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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

Yes, let’s destroy one of the few large companies which has found a viable method of long term innovation instead of endless cost cutting and outsourcing.

Let’s force Google to be like every other company in needing to constantly extract money from every project quarter by quarter.

Not to mention that it is not clear that any except advertising are viable businesses by themselves.

YouTube wasn’t profitable for a while. Even if it is now, it is probably barely so.

Not sure how Maps would make sufficient money without deep integration with advertising.

Android would just be dead.

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To be fair the "old Google" mindset died off a decade or so ago during the big Google+ push when they feared an existential threat in Facebook. That threat never quite materialized, probably because FB are just as unsuccessful with their also-ran products as Google are with theirs, but Google still shook themselves up into a company I no longer admire.

For example (and sorry not trying to pick on any team in particular!) compare something like Google+ to Facebook Search, where the team had to actively make the UI worse to use to juice their metrics for FB's onerous performance reviews so they could keep their jobs and continue working on FB Search at all.

Does anyone remember back around the time that Graph Search was a big deal when you lost the ability to directly click on FB Search typeahead results, like starting to type a friend's name and clicking on the suggestion to go straight there? Requiring two clicks instead of one means every one of those searches now counts as a "full" search results page impression =p

I get what you're saying but what if because of this people start to use decentralized alternatives? Open source programs with sufficient support don't take as much money to run and develop as a proprietary service would. Obviously not everything would work but I imagine if we moved social media to something like the fediverse which has already proven sustainable enough it might even be better. Also with android dead, people would focus on more innovative alternatives like linux mobile or the late windows mobile. The few services for the public that google runs that are objectively good and free is google earth, the google search engine (to an extent), and maybe youtube. I like how they innovate but as it is if you tried to cut out google entirely from your life your quality of life would drop substantially to the point where it might affect your job and well being. That is the main problem with google and that's why people think it needs to be broken up.

> like the fediverse which has already proven sustainable enough it might even be better.

Is that going to scale to more than a couple non-technical users?

> if you tried to cut out google entirely from your life your quality of life would drop substantially to the point where it might affect your job and well being. That is the main problem with google and that's why people think it needs to be broken up.

You can say the same about Microsoft Word. When will that be broken up in PowerPoint, Word, and Excel?

Honestly I’m wondering what innovations they’ve had in the last 5 years. I’ve been around long enough to see their decay in that area. YouTube you mentioned was an acquisition. Android was created in 2008. Maps in 2005. What’s really new with Google besides a ton of failed ideas like Reader, G+, and messenger apps?

It's worse than that. Maps was a 2004 acquisition[0]. Where 2 developed the base map tech originally, and Google acquired them and a couple of other companies, combining them to launch Maps in 2005.

Android, also, was an acquisition[1]. Google bought them in 2005 and launched in 2008.

Even their core ad business is mostly-acquired from DoubleClick. Even the "personalized search" they're known for involved an acquisition! Really, the list is amazing.[2]

[0] https://medium.com/@lewgus/the-untold-story-about-the-foundi...

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2010/10/27/google-exec-android-was-b...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

List is amazing ! They've just lucked out on their success.

Project Loon is quite interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loon_LLC

Fiber would have been great had they succeeded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber

Photos Tensorflow Waymo

Can go on and on...

Self-driving cars...

> Force Google to be like every other company in needing to constantly extract money from every project quarter by quarter.

I agree with the article but have my upvote: this is good counterargument to parts of it.

I imagine android would probably survive via search engine placement fees similar to safari / iOS / firefox.

Also funded by all the phone manufacturers who have a vested interest in seeing it not die (like the Linux kernel)

Phone manufacturers on average aren't particularly famous for their contributions to the Linux kernel. It's still notoriously difficult to get mainline Linux to run on any Android phone even years after its initial release.

I'm not talking about phone manufacturers funding the Linux kernel, but how they might want to fund an "Android consortium" like Linux is funded by companies like Redhat and IBM.

> Let’s force Google to be like every other company in needing to constantly extract money from every project quarter by quarter.

I think you're actually making the argument for breaking up Google. Their search monopoly is so powerful and so profitable, that they can afford to just throw money away on hundreds of terrible side projects.

Having lots of profit just means it is a good business.

It doesn’t demonstrate that it is a monopoly nor that it is a harmful monopoly.

There are plenty of other highly profitable areas of business. They just usually take their earnings instead of investing them in new things.

"Having lots of profit just means it is a good business."

Are you going to seriously argue that's the case? The companies that created the opioid crisis made a truckload of money off it. Health insurers make tons of money. For that matters, dealing illegal drugs is very very profitable and that's why crime syndicates are involved in it. So is selling weapons to the military, or generally involving yourself in foreign wars.

Thankfully Google, Facebook etc have not had the kind of negative impact the opioid crisis has, but there's a proven record of negative impacts like the whatsapp lynchings.

Yes I am going to argue that case.

Profits alone do not indicate something evil. Evil things can be profitable, but the inverse is not necessarily true.

In this thread, you have asserted:

* Large profits don't make Google a monopoly * Large profits don't make Google evil

However, no one in this thread asserted otherwise. On the other hand, above you assert that large profits alone are enough to qualify Google as a "good business." It's very easy to come up with historical examples of businesses that made lots of money, but which no one would describe as "good."

Google is a monopoly, not because it makes lots of money, but because it is a monopoly. It captures the vast majority of internet search traffic.

> that they can afford to just throw money away on hundreds of terrible side projects

How is that a problem? I'm glad we have companies that can afford to experiment.

> YouTube wasn’t profitable for a while. Even if it is now, it is probably barely so.

First search result...

"YouTube generated nearly $5 billion in ad revenue in the last three months, Google revealed today as part of parent company Alphabet’s fourth quarter earnings report."

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...

And what about the costs? I don't know how to find that for youtube, but here's netflix:

> Netflix operating expenses for the quarter ending March 31, 2020 were $4.809B, a 18.4% increase year-over-year.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/opera...

They're obviously not comparable directly like this, but just based on internet bandwidth usage, they're probably in the same ballpark, but netflix has a far, far easier technical problem. They have a relatively small library that can probably be cached easily. Imagine the infrastructure that is behind a youtube CDN.

That doesn't demonstrate that it turned a profit though. Video streaming is costly and they pay over 50% of that to creators.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21121370/youtube-advertisi...

Maybe people should just pay for it?

Oh no. How could they make us pay for the software services. Imo, this mentality needs to go. People spend $$$ in cafe, buy expensive branded clothes, transportation, hanging out with their friends, outside food, and so on. All of those are not necessary but they pay for it. They should pay for the digital services they spend most of their time on now a days. What's different?

Everyone has the option for an ad-sponsored or ad-free YouTube for a monthly fee.

Which is how I've been watching YouTube, ad-free for years.

Except, they don't. People aren't willing to pay much for non-physical goods anymore.

/me looks at my Patreon bill

Yeah, no. The problem is Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is garbage, and people don't like to pay for something that is mostly garbage.

If there are no free services subsidized by google or other tech corp, then they will have to pay or shut up.

> People aren't willing to pay much for non-physical goods anymore.

Anecdotal

And guess who's fault is that ?

I pay for Youtube premium, I see no ads, it's amazing...

What is your point here? You want Youtube to be like a cable television company and make money off ads and subscribers?

How does this relate to YouTubes 5BN in revenue?

or we could all move to something decentralized like peertube. It doesn't need to all be hosted by one company.

That doesn't tell us how profitable it is. It might very well be spending more on infrastructure and networking than it gets in revenue. For comparison, Netflix's cost of revenue was 3.6 billion dollars last quarter.

Revenue is not profit.

Sure, but how much did that $5B cost?

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