> Smaller companies can't embark on Google-sized projects.
What do you mean by "Google-sized projects"? Google is made up of many differently sized services. And a lot of the services that Google provides have smaller companies that provide competing services. One of Google's advantages is that it can subsidize the cost of smaller services with it's cash cow.
What monopoly? Google doesnt remotely have a monopoly on scientific visualisation, and a possible monopoly on search doesnt really overlap with that.
The problem small companies have with Google is Google's _size_, so many of their side projects are bigger than somebody else's entire business. This absolutely doesnt have anything to do with their headstart in search. Whatever project somebody else successfully starts, Google can simply outspend them and reach the goal first, but this isnt specific to Google, you have this problem with any other big solvent company. WA would have the same problem if a producer of toilet tissue with more cash reserves than WA suddenly decided to compete with WA.
>It's incredible the number of side-projects that Google can afford with its advertising revenue
Part of the reason they are affordable is because they are built on the existing shared infrastructure. It would be much more costly for an independent company to spin up all of the necessary infrastructure, frameworks, practices, etc.
> Also Google is, for a carmaker, tiny. VW, for example, is over twice as large as Google.
By what measure? Market cap, Google is one of the biggest companies in the world, (#2 behind Apple, last I heard) in the neighborhood of $450 billion. VW Group is around $100 billion. Google's cash on hand is on the rough order of magnitude of VW's market cap.
> That led me to use smaller independent service providers
I believe in doing this as well. These companies make or break themselves by delivering one product, and so you can trust they're going to do a very committed job of it. In comparison, services from Google seem like they're done by rotating groups of people who don't really care about what they're doing, and there's no longevity in the services unless they're super profitable.
> And that's an acceptable trade-off for a different sized company. Google arguably has the biggest centralised codebase in the world, and simply has different requirements.
AWS does not operate this way nor do many CDNs operate this way nor do ISPs operate this way. There's other high scale businesses out there. Google isn't the only one. Using Google's scale to justify business practices is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> IMO, we need some way to declare a company "Big" and apply special rules to them. If those rules are onerous, that might create some organic pressure to split and/or help smaller incumbents compete.
What do we win here? To me it seems that letting big companies get as big as they can allows them to use economies of scale to provide quality services cheaply to all of us. Search is a prime example here, only Google seems to be able to do it as well as they do. Many others have tried and failed.
Isn't the benefit of cheap/free services far outweighed by whatever arbitrary "abuses" that are alleged to have been perpetrated? Shouldn't our attitude be primarily of bewildered amazement at the status quo instead of attempting to micromanage how Google uses the massive, amazingly positive platform it built?
> i've always had a problem understanding why big companies need to dominate all the market? If i have a successful local business, it's not hurting me that others do as well.
Well, in this case, Google would leave billions of dollars in revenue and hundreds of millions of users on the table. Not only would it hurt their bottomline, it would also hurt their products as they train on user data, which has quite strong network effects.
This is really a different scale than a local business. If you have that with a single owner, she/he might be content with what she has and choose not to expand further. Google, on the other hand, has multiple of layers of management which need to report to thousands of owners, quite a few of which expect constant growth. This is really not one person who can be content with the size; it's multiple people who get their salaries based on growth and report to thousands of investors, which, for the most part, care about increasing their shares value. Leaving so much money on the table just for the sake of it is a hard sell in this structure.
I doubt this is an advantage in the long term. Big companies work hard to protect their revenue source so they tend to overlook opportunities that threaten their income. Google should have had a product already but they claim they want to make sure it's safe before they produce one. That's admirable but ultimately it will bite them in the ass. Google is protecting their reputation along with their ad business which is basically a money printer. Small startups don't care they just want to survive one more day so they are willing to take chances. That's a huge advantage over the big players.
Who knows what the future will bring but I know we are at the beginning of a major change.
> If they cannot solve search with basically unlimited resources, how is a tiny company going to?
Reminder: Google Is An Ad Company. Are you sure they actually want to solve search? Their primary interest is to be that corporation selling you something.
> Yes, because economies of scale greatly benefit big companies.
I don't think software engineering in itself benefits greatly from the economies of scale. Yes, tech giants have developed some nice internal tooling, but the cost of implementing a feature for a google engineer is probably in the same ballpark as for a startup engineer. User acquisition OTOH seems substantially cheaper for the big companies. So, economies of scale in marketing and distribution?
What do you mean by "Google-sized projects"? Google is made up of many differently sized services. And a lot of the services that Google provides have smaller companies that provide competing services. One of Google's advantages is that it can subsidize the cost of smaller services with it's cash cow.
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