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Comment by 4chandaily | Hacker News Reader

This gotcha only works if you are a user of only their free services.

When Google charges me a monthly fee for storage, takes a percentage of my Play Store sales, or manufactures a Pixel that I purchase from their online store, I am absolutely their customer. I may also be providing data they will sell, but I am still paying them for goods or services and that makes me a customer.

The problem is that they continue treating their customers like livestock, and it seems they have little incentive to change.

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The real problem here is that all those businesses are rounding errors on the balance sheet compared to ads, so the CEO doesn't care (or even know) about the issues and isn't motivated to improve anything.

Then have they repeatedly fought so hard legally to get to keep extracting three revenue? If they didn't care about it, they wouldn't do it in the first place.

The problem is that there's no pressure on them to act any differently. If they made 100x as much money from app purchases, they wouldn't suddenly treat app developers better just because of that. They might treat them better if the app developers had better alternatives, but that would also be enough to force Google to behave differently even with the current amount of revenue.

Android and Chrome exist as moats primarily. Pichai came up in Chrome and understands moats. Obviously if you can get the moat to be self-funding (Google Play IAP revenue) even better. Things like "the developer experience on Android is bad" don't prevent the moat from doing its job, but "Google and Chrome aren't defaults on Android" are very much losing the moat.

I don't disagree with this. I don't honestly see how it relates to your previous comment that I responded to though. It seems more like support for my rebuttal, which is that the moat is what matters, not whether the revenue is a "rounding error" compared to their other businesses.

This article in one sentence: "the developer of a small app switches to a third-party app store because Google Play ignores him." This doesn't hurt the balance sheet ($150 a month to Google is nothing), and doesn't affect the moat (this app isn't strategically meaningful and didn't even go away--it just moved).

They chose to not monetize at all anymore because they decide it's not worth the hassle due to having other sources of income. If they didn't have the other sources of income, it doesn't sound like he'd choose to move somewhere else.

They can treat their customers like livestock because their customers are okay with it. Why is that?

My hypothesis: turkeys think the farm is an amazing life until the week before Thanksgiving. Nobody really groks that Google is shit until it's too late.

These pithy sayings are not adding to the dialog.

Please try to engage more deeply.

For example, connect your turkeys more explicitly to a point you are making about Google. When is Thanksgiving coming? What will it look like?

That's every time Google does something bad to a customer. Such as the one who was banned for his son's medical photos. Or the one who was tricked into enabling passkeys and then couldn't sign in any more and called support.

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