a compelling case that users simply don’t use search engines or the general Internet anymore. The current trend of ad blocking is that they are getting less and less effective. I’m sure Amazon and Facebook have taken a slice of that advertising pie but it seems unrealistic to expect them to take the whole thing.
Not only that but Google’s ad platform allows website owners to place ads directly on sites, so an external link on Facebook can take a user right back into Google’s revenue space.
Google just can't care as much about Springfield as the people who actually live in Springfield do. Maybe a government database swears that's a new housing estate with asphalt roads, the reality on the ground observed by mappers who live there is it's still a field.
1. Traffic data harvested from people whose location data is being shared to Google. This allows for much better routing as gmaps will automatically route around traffic.
2. A team of paid developers making probably one of the best driving-routing algos out there. I've used osmand and the routing is absolutely trash. Same with the web version of OSM. Until this improves massively, gmaps isn't going anywhere.
3. Incredible search. Searching for places on OSM just isn't great, and gmaps has all the extra bells and whistles when it comes to searching for, say, "restaurants" and it gives you different cuisines, price ranges, etc... Perhaps when considering a solution like OSM, this is better suited to a separate restaurant search app to keep OSM from bearing the burden of having to accommodate all these uses.
I say all this as an avid OSM contributor. I love OSM and I really want it to be good, but it's just not there yet.
If there comes a day beyond online advertising as we know it, then Google will collapse; Google cannot compete effectively outside the Web.
You are almost right, but didn't look high enough. Alphabet, the big holding company at the top, can survive Google's collapse, and Alphabet is diversified.
I would suspect the advertising itself has been diversified as well, but I can’t say I can prove it.
That’s why I think any sort of “collapse” would be so slow that it could be mitigated by other growing segments.
I'll take Firefox any day, any night over Chrome. It is simply a better browser to me for many reasons, and I put it everywhere I can, with Chrome only as a backup.
Not only that, until recently, Firefox had battery usage inefficiencies on the Mac. End users will notice that kind of stuff.
Unfortunately, marketshare numbers aren't lying as you say.
I still use it on all my machines and phones and try and get as many people as I can to try it out. Got some people to use it permanently.
I don't find any reason to use Chrome apart for testing (Chromium). As every day browsing option I really don't see a choice myself. It's Firefox.
Yes, and that is because Google is actively pursuing all the ways they can to break user's ability to block ads.
They are doing this in all products they control. In Google Chrome and Android.
Someone will build a better mousetrap.