Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily, since it seems Google's new strategy is to create its own walled garden and keep you inside of it as much as possible.

View on HN

I would say they are more like a funnel. And they are trying to make their funnel even bigger. They make their money by sending you to other websites and services, which is why most people don't consider them a walled garden.

Their search engine makes money that way.

Their mail and calendaring apps sure don't, for example.

At this point Google is big enough that generalizing about how they make money is a bit pointless, because they have a bunch of different revenue streams. The only commonality is advertising.

They have the open data policy allowing you to take your data with you. And this is what makes people less suspicious of them.

Sure. They're way better than many about vendor lock-in, because they do realize that it's somewhat evil. Not to mention often counterproductive.

But that's not stopping them from signing deals to get Chrome drive-by installed on users' computers, say. Again, it's a big place. Some of it is still all about "do no evil", while other parts seem to be run by scumbags. Pretty good for a large corporation, all things considered, but not exactly all wonderful.

How so? (genuine question - you don't make it clear what you're referring to)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com