12 ms·

I'd have to say no. Google has been supportive of open technologies and interoperability rather than walling themselves off and keeping customers locked in. D

by mdasen 17y ago

I'd have to say no. Google has been supportive of open technologies and interoperability rather than walling themselves off and keeping customers locked in. Don't like Gmail? Have your Gmail address forward to another address or access your Gmail account via IMAP or POP. Search has no lock-in other than being better than the competition. Consider this: Google's video search returns results from YouTube AND other video sites. Since when does a company do that? Does eBay return results from other auction sites? Hell no! That would give people the opportunity to use whatever service they wanted and ruin the eBay monopoly. Does Facebook allow you to chat with people on other XMPP services or friend people from other services? Hell no! That would ruin their walled garden. Google has been championing a lack of lock-in. Without lock-in, a monopoly isn't exercising its power. Google could have made Google Talk like Facebook, AIM, Yahoo, and MSN and not made it inter-operable. They chose open. They consistently choose open. Even one of the complaints - that Google favors its own services in search results - isn't true. Try looking up a stock. Most of the time Yahoo Finance comes in first (http://www.google.com/search?q=goog http://www.google.com/search?q=goog). Sure, they have the nice little summary there, but Yahoo Finance is the first regular result and they even have links in their special summary to Yahoo, MSN, CNN and others. Now, Google does purchase ads for their services, but it is a real purchase. Let's say I search for "shopping" and they decide to display an ad for Google products rather than displaying another ad bought for that keyword. They lose that money. Therefore, they're bidding at least equal to the price that the other advertiser would have paid. Heck, search for "shopping" and up comes Shopping.com first, Overstock second, and Google Products third. Search for "search" and Google is SIXTH! It's Bing, search.com, Yahoo, Dogpile, and AltaVista before them. Google has been championing the open web. I'm not always comfortable with their policies or decisions. However, they have not been exercising monopoly power.

DannoHung 17y ago
How do they lose the money? I... what? Do they donate it to a charity or something?
- byoung2 17y ago
  I suppose they lose the money they would have made if another company had paid for the ad slot.
- mdasen 17y ago
  As I said, they lose the money because that ad space isn't being sold to a paying party. Let's say you own a baseball stadium and a bar. You decide that you want to put an ad for your bar in the baseball stadium - it will drive business to your bar where you'll make money. Let's say that it drives $1,000 worth of business to your bar every day. That's hard to measure, but assume you can measure it. Someone comes along and says that they'll pay you $10,000 per day to put an ad for their competing bar in that spot. You calculate that that ad isn't worth $10,000/day to you - even taking into consideration natural business to your bar which might now be drawn to a competitor. So, your bar loses the $1,000 per day that the ad drives there plus you determine that you'd lose another $5,000 per day from business that would naturally go to your bar, but is now driven to your competitor. You'll sell them the ad. Why would you sell them the ad? Because you make money. If you decide to keep your own ad, you have to justify $10,000/day in expense. It drives $1,000 in business and a competitor's ad would lose you $5,000 in business for a total of $6,000. It doesn't make business sense. In order to want to keep your own ad in that space, you have to believe that you're gaining more than you would by accepting cash from your competitor. In this scenario, you aren't - you'd be losing $4,000 per day. But if you determine that the ad drives $11,000 worth of business to your bar, then you'd be willing to "pay" that $10,000 for the ad. So, your bar pays your baseball stadium $10,000 per day for the ad and the profits of the bar go up even with that expense. However, if the bar becomes less profitable "paying" for that ad, it's better to sell it to the competitor. When another department of the same logically-owned company does something for another department, it isn't free. If Google's search gives Gmail a freebie ad, search is losing money. So, the gain in money for Gmail must be greater than the amount that search is losing by not selling that ad to a competitor. Therefore, from an internal accounting perspective, it makes sense for Gmail to bid on the "email" keyword just like everyone else as part of their marketing budget. If they're the top bidder, they get the spot. If they aren't, they don't.
  - 17y ago

by mdasen 17y ago

DannoHung 17y ago

How do they lose the money? I... what? Do they donate it to a charity or something?

byoung2 17y ago
I suppose they lose the money they would have made if another company had paid for the ad slot.
mdasen 17y ago
As I said, they lose the money because that ad space isn't being sold to a paying party. Let's say you own a baseball stadium and a bar. You decide that you want to put an ad for your bar in the baseball stadium - it will drive business to your bar where you'll make money. Let's say that it drives $1,000 worth of business to your bar every day. That's hard to measure, but assume you can measure it. Someone comes along and says that they'll pay you $10,000 per day to put an ad for their competing bar in that spot. You calculate that that ad isn't worth $10,000/day to you - even taking into consideration natural business to your bar which might now be drawn to a competitor. So, your bar loses the $1,000 per day that the ad drives there plus you determine that you'd lose another $5,000 per day from business that would naturally go to your bar, but is now driven to your competitor. You'll sell them the ad. Why would you sell them the ad? Because you make money. If you decide to keep your own ad, you have to justify $10,000/day in expense. It drives $1,000 in business and a competitor's ad would lose you $5,000 in business for a total of $6,000. It doesn't make business sense. In order to want to keep your own ad in that space, you have to believe that you're gaining more than you would by accepting cash from your competitor. In this scenario, you aren't - you'd be losing $4,000 per day. But if you determine that the ad drives $11,000 worth of business to your bar, then you'd be willing to "pay" that $10,000 for the ad. So, your bar pays your baseball stadium $10,000 per day for the ad and the profits of the bar go up even with that expense. However, if the bar becomes less profitable "paying" for that ad, it's better to sell it to the competitor. When another department of the same logically-owned company does something for another department, it isn't free. If Google's search gives Gmail a freebie ad, search is losing money. So, the gain in money for Gmail must be greater than the amount that search is losing by not selling that ad to a competitor. Therefore, from an internal accounting perspective, it makes sense for Gmail to bid on the "email" keyword just like everyone else as part of their marketing budget. If they're the top bidder, they get the spot. If they aren't, they don't.
- 17y ago