I would argue that the fact that Google causes such drastic, irreversible shifts in business practices is a good thing. Simply put, Google isn't raising the bar - it's setting a higher baseline for consumer-level performance. Forcing better service and performance across the information industry can only be advantageous in the long run.
I just want to know how Google's success is not good for our society?
Google is successful because people find it useful, ergo it is good for society. How am I to take seriously an article like this which is purely written based on emotions with almsot 0 regards for facts?
I do wonder if the author thinks that Apple is useful for society? I for one find Google way more useful to society than a glorified fashion brand..
Compared to Facebook's ads and rest of the industry, Google's are actually on point. They do not spam my screen, and most of the time are actually useful links.
And the fact that they are now a huge corporation does have it's negative sides like stated in the article, but it also does have some nice benefits. Google Maps, GBoard, Gmail and to me personally the biggest play right now, Firebase, which empowers small time devs who want a quick and scalable backend with all the good offerings...
That's without even counting that Google get to decide on what can be experimented upon and what can't. You probably don't want a single company to decide this.
You are aboslutely right. But that is not my value proposition. I have not finished desgining the first iteration of the product, so value proposition is still not defined. The points you mention are what I call my basic beliefs: privacy, no bubbles, API, social, and for hackers.
DDG does provide most of that. I know because its my search engine of choice. And the DDG team has made an amazing job. I love, love their product. But it still trying to do search like Google does search. I dont want to copy Google, the aim is to research other options/routes and build a service that provides a better service altogether.
It will be a glitch. I don't mind that. It will porbably fail like the Titanic, and be a public embarrasment for me. So what? Maybe the people will build the Google killer with be reading along and use my failure as a building block. One of the reasons Google goes unchallenged is because it is fucking crazy to even try and build something that will compete with them. If this ignites people to go and question Google (and Facebook, and Amazon, etc), then it was not in vain.
(I still think their goal and actions are admirable. There are many companies that have been jump started by a major customer pre-buying a product so the company can ramp up manufacturing to fulfill that and other orders. I much prefer this model over government-driven investment as I have more confidence this demonstrates true demand.)
The risk/reward tradeoffs are very different for Google than for a typical startup, though. In a startup, you have no brand name to risk. If you develop a product that everybody wants but it can't scale, people might grumble a bit, but they still want your product, and you've still got nothing to lose.
But if Google develops a product that everybody wants but can't scale, it runs the risk of damaging the reputation of other Google products. And there's a lot of prior success to damage. Do it often enough and people start thinking, "Those Google engineers don't know how to do anything right. Why should I trust them with my data for GMail or Docs or Websearch?"
Those plans were smart, they made Google richer. Not sure why people can't see this, that what a company wants is getting richer. They don't care about you.
Some people know this but want to out-cheat Google. The results are always the same. They are the pros, not you.
I often think of it as: As a website owner, will partnering with Google - a market leader in the advertisement space have a direct negative impact on me and my stakeholders?
If not, it has been observed that there's very little incentive to communicate that change through.
As much as I'd like to believe that altruism will win in the end, it has been established that ultimately the capacity to gain materialistic advantages can often triumph over individual's judgements.
Most consumer products & services are profit-optimized crap these days. The vast majority of people gripe about that, but they keep buying & using 'em.
There have been a few ex-googlers who are upset about Google being an advertising company. Maybe they where sold into a dream that never materilised.
Lets say you own a company employing thousands and you discover the perfect way to improve your clients user experiance, the only problem is it disrupts the market so much your company is no longer profitable, so all your share holder and employees go without ? would you still do it?
Siri is a value add to a company that makes money out of its products. You have to own a 600$ piece of metal to have the privelege of using it.
And i much prefer googling - "Pet shop in dubai" for free.
Weirdly - companies that do avertise have it much more together. If there paying for a dollar for my click, there definitly going to be open and have the products i want.
Something can be good for a corporation you don't like AND good for the world at the same time, without any implied tradeoffs or dichotomies.
Yes, Google is betting heavily on web-everything-all-the-time because they know how to monitise the web (and their competitor don't). Making the web better furthers this goal, but it also makes the web better, so there's that.
When we start seeing things that will break/degrade the web for apps and users that aren't in the Google (ad/tracking) garden, that's when we start to worry, but there's been very little, if any, of that.
Personally, I don't care what's "efficient" and what will make Google the most money. What I care about is how they treat a) their users, and b) the planet.
Money is a means to an end. The fact that so much of our society treats it as their score in the game of life—something to be maximized at all costs as an end in itself—is a disease of the mind.
If Google (and, yes, literally every other major corporation) made more decisions based on what was better for their users (not just "their customers", because in certain aspects of their business that's advertisers, not regular users) and for the health of the planet, while simply making sure that they had a reasonably comfortable financial cushion, we would all be better off, and Google's executives and shareholders would barely notice the difference in their high scores.
What google leaves on the table due to principles, a marketshare-only oriented competitor will definitely jump at. What's best in the long term remains to be seen. While I personally prefer companies with a personality because it gives me a feeling of a longer term vision, it could be considered condescending to enforce your morals on a market that in majority is averse to specific content.
"one" because it is too much of a situation of "all of your eggs in one basket". I understand why people heavily invest in a specific ecosystem but I feel it's short-termism. I would be open to the argument however that tech moves so quickly that short-termism doesn't really apply to most consumer products.
"particular company" because Google has been a bad actor in all of the projects I have personally been involved with where they have been involved. This is purely a personal anecdote and YMMV (and probably does). I am sure I am an exception with this opinion.
There are two different angles in this story: Google is "elitist" and Amazon empowers its users much more than Google.
The elitist part is, I think, irrelevant, difficult to prove and ambiguous. "Google has invented something very cool, but they won’t show it to you unless they think you are among the world’s elite engineers." Would it be better if Google was only willing to show the best of its technology only to beer buddies of the janitor? Then it wouldn't be "elitist" (maybe) but it still would be pointless.
The problem here is that Google's blog post does not discuss how "petasorts" benefit Google's users; an engineering feat, certainly, but why should we care? This sounds a little like Microsoft R&D of which very little ever came out (at least in proportion to the hundreds of billions poured into it).
In contrast, what Amazon does is always, always geared toward its users / customers. The thing is, Amazon HAS customers, and serves them well (they answer to email, even pick up the phone).
I don't think Google thinks about their users as customers.
This is a little too sycophantic. Both Google and other firms want their products to succeed, which means an increase in market share, or an "Alexander the great" share of the market, if you will.
Both Google and other firms believe they are bringing value to the market. It's hard to believe Rupert Murdoch, for example, believes his companies bring nothing of value. You may not like what he produces, but it's hard to accept he doesn't in some way, and his customers certainly do.
It's pleasing to believe Google is full of salt o' the earth types out to make the world a better place, and Newscorp, for example, and its like is full of evil men and women--but this is a picture far too black and white to be taken seriously.
Essentially assuming two giant companies are so different to the extent that one wishes to make people lives happier, and has the success of the business as a second priority, and the other is inversed seems very fantastical, and without evidence.
Personally I don't care if a company built atop of Google fails.
The only thing I care about is consumer welfare, and good quality products + lower prices.
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