Is Google the Wal-Mart of the web? | Hacker News Reader

Is Google the Wal-Mart of the web?

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8 pointsritubpant9 comments

Not very useful commentary. All they are saying is that like Wal-Mart, Google is big, which they have done by offering things people want.

A much better comparison to Wal-Mart is Amazon, which at least is in a similar industry, engages with a similarly complex supply chain, and has a far more analogous business model.

Some sloppy reasoning here:

> For example, the newspaper industry is quickly crumbling - they lost $7.5 billion in ad revenue in 2008. The public gets irate at the mention of paying for online news.

Traditional media and online media alike are based on advertising revenue, not on readers/viewers paying for the news. People won't pay for news online for the same reason they wouldn't pay for news on TV or even in print. Subscription charges for newspapers and magazines, like TV cable/satellite bills, pay for content distribution, not content creation.

Given that readers/viewers already pay the distribution charges for their internet connection, they balk at paying again for the creation of content that they're long accustomed to getting for free.

"No company can compete with free."

I'm getting really tired of seeing this.

Wal-Mart is despised and loathed because they have borderline-abusive policies towards their employees, because a Wal-Mart store has the capacity to completely disrupt the entire established ecosystem—that's been there for decades or more—of a community, and because they contribute to a leveling-out of cultural diversity in favor of a single lowest-common-denominator monoculture. None of these things are true about Google.

Let's see...they don't abuse their employees, they compete on quality, they frequently expand through acquisition rather than duplication, they're not known for exploiting third-world countries, and they appear at least mildly interested in being a good citizen in their community.

So I'm going to go with "no".

No, Amazon is.

At least Google's customers don't get stampeded to death by peers as they enter the premises.

I think Google is the Advertising Company of the Web.

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