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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

I think the key difference between the old big guns, SGI, IBM and the likes, and today's Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Apple is the diversification of income streams. Even if any one of these companies just completely fucks up an entire business line or it gets replaced by something better, it doesn't matter because the companies themselves are so utterly large they can and do survive that - or because they can, like Meta, just buy up whatever upstart is trying to dethrone them.

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I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat. We can see this with YouTube. YouTube shows so many ads, that people have been using TikTok instead. They say TikTok is also bad for them, but they rather use it than watch an ad every 30s.

Point being entshittification comes at a cost, and companies partaking in shitty activities can only keep this up for so long.

>I don't believe they can keep this up forever. Take Google which is dependent on Google Search. That their search is becoming actively worse is common knowledge, reason being more searches equates to more ads shown. If a company which respects you as a user comes around people will jump the boat.

I think their strategy is to poison the internet so thoroughly that no better search becomes possible. The costs alone to spin up a new search company are an enormous barrier to entry, they'd only need to erect a few more to make it impossible.

One question I find interesting about this interpretation is whether whether that'd a conscious strategy of theirs on some level, or whether it's just what entities of this scale and structure do to the substrate.

Somewhere in the middle, I would think. Maybe not immediately deliberate, but it's a large enough organization that someone in the company would have realized that the originally inadvertent actions paid off, and would continue to pay off, and so they put in effort to not accidentally stop doing it. Knowledge of the discovered strategy stays limited to some management, but not the rank and file.

Remember when we used to make fun of people for typing full sentences in google search, while we used google-fu to type keywords in an order that'd lead to better results? Well, now typing full sentences is the best way to use google search, and google-fu is dead. So I don't think google is "worse" per se, it's just now optimized for full sentences.

Tiktok may show a lot of ads but they are all skippable the moment you realize they're ads.

Not sure "enshittification" applies here, as Google isn't leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates, but I think you're right that Google does still have most of its eggs in one basket. Search and YouTube ads together still make up a majority of their revenue: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/googl/metrics/revenue-by-se...

"Google leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates" is exactly how I would describe the google ads business.

Can you elaborate on that? It's not clear to me how advertising involves acting as an intermediary in a transaction between two other parties.

Google Adsense is an intermediary between advertisers and websites. It operates an auction where advertisers compete to pay the highest for the space (squeezing advertisers) then it determines how large of a cut it can take before paying the websites (squeezing websites).

I suppose you're right, and it does apply to Google acting as a middleman between advertisers and content providers.

I do think the dynamic there is still a bit different from where the term usually applies, since advertising involves three parties in addition to the middleman, not just two -- the above comment was looking at things from the perspective of end users, in terms of where they prefer to watch videos, and that actually may represent a constraint on how much "enshittification" can happen that's particular to this industry.

>Google isn't leveraging a middleman role to maximize revenue extraction from both sides of a transaction it facilitates

They're literally the middleman between layfolk an the Internet itself?

"The internet itself" isn't a vendor that one obtains specific services from.

Fair enough, and neither are users paying customers. It's all middleman at this point.

A middleman is a specific party that mediates the relationship between two other parties. An aggregated system that everyone is using but no one in particular is in control of is not a middleman in the sense applicable here.

> IBM

Check the list of companies they've acquired, divisions they've divested, random research they're doing. While mainframe is a big portion of their revenues (depending on year), they're super diversified.

That didn't hold true for Intel, which once had a monopoly.

Intel never had a true monopoly over x86, there always was AMD and a few others who made x86 CPUs although it's only AMD these days. Yes, they had market dominance, but (similar to NVDA) in only one specific market: x86 CPUs.

Intel never managed to leverage its dominance in x86 CPUs into dominance in other markets though, and that is the key difference to the ultra-large companies I mentioned... yes, they did have ARM offerings (XScale, I 'member tinkering with an NSLU2 decades ago), they did have a cellular modem line (that failed and got sold to Apple eventually), they still do have the Intel Wireless lineup (which is pretty widespread but has a healthy competition), and they got a decent dGPU lineup that nevertheless is at, what, 1% of market share?

And that is what is screwing over Intel at the moment. The server CPU market is going down the drain, gaming consoles went to AMD, Apple is completely lost as a customer (thanks to Intel's various fuckups) and consumer device demand is shifting to phones where Intel has absolutely zero presence. And on top of that their fabs have fallen way behind plan - to think of that Intel has to go to TSMC? How far the mighty has fallen.

That’s nothing new. Conglomerations had been around for decades before SGI et al and that type of organisation has its own problems. So you do see them fail too.

For example Thorn used to be massive in the 80s and by the end of the 90s it had ceased to exist. Arqiva is another that’s presently in freefall despite previously being too big to fail.

Also, I dont really think you can accuse IBM of a lack of diversification.

HP is another good example of a name brand that has rotted into nothingness.

That’s just because they spun off all the high quality companies (Agilent, Keysight, Verigy, Avago). The PC server and consumer print business have always been commodity product.

IBM is a bank masquerading as a tech company.

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