Hacker News Reader

Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

> What's surprising to me is how un-monopolistic Google's share of the Cloud + AI market is under its control, considering how many of the techniques were invented there. I'd put it at under 25%.

I don't find that surprising because Google is a mess. They're a very poorly run organization, making decisions that make no sense at times. Their inefficiency and/or incompetence is probably the only reason why they haven't wreaked havoc on all of the markets they have their hand in. And the various monopolies they do have are, as monopolies usually are, immune to stupid decisions that would kill most other companies.

I think it might be because their corporate culture of being the good guy/"don't be evil" is incompatible with the reality of their situation. Like cognitive dissonance at a corporate level. I wonder how many of their employees in positions of power are still living in that fantasy, and making decisions based on it?

View on HN

From my conversations, Googlers indeed appear to earnestly argue for their company in ways that directly ignore or fail to recognize the monopoly power they wield. It absolutely feels like line employees are unable to grasp what market power is and how the company wields it.

Executive level people seem too adept at defending the company and avoiding certain phrases or concepts, I believe they all know. Things like suggesting routine conversations include a lawyer and tagging them as such to try to include more conversations in attorney/client privilege shows a desire to hide guilty actions.

I've noticed this in many companies, but at Google it does seem particularly worse. In private conversations with friends, I will at least be cognizant of the bad things that the company I work for is doing - it's just a job.

But many Googlers seem to perfectly fit that Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

That said, I don't think you can see how Alphabet's lawyers talk and think that they are somehow living in a bubble or are not having these sorts of high-level strategy discussions.

I have zero experience at the levels of Google when it comes to market dominance. But I do have some for certain niche products in the chemical sector, where I worked for one of two suppliers in exostence. And there I, a simple low level team lead, received dedicated anti-trust training. Including what wording to use in e-mails and what words to avoid. So I would guess, Google is much more prudent and higher management levels, especially since this discussion is nothing new.

Googlers are definitely trained what language to use and not to use. Though I think there is still a cognitive dissonance where they believe they're just avoiding problematic statements as opposed to avoiding admitting blatantly illegal behavior.

Why would a company believe it's doing illegal stuff? That wouldn't make much sense unless it's made out of people that are OK with doing illegal stuff (Mafia?). So of course most employees don't believe that.

And whether or not such training is meant by executives to hide illegal behavior that they are aware of it's also catching many cases where people are just dumb and use wrong words to mean different things, words that have specific meaning in a legal context and that can hurt the person and the company although there was no illegal act being done.

>They're a very poorly run organization, making decisions that make no sense at times.

How many messaging apps have they launched and killed?

Do you mean as of right now, or at the time you posted?

I said this before, but I still believe Larry and Sergei removed themselves completely from the company because they couldn’t care less about the ad or cloud business per se. More so they might even view it as dirty. It’s a means to an end. Amass as much money (ad/cloud) as possible, get the best possible experts in CS/AI (so many phd’s) and gather every last bit of relevant information/data they can get.

It seems kind of obvious. Their goal is to organize the worlds information and make it universally accessible and useful. What better way to achieve this than to somehow create an AGI/ASI. They are certainly the best placed org to do it.

What are some specific examples of being poorly run?

Personal opinion? And this applies almost equally to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. But that they all lost the messenger wars. Of the four, Google was the best positioned to take mobile, really the best positioned of any company in the world. And that blunder is probably a bigger blunder than Microsoft and Facebook arriving late to the mobile world. Because Google WAS the mobile operating system, they were the cross platform browser vendor, and they completely, absolutely, 100% failed to deliver a worldwide mobile first + desktop messaging solution that was better than the competition.

Does this not in fact support the claim that they are not quite the monopoly that people make them out to be? That it is in fact not that easy to abuse their power in owning the platform to gain market share in messaging?

I'm not sure what people want these days: people are angry that they have successful products that people use more than competitor's prodcts, and also angry that they have unsuccessful products that are shut after failing to gain traction.

I dont know how the accusation that they are a monopoly in search and advertising related to them being poor at spending that money to become a monopoly elsewhere.

Interesting.. I’ve seen the messaging wars start up again every 5 years. The current iteration is business oriented with slack etc.. but that doesn’t mean it won’t be personal again.

Mobile is all about power management. Apple got that right and really nailed the UX.

I don’t think Google knew that playbook at that point. Maybe Rubin did but even MSFT blew it.

Quite honestly, I think Facebooks play to overlay chat ontop of something more addictive was its big win. Then having a mobile app to talk to the same people.

None of that matters anymore, because Messenger/IG/WA are all mobile apps that most people probably dont chat as much through on a desktop/laptop. But at the time, it gave people a compelling reason to have the messenger product open on screen. Google Talk was similar, being overlayed over Gmail, but google squandered having a Talk bar over the bottom of every google property. Yahoo as well. Yahoo News should have had messenger across the bottom of the screen.

On the mobile front, FB Messenger sort of won out because people started to like iMessage, but there was still a need for a cross platform alternative. I believe Apple could have prevented FB Messenger from being a thing, had they released an Android client along with a browser extension. Apple's best move was releasing iTunes for Windows, something they are scared to repeat, and shouldnt be.

>On the mobile front, FB Messenger sort of won out because people started to like iMessage, but there was still a need for a cross platform alternative. I believe Apple could have prevented FB Messenger from being a thing, had they released an Android client along with a browser extension. Apple's best move was releasing iTunes for Windows, something they are scared to repeat, and shouldnt be.

I wonder what the numbers are on WhatsApp vs FB Messenger, because people of all socioeconomic levels, languages, ages, country, and tech literacy use WhatsApp in my experience, whereas only Americans of a certain age group use FB Messenger.

WhatsApp is the clear winner since it has always been optimized for very old devices. But it's now a FB product anyway. At some point FB will develop a unified messaging product... maybe in response to antitrust.

how much revenue is in the mobile messaging business?

I mean the gold standard here is WeChat. QQ is probably the next one. Messaging apps are probably more important than FB for example. The problem right now in the US is friction with using messaging apps for payment. Venmo, apple pay and other apps are making inroads here but we are still mostly confined to credit card interfaces.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com