This is textbook "how empire falls" and why things that seem indestructible eventually dies like anything else.
This will be the mile stone people will remember as the first sign of google decline.
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
It also has a stupid name.
Given that we're in a thread underneath someone endorsing Bing as a good option, that sounds like a plus.
> with some graphics to tell you how much they love privacy every 2 seconds.
That is their differentiator, yes.
> It also has a stupid name.
As... Opposed to Google or Bing? This is your argument?
Yeah, but why not just cut out the middleman?
> As... Opposed to Google or Bing? This is your argument?
I'm half kidding, but seriously "duck duck go"? What kinda goofy ass name is that? No wonder nobody takes it seriously.
The equivalent there would be GoGoBaby for Google or RingADingDing for Bing. I guess GoDaddy is a thing, but that doesn't make it any less weird.
Because DDG acts as a privacy screen and doesn't tell Microsoft what I personally search for. They are, as you note, fairly pointed about this being their purpose.
> I'm half kidding, but seriously "duck duck go"? What kinda goofy ass name is that? No wonder nobody takes it seriously.
It's a play on a commonly-known phrase (duck duck goose), and while this is all subjective I don't see how it's any weirder than anything else in the space.
It's like Firefox haters, they find one little bug or one negative thing happens, and "Welp, just might as well use Chrome." If Firefox isn't 100% absolutely perfect, then people say they're clearly just as bad as Google.
They say DuckDuckGo is just Bing, and has a dumb name, so it's clearly no better than Google. The truth is that they fucking love Google's products, integration and ecosystem...
No, they’ll place it at the top, just like Amp.
This idea is the idea of someone at Google, it was implemented by someone at Google, the decision to go ahead was approved by someone at Google.
Pretending the two are at arms length is a bit silly.
The bonus might be significant, the increase in share price might be a percent or 2. Google dishes out this bonus, not Wall Street.
Google Stadia case in point. Nobody serious backed Stadia because almost everyone expected Google to kill it off so nobody jumped to it and then it was inevitably killed off because it didn't bring in the cash Google was expecting. Even when the stars had aligned for them with the pandemic and supply shortages that should have given them tons of players Google just couldn't convince enough people to go for it.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are high level talks going on about the sustainability of some of this exact lines of thinking. Chasing growth organically is fine. Artificially generating it by shifting costs or cutting corners elsewhere to maintain the illusion of growth eventually sinks the whole ship.
You know that doing X will harm the company in the long term (defined as anything past your likely tenure in this role, so usually 2 years max). But doing X will bump revenue in the short term, and get you your bonus and your happy life.
WDYD? Given that to get to a level where you have the power to make this decision, you had to have a particular personality type and set of priorities, it's extremely likely that you decide to do the thing that helps you and hurts everyone else.
"Reward long term" is easier to say than to do.
Issuing debt to buy back shares is a strategy that works great when interest rates are very very low.
But when the money supply is scarce, only so much leverage can exist, so issuing debt to buy shares would be far far riskier.
Stock options with a strike price below market also have tax implications for both the company and the employee.
Equity based compensation essentially comes out of the hides of shareholders: As long as they are happy (and people aren’t playing Thiel-type games), it’s not as terrible as you make it out to be. There’s a limit to what buybacks can do to juice prices and equity generally puts people into a long term mindset.
The problem, ultimately, cannot be solved without disassembling neoliberal capitalism. It is more or less endemic to the system. To a large extent that short termist, get returns and move on before the cost is due, mode of being is how we managed to run an economy that requires constant growth (rather than stability) to function. It's also why we won't solve any of our climate or many social issues.
There's no way to change this without drastically restructuring the utility function people apply to decisions, and that just won't happen until the aftermath of whatever collapse is inevitably going to happen when the planet floods.
Personally I'm a bigger fan of "encourage competition" than "reorganize control," at least in the search engine market, but I fully agree with you that what we see here is the system working exactly as designed.
Easier said than done, but the basic idea would be something like what the Founding Fathers of the US did with the Constitution - make a system where incentives are set up in such a way as to align success for the individual and the group.
If you start a company, you can experiment with alternatives to the current "increase da KPI" style of organization that is so prevalent nowadays.
I think Steve Jobs was a good example of someone who governed by pointing people to a beautiful vision, rather than mindless "ya, numbers go up" type thinking prevalent amongst investors nowadays.
I totally get your point, and I understand the "me first!" attitude that it comes from. But we can't have nice things if everyone does this.
Besides, look at context. We are talking about what a company does and the agents of the company. Of course it all collapses to serving capital. I read GP as "why would company take short money over long?"
You don’t need capitalism for that (as non-capitalist systems have clearly shown).