> then the entity wont survive for long and will go out of business (or at least that's the hope of a competitive free market economy)
Only if the inefficiency is large enough to overcome other forces.
Or to put it another way, picture if every single individual teams at Google did this to the tune of 100k a year, per team, and assume among 135,000 employees there are 13500 teams.
That's 1.35 billion dollars. Well under 1% of their revenue.
No way is a competitor going to appear that is identical to Google in every way except they have better budget management. Google has too many moats around their business, they can be really inefficient in many many ways and still dominate in multiple markets.
You've got to have more real capital than Google has at their disposal, and you've got to deploy it irrationally in their markets for longer than they can afford to remain solvent.
> See, Google, that's how it's done. Invest in an ecosystem for two decades, with many money-losing years, and you might have a shot at breaking in a highly competitive market.
I don't think they have the money or the human resources necessary for that anymore :(
> 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.
A competitive business model. You can create tech that is easier to use and more powerful than Google's services, but you won't last unless you actually make money.
> Why do you think Google and Amazon and others can create entire products that never make a profit for years and then unceremoniously shut them down or reduce their investments in them?
It seems like Google and Amazon shutting down or divesting some products would make room for a lot of competitors to step in and dominate that space.
> if your technology is better than everyone else, you deserve to put them out of business.
The issue is that, once you reach Google scale, you have so many tools to put the competition out of business that are unrelated to product fit. And, in the case of Google, they've been known to do just that.
So yeah, you can't really compare an incumbent with monopoly power to an underdog, just like some sentences from young kids are hilarious, that would be chilling if adults said them.
> Google is a bunch of independent teams competing and conflicting with each-other (to launch products, mostly.)
Well, Google needs very badly to stop that then. If you think internal competition somehow breeds better products, then by all means run the company that way. But pay one person to keep this fucking Thunderdome isolated from the public. Someone needs to declare a winner before you trot out 83 contestants, all of which suck because you couldn't make a damned decision.
>There’s no great solution to this apart from the economy and company doing well so that this doesn't happen.
Google is making 25% profit on massive revenues, they're easily in the 10 best performing companies in the US. There's not a good economic reason for them to do something like this.
> If Google becomes useless people will organically move to something else,
This is not what happens easily. In a near monopoly, the monopoly product can be significantly worse than other options, or what is reasonably possible, but people will continue using it for a long time because of various economic, network, psychological lock-in effects.
> For all its efforts, the money Google earned from its nonadvertising ventures only ever accounted for a mere 15% of their revenue.
15% of Google's revenue is still a quite large business. Having online advertising badly weaken isn't enough to kill the firm, unless they sell the profitable parts to try to bail out the unprofitable core business.
The assumption that Google will collapse is probably still true, but only because most companies don't last long term. The bigger firms often take quite a while to fade though.
> Other than search and ads, I doubt other part would do particular well. Breaking up Google would result in a lot of people losing their job.
This is exactly why companies should be broken up. They can currently afford doing a lot of anti-competitive stuff just because another department is profitable while the anti-competitive methods/departments won't. That people would lose their job shouldn't be a consideration as they can surely find jobs elsewhere that won't exploit the public like Google have been proven to do here.
> I would love to see a real challenger to Google. A paid model will not likely be that.
How could a challanger to Google use the same business model that Google has? That is certainly destined to have the same end game/degradation as Google has.
Only if the inefficiency is large enough to overcome other forces.
Or to put it another way, picture if every single individual teams at Google did this to the tune of 100k a year, per team, and assume among 135,000 employees there are 13500 teams.
That's 1.35 billion dollars. Well under 1% of their revenue.
No way is a competitor going to appear that is identical to Google in every way except they have better budget management. Google has too many moats around their business, they can be really inefficient in many many ways and still dominate in multiple markets.
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