Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic.
All of our core service and software is locked up in a handful of companies.
For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source.
It hurts me as somebody who wants to make money off software, but SaaS is just a bad deal for everybody. My compromise is in prim solutions.
And Google have provided tremendous value with their free tools. People forget what it was like before Gmail and Docs.
I sincerely hope we can move away from their business model, but looks to me consumers rather pay with anything but their money.
So anyone who’s 18 today has never known a world without it.
People don’t know what the save icon is in reality.
Paying for things is interesting as media streaming is frequently valued by paying for it, collaboration and things like Google Maps not so much.
I remember using a Palm Pilot with Tom Tom, and an old maps pack that didn’t have half the new main roads included in the UK! I’d honestly pay for Google Maps for the value I get from it.
You begin a trip with driving directions, but 2/3 of the way in your phone shuts off because you forgot to plug it in. When you get it going again you have no service. You open Google Maps and... nothing. Your directions are gone, and you can't load them again because you don't have network connectivity. I believe due to the restart this is even the case if Maps happens to give you the "download offline directions" option and you accept (which they don't always do). AFAICT there is no way to "reload" downloaded offline directions, only a search bar which does nothing without network connectivity.
Google only really makes things that serve Google's interests, that's why they'll never fix this. If you, the user, put yourself in a situation where you depend on them, you're the sucker. Google has no incentive to actually make the product good for users, they just have to make it good enough that a sufficiently large number of users look at the advertisements in it. I'd much rather buy software and services from a company that has better aligned incentives. That's why I keep a paperback road atlas in my car.
It's hard to beat Google Maps for POI discovery though
We had Google docs before Google released it and it would have prevailed as an independent company if the authorities had had any interest in preventing trust and oligarchy
I don't think you're correctly remembering Writely or early Google docs. Expectations were very different back when ajax was still a cutting edge buzz word.
That ship has sailed in my opinion. I am under the impression most enterprise and public facing open source projects are fauxpen-source and use FOSS as bait for commercial support and freemium plugins. I am at the point where between two solutions, one fully commercial where I don't even host but can export data out and has strong GDPR compliance and an open source one with a locked-in scheme then I'd rather go with the commercial one because at least I am not under the delusion that I am financing feature-parity open source alternatives to commercial products. I draw the line at formats and protocols, maybe ? /rant
Lots of boutique stores in the city centre moved into the newly created mall (due to the economics of malls being as they are)- the mall was also centrally located so: nothing lost.
Almost immediately after this happened; another mall was built outside of town (requiring a car to get to), but as you might expect: rents were substantially cheaper.
All those stores (via peer pressure, cost saving and so forth) moved into the new mall.
Those boutiques never returned and the high-street is dead.
— we have this same situation in tech,
We have lost the ability to function without loss leading technologies (all US based, tying those needs to whatever economic and political situation is happening in the US to the entire world), and, at some point that will have to end, but the oxygen has already left the room for anything else to exist - everything else is starved.
And, Microsoft will not save us, they are leaning into these practices and will suffer the same if US tech is regulated (as it should be). There’s no space for competition.
I wonder if something like a NIH style grant system would make sense to keep opensource software funded and supported without needing corporate support. I have xz on the mind. Would that have fallen under the control of a bad actor if the original maintainer (or others) had the financial ability to dedicate their time to it's maintenance? Who knows.
Many countries have their own tech stack for what Google provides (think Japan, Korea, China, Russia). It's a shame how EU has completely given up its market for Google.
Reddit, newspapers, Facebook, Twitter, are all locked down or heavily restricted. I am sure there is still a burgeoning small web, but it is increasingly hard to find. Would many consumers notice/care if your search engine only surfaced pages from the top 1000 highest ranked domains? You would actually decrease the amount of SEO garbage you hit from Stackoverflow clones, Amazon listicles, or Grandma's cookie recipe #9381.
A bigger issue are the network effects - no website can afford to block Google; not so much for your startup search engine.
> For humanity and the future of software’s sake we need to go back to users of software owning their software, preferably by being free and open source.
This sounds like a decent plan. Why not start executing the first step of it today?
Or is that the actual first step to make a societal-level change? Maybe it's better to make millions of dollars under the existing regime, and then found or fund a think-tank to get certain politicians elected.
I'm in the process of setting up a Community Interest Company to facilitate this very thing. I spent a couple of decades in the world of Drupal, which is the largest open source community in terms of contributors, and have spent the last few years following and supporting the ceptr.org project which is rebuilding the tech stack aligning as to how nature works.
One of CEPTR's subprojects is Holochain.org, a distributed agent-centric open source language, and I'm using https://theweave.social/moss/ which is built on Holochain, to collaborate with my as of current one collaborator who is my support worker, funded by an Access to Work grant as I discovered and was diagnosed last year aged 50 as autistic and ADHD.
Free/Libre Open Source Software can work and be sustainable, it just takes more people getting involved in every aspect of it, and I find the biggest issue there is the majority simply don't know this stuff exists, let alone they can use it and adapt it to their needs.
So times are changing, we have the power, we just give it away every day by not making the most of what we have control over.
I like the idea of building communities and software that is inspired by nature. Btw homepage looks nice.
The most natural analogy for software is infrastructure. Lots of money to be made in building, maintaining, and supporting it, but as with any technology, the proposition of renting the right to use it is one that is obviously a bad deal for everyone but the rentier, and all the moreso for the fact that they can constantly make changes to the deal, including how the software functions, what one must pay for it, and what other benefits your use of it may extract from you on the behalf of its owner
I make money building software and think this feudal status quo is a terrible one that we should welcome the destruction of. Its benefits are ill-distributed and temporary, its drawbacks are dystopian, pervasive, and long-lasting, not only creating these awful deals for a wide swath of the economy, but also creating massive incentives for the rentiers in this equation to hoard competence in using these new technologies, stymying untold amounts of innovation and progress by making criminals out of tinkerers and discouraging even non-technical users from adapting them to their own needs
Saying that software is infrastructure only supports the renting model.
Your existence is contingent upon people the best of whom (ones who at least read) think 48 laws of power is a how-to manual. You live among people who know less than nothing.
Software is a land of idealistic, capable angels by comparison.
There’s nothing special about Gmail in 2024. But Gmail is totally free which prevents anyone from investing in a significant competitor.
Society will be just fine.
The irony behind Google is that Google in the early days was the antonym for Yahoo; just a simple looking search engine with a search box, minimalistic UI and a better search ranking compared to Yahoo which was crammed internet portal which looked and felt messy.
Nowadays Google still has minimalistic UI but lousy search and shit ton of web apps that try to capture as much attention as they can while sucking your data and doing God knows what with it.
>There’s nothing special about Gmail in 2024. But Gmail is totally free which prevents anyone from investing in a significant competitor.
Yea, Gmail is free and it somewhat feels OK to use so many people use it but I don't see how Gmail evolved substantially over the let's say last 10 years, there is still room for competition. And there are competitors, idk how "significant" they are but they do exist e.g. Proton Mail, Tuta, Fastmail, GMX Mail etc.
It will read your email for you, reply, make major life decisions (eg respond to marriage proposals, banking transactions, etc), and much more - all in the inbox you know and love!
If there’s one thing I know about Google under Sundar it’s that he’s a man of rare vision, foresight, and leadership. I’m sure things are going to go great!
They are a lot more replaceable than most people think.
SSO is also solved. People will survive
This is probably my biggest fear about the eventual fate of Google. The amount of data they have is staggering and would be very short-term profitable for PE firms looking to make a quick buck.
If Gmail had a $5/10/20 per month fee, I would probably migrate to a more privacy/security focused provider.
I wouldn't pay much for YouTube, but video hosting is relatively easy and YouTube has degenerated so much that I'd like to watch content elsewhere.
I would pay for Kagi and ChatGPT each twice before I would pay the same amount for Google Search.
Good luck charging for Chrome and any of their developers tools.
I know there's a million services by Google and I would probably demean most of them and I'm not near the typical consumer. However, if the typical consumer at least had to consider whether to pay, there would be so much breathing room in many industries. Something as large as Google trying to explicitly monetize all those services could also tremendously change consumer attitudes towards being willing to pay for things thus making more businesses viable that do less of the shitty stuff that Google does. For a bit, there would be some bad will as people notice extra bills. It sucks that those extra fees would disproportionately affect the poor. The most likely case would be something like Google Prime with a monthly $15 or yearly $140, which I don't think is a gross value proposition for an individual of even low means.
There needs to be a very strong case this time to go after Microsoft to argue for a break up of their business. Whoever is to bring the case (either the DOJ or the FTC), would have to go after Meta and Amazon first before targeting Microsoft.
It won't be easy, but Microsoft has been able to avoid scrutiny for years.
Many regulatory agencies would target Microsoft next, but they have played this game and are willing to do whatever is needed to avoid extreme measures like forced break ups and sell offs.
Obviously this would be solved if we had a way to centralize our identity and file storage and such across platforms and systems. Yet at the moment the silo is what makes it seems painless and increases its value beyond the fact there’s a substitute to each platform and product.
Tech folks love to say "X is is perfect substitute for Y" in the same way they say "what's so hard about X, I could write that in a week" by considering only simple ideal workflows.
The real value, and the real moat for these products, is that they're tied in with SSO and other products, easy for organizations small to huge to manage, have dozens or hundreds of specialized features crucial to large organizations. They comply with legal regulations, accessibility standards (which ARE legal regulations in many jurisdictions such as if you want to sell to the government), and more.
Writing an email server is perhaps 2% of the work involved in building an email product.