In a competitive market John Doe would go to one of googles competitors. We don't have a competitive market. We have winner takes all market.
I agree, Google has swallowed up the video streaming market unfortunately.
I keep thinking back to how Vine was basically TikTok, and they threw it away.
Google makes enough money that losing several currently non-existent revenue streams that are theoretically $10 million apiece isn’t hurting them. It’s hurting their users.
Google is all about ads - why would they give a shit about the users?
Google made $300B last year. "billions over the long haul" is a lot of money, an unimaginable amount even, to you and I. But to Google?
No, Google made $73.795B last year. Revenue is not profit, net income is profit and what you ‘make’ as a company.
Revenue is not profit.
Second there is lots of revenue you use for "business" because you don't want to pay taxes on the profit and anyway it is giving you something you like to have.
How much of Google's revenue is used to do things for top executives and people with power in the company that is really something they (the executives) should be taxed on but is instead a business expense of google (cars, transport, 'working' vacations, security, super cool chefs preparing meals at the company...) Hard to say really because if you knew the answer it would actually be something they were taxed on. But it's not 0 - sure probably not a billion, but a couple hundred million splashed around wouldn't surprise me.
How much of Google's revenue usage is for wages and other forms of payout to executives etc. (stock) that does not get counted as profit but of course it is amounts those people want to have.
Google made $73.795B profit last year, and expensed slightly over 262B - some portion of which the people who run Google no doubt personally thought of the way we would consider profit in our day to day existence, and another portion of which were fines for things they did in getting the rest of the money.
Literally the other stuff is relevant for how remunerative the people who actually run the companies, day-to-day, feel those companies are (put in day-to-day because I got the feeling you might give me a lecture about the shareholders actually running the company)
Your assets might inflate in value, but that's nothing to do with the mortgage
Companies get to write off expenses of existing
People don't
1. I know it's revenue - the GP says The impact on google losing $10m of revenue
2. Do you think the 10m that Google would have booked from API usage would be booked as pure profit?
Provide a selection of restaurants within a 1km radius and automagically provide 3 recommendations based on my preferences.
We had multiple API providers available, Tabelog, Gurunavi and Hotpepper, all required a paid developer license. We still needed to use the Google maps API to get the user's current location though.
This was also just when Google Maps suddenly raised their API pricing. After spending a couple of weekends building a working prototype, we stopped as we couldn't justify the cost of paying multiple API providers for basically 3 guys looking to save 10 mins deciding where to get lunch.
Also, this kind of app is a common theme if you frequent meetups in Tokyo. There's always at least 1 person that has built such a thing.
I’m sure as somebody who actually built a prototype, you understand the situation better than me, but I’m curious: why would just getting the user’s lat/long require anything you’d pay for? Wouldn’t the OS or browser provide that to you?
We were just testing the abilities of the various APIs. Google was the only that provided travelling time estimates.
I’d argue that, on the contrary, it seems to be all the rage lately.
As for the actual anticompetitive power of big tech, absolute crickets.
It isn't much, but I'd like to see that as a start.
If you want competitive market in a capitalist economy, then you need very active state enforcement.
They are now hemorrhaging search to OpenAI that popped into public existence just recently.
To claim there isn’t competition in these markets is completely ignorant. “A big player eats 80%” isn’t anything like a monopoly/duopoly scenario where there literally isn’t any competition or product advancement for decades.
If you wanna see lack of competition, look at government granted monopolies on utilities. Guaranteed but capped rates means you reduce investment right to $0 and cut costs as much as possible since there is no other way to make money. That “state enforcement” you are calling for is how you end up with PG&E and scenarios like all insurances companies pulling out of the state.
Phew, here I was stressing out about lack of competition, but you helped me relax.
Google has to invest into Youtube lest it loses out to Twitch (Amazon), Netflix ($35bn per year), HBO Max (Warner Bros, $50bn per year), (Amazon) Prime, Plus (Disney, $90bn per year).
My faith in humanity is restored now that there are alternatives.
From other MegaCorps.
I picked well-known names as examples. There are thousands and thousands of niche providers.
Claiming that this is a competitive market is a joke.
Please tell me how many “product advancement” in Google search or YouTube over the past decade… From a consumer's perspective all that happened was enshitification and despite being owned by a search engine company, YouTube never managed to ship a functional search on their platform.
> If you wanna see lack of competition, look at government granted monopolies on utilities.
Utilities are “natural monopolies” though, and as such they should be state owned. Making a natural monopoly owned for profit is a recipe for rent seeking, and that's why it was promoted …
> That “state enforcement” you are calling for
No, the state enforcement I'm calling for is proper enforcement of antitrust laws, forbidding consolidation through M&A and disbanding companies megacorps. That is to say, what existed in US's golden age.
Empirically this absolutely isn't the case; the majority of listed companies have fairly low margins, especially non-tech companies, which can be trivially seen from their financial statements. A low profit margin means a competitive market (because if it wasn't a competitive market the firm could raise its prices to obtain higher margins).
Not necessarily: if prices are elastic then even a monopoly can aim for low profit margin (in percentage) in order to increase profit. What matters is how much total profit are being made, margin only matters when measuring risk.
Also, corporations are social structures, and low competition also encourage complacency in the corporate structure itself, which drives costs up and reduces profit margin.
no, it's not, see declining marginal utility of wealth
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/12309/concepts/diminishin...
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lawofdiminishingutility...