13 ms·

The Bill Gates Line

477 points by dsr12 8y ago

cryptoz 8y ago
From a user of both services, and not a lawyer - Yelp has burned all benefit of the doubt by seemingly basing their business on deception. I find using Yelp to be extremely difficult as I end up frequently reading an advertisement instead of a review despite double-checking first (!), I find myself locked out of Yelp content frequently (I have an account! Maybe I'm not signed in? Who knows? Or am I trying to use the website and not their app? etc). Yelp frequently leads users to believe they have information right in front of them when the user has no such thing. Given that this is the current state of affairs, and has been for years (always?) I would think Yelp would have exactly 0 credibility when it comes to them trying to make things "fair" in search results. Why should a society bend for Yelp when Yelp has done everything in their power to deceive us through poor UI, poor UX, misleading links, what I would even call false advertising? We shouldn't. -- Edit: As a point of comparison, on Google you know when you're reading a review and when you're seeing an ad right away, there's no confusion or deception or lies there.
- IBM 8y ago
  Substitute TripAdvisor or Expedia or any other business in a valuable vertical in place of Yelp and perhaps you can evaluate the antitrust case against Google with more objectivity.
- lerchmo 8y ago
  The app wall is extremely frustrating for me.
  - choward 8y ago
    It makes no sense. Why do I need a separate app to view a web site? That's right. I don't. I always have to switch the the desktop version on my phone. They had to go out of their way to hinder their mobile web site and make it nag to install the app.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Edit: As a point of comparison, on Google you know when you're reading a review and when you're seeing an ad right away, there's no confusion or deception or lies there. https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/04/27/do-50-of-adults-really-not-recognise-ads-in-search-results/ https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/04/27/do-50-of-adults-rea...
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  Google used to highlight all of their ads in a separately colored box. Now, ads are marked by the word "Ad" in fairly tiny print, and the ad is formatted to look as identical as a real search result as possible. Google's entire search engine design is based around deceiving users into clicking on ads they thought were search results.
TAForObvReasons 8y ago
> Gates said something along the lines of, “That’s a crock of shit. This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.” Funny how the largest tech companies and many silicon valley startups of this wave are trying to do the opposite.
- matchagaucho 8y ago
  For an Ad-driven revenue company to become a "platform", they must remove themselves from the actual media content and pay royalties to content producers. Neither Facebook or Google are able to do this wholly, because their user adoption is based on content curation and personalized delivery of repurposed content (page rank, graph rank, feed).
  - empath75 8y ago
    Google is a content aggregator and an ad platform, and a lot of people have made a lot of money advertising on google.
    - matchagaucho 8y ago
      The point of the article is that the money made by others must exceed the platform. SEO experts and Doubleclick partners make money only at the whim of Google's policies. Google can make or break a partner's revenue stream with just one change.
      - adventured 8y ago
        > The point of the article is that the money made by others must exceed the platform. I'd posit that the economic value derived from Google's ad network, exceeds its own revenue from the ads by several fold at a minimum. The majority of the ad network value is going to the businesses that are doing the advertising. Companies overall have used Google's advertising systems to such a massive degree, because the advertising measurably generates a greater sales/business return than the money they put into the ads. Google's ad network (which yes they ripped off from GoTo.com) was the first large scale advertising system in history to offer such an easy way to judge return on advertising spend. Previously neither radio, TV nor newspapers could offer the kind of instant information that Google ads could on performance (and often they didn't offer any accurate information at all, by which to judge advertising results). Businesses have been voraciously using it for all these years, because it has worked extremely well.
jonbarker 8y ago
Please humor me this reductio ad absurdam question: So does that make a toothbrush company a platform? Because arguably lots of people are avoiding cavities, and that fact seems more economically valuable than the total dollar value of all the toothbrushes sold, or the net present value of all the toothbrush customers in the world. What am I missing here? (I don't think a toothbrush company is a platform company, for the record).
- andosa 8y ago
  I think in this context it's about businesses built on top of the platform and their direct revenue. A person brushing teeth is not building a business and generating revenue.
  - jonbarker 8y ago
    Well it gets defined in the article as 'economic value' not necessarily building businesses using the platform company's features.
- samastur 8y ago
  That the only thing "building" on top of the toothbrush is tooth paste. Everything else being done to avoid cavities does not depend on toothbrushes. So it would be a platform if you had a dominant company whose brushes would require certain kinds of pastes. Since most toothbrushes are completely interchangable as are pastes created by those same companies, there's nobody really building their business on top of any of those particular "platforms".
- ballenf 8y ago
  There's an additional key point that missing a single tooth-brushing does not cause cavities. If it did and: - you knew when a person was out of toothpaste and going to the store to buy it - you could implement differential for customers, singling out the customer(s) who have run out of toothpaste - you could control pricing for all stores at which customers could buy toothpaste Then yes, you could extract the full value of your toothbrush product. Whether this makes it a platform would remain up for debate. I'd just call it a toothpaste monopoly.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cromwellian 8y ago
It's always surprised me that Yelp, like Flickr, and other early services, became stagnant when the mobile transition happened, and failed to leverage the opportunity. Why didn't Yelp early on see that they could become OpenTable, or GroupOn? In China, services like Dianping combine all three plus mobile payments: Restaurant reviews, booking, discounts, and payment, and even delivery services. Surely Yelp could have seen how other crowd sourced content farms became commodities? Yelp is trying to blame their problems on Search, but the real problem to me is that they failed to adapt their business model in the face of a sea change in computing and from mounting pressure from competitors like TripAdvisor. The Yelp CEO seems to be indulging in the classic approach when your business model fails to resort to patent lawsuits, copyright lawsuits, or begging anti-trust regulators for regulatory capture.
- zackbloom 8y ago
  They tried, they just weren't successful.
  - personlurking 8y ago
    Here's a TC piece on "Yelp Deals": https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/29/yelp-deals-mobile-groupon/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/29/yelp-deals-mobile-groupon/ I also learned the current Yelp is the pivot, as per Wikipedia, via Fortune [1]. > One day Stoppelman was looking for a doctor but had no clue how to find a good one. That gave him and Simmons an idea for a convoluted automated system in which people could e-mail friends asking for recommendations on, say, local doctors, and the answers would be logged at a communal site for everyone to see. Levchin floated the duo $1 million to build out the plan. It went nowhere. But the co-founders noticed an interesting tendency among the early users. People were writing unsolicited reviews of their favorite businesses just for fun. So Yelp switched tack. "I remember the moment that Russ said, 'There should be a way for you to write your own reviews without asking questions,'" Stoppelman recalls. 1 - http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/07/23/100134489/index.htm http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
bo1024 8y ago
Hmm, this is interesting but not completely clear. In this paradigm, what's the difference between a platform and a tool?
eigen-vector 8y ago
Pertinent to revisit Yegge's famous platform rant[1]. Companies like calling themselves platforms—more so in the modern times—because they can usually provide one or dimensions of value. For everything else, they need external entities to bring in value which in turn brings more users. Facebook, for instance, could have simply been a directory of friends, maybe with a chat feature and would have continued being that till the next Facebook took its place. They'd have never been a 'social network platform' However, to make money and commoditize the swath of data users were giving Facebook and in turn, make users give them even more data, they needed other companies to provide value in a few other dimensions—games from Zynga, articles from publishers, ads from everyone under the sun. For this, they had to become a platform and market themselves as such. It is the same case with say Google where they needed companies like Rotten Tomatoes, or Wikipedia to exist so Google can make search results better. Platform today isn't what the Bill Gates quote indicates but is just a way for companies to meet their value providers halfway. I have the data, come build services on top of it. It is a win-win till it isn't—see the Weather Channel pulling out of FB videos[2]. Maybe platforms of yore vied to make their value providers richer than they are, but platforms of today are goldmines for value providers to commercialize that value. For instance, YouTube creators are the value providers without whom YouTube isn't valuable, but for those value providers to make money off the content they create, they are reliant on YouTube. Each YouTube channel is a company of sorts as many many YouTubers are doing it as their full-time job. To say that the value providers' companies should be more expensive than YouTube itself is a funny proposition. [1] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17134451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17134451
- PantaloonFlames 8y ago
  > To say that the value providers' companies should be more expensive than YouTube itself is a funny proposition. Why? That’s the Gates Line. Why is it funny ?
  - eigen-vector 8y ago
    That's my entire comment about. The Gates line made sense when platforms brought infrastructure. It doesn't when the platform is less about infrastructure and more about providing an audience for the services built on top to succeed. To clarify, maybe these comparisons are not justified when we're comparing different kinds of platforms altogether. Infrastructure platforms still exist, like AWS and Azure. The solution is likely classifying—in Ben's terms— 'aggregators' into an entirely different bucket called data platforms. When dealing with infra platforms, the value providers build things on top of the platform and that's where the relationship ends. If company A works on AWS and makes $X MM a year, it could still make the same $X MM if it is built on Azure (all infra costs being the same). Whereas, a content creator can produce the same video and would make less money by hosting on Facebook as compared to hosting it on YouTube. The platform has a direct impact on commercializing the content/value/whatchamacallit.
justboxing 8y ago
Here's the actual "Bill Gates Line" that the title references > And I remember when we raised money from Bill Gates, 3 or 4 months after — like our funding history was $5M, $83 M, $500M, and then $15B. When that 15B happened a few months after Facebook Platform and Gates said something along the lines of, “That’s a crock of shit. This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.”
reaperducer 8y ago
There's a small mental disconnect at the beginning of this article. The author accuses 60 Minutes of not balancing the story. But does so immediately after noting that Google refused to talk to 60 Minutes. Sounds like 60 Minutes tried to balance it, but Google wasn't interested in or capable of providing that balance. An alternative would have been to get industry types to try to explain Google's side of the story, but that's not usually a good idea since nobody really knows what Google is up to except Google. Anyone else is just speculating.
- arebop 8y ago
  They might have done some investigation besides asking the competition to tell them how bad Google is. For example, instead of asking Yelp's CEO if his results should be on top, they could have run a UX study to see if non-interested people find a reordered SERP more or less useful than what Google serves. Maybe this isn't the best alternative but it seems to me it is clearly better than the path they chose. Also, IMO the claim that 90% market penetration = abuse of monopoly power is very questionable. If the 60 Minutes team wants to run a story taking a clear position on a controversial issue, they ought to assign a team member to play the devil's advocate and point out where their key arguments are so flimsy as this. Then they can either remove or shore up these points. I don't think every news story has to give equal time to "both sides" of the story, but this story did appear to give 100% of time and thought to one side with no scrutiny about whether that side has 100% of the truth.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    If Google wanted to defend itself, it had the opportunity.
  - bitmapbrother 8y ago
    I find it funny that 60 minutes neglected to mention the Yelp documentary Billion Dollar Bully that exposes Yelp's business practices. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2dkJctUDIs&t=3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2dkJctUDIs&t=3s
- bcoates 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
denzil_correa 8y ago
> Remember the conditions that led to Facebook’s rise in the first place: the company was able to circumvent Google, go directly to users, and build a walled garden of data that the search company couldn’t touch. Umm, not really. In the relatively early days of Facebook, Google allowed Facebook access to its "Contacts API" which let Facebook peek into your contacts and find out your GTalk/GMail contacts on Facebook. GTalk was the popular IM client pre-Facebook Messenger and your "social network" resided within your e-mail plus IM client. OTOH, Facebook did not allow access to its "Contacts List" citing privacy concerns (talk about irony!). Google eventually stopped Facebook from access to GMail/GTalk contact lists [0]. Facebook complained but did find a work around to export contact lists [1]. Twitter found a work around to get access to Facebook contact lists - by using the Facebook app for Twitter [2]. But lady irony died again when, Facebook blocked Twitter's ability to do so [3]. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/04/facebook-google-contacts/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/04/facebook-google-contacts/ [1] https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/08/facebook-finds-a-new-way-to-liberate-your-gmail-contact-data/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/08/facebook-finds-a-new-way-t... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/23/twitter-facebook-friends-linkedin/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/23/twitter-facebook-friends-l... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/23/facebook-blocks-twitter/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/23/facebook-blocks-twitter/
- jedberg 8y ago
  That's... exactly what the article says. That Facebook created a walled garden that Google couldn't get to.
  - jdminhbg 8y ago
    I think the quibble is that Facebook didn't circumvent Google, they used an open API that Google themselves provided. It wasn't an end-around, it was just Google leaving the keys in the door.
    - acoard 8y ago
      The "circumvent" part is that Facebook's content isn't indexable by Google. For example, a website review on Yelp winds up on Google, but a review from Facebook won't show up. Insofar as they're creating content in a walled garden that Google can't access, they're circumventing Google. (It might not be the best usage of the word circumvent, but I still think it's clear what the author is going for here)
stcredzero 8y ago
Google has had the luxury of operating in an environment — the world wide web — that was by default completely open. That let the best technology win What is the effect of Google? Is the web now more or less open than it used to be? Has any of that change been attributable to Google?
- BigChiefSmokem 8y ago
  I am exactly ten years older than the internet and here is what I would say: 1) Google (not Reddit) is the "front page" of the modern world wide web. Before Google, it was AOL (which was a closed network with access to the open internet) and Yahoo. The public internet existed some time before the world wide web, and that was an important distinction back in the mid 90s. 2) Definitely a lot less open and more controlled and regulated in 2018. There was no dark web back then, it was just one web. My first online purchase was a pre-order of Diablo II, tax free and it took forever to arrive :) 3) Yes, Google has been the heaviest and richest lobbying power representing Silicon Valley in Washington for years now, ever since hiring Eric Schmidt and before debuting their IPO. Whether this is a good thing or bad thing will be the measure of how open (or closed) you think Google and companies like Amazon have made the web with their lobbying efforts.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    I am exactly ten years older than the internet and here is what I would say: Another oldtimer here. My internet use predates the web. I've been using it since the late 80's.
  - jholman 8y ago
    > I am exactly ten years older than the internet Wait wait wait, does InterNet have a precise date of birth?
    - sah2ed 8y ago
      Yes, 1969. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
headsoup 8y ago
I think the article misses one important point. Google is not just an aggregate. They are also a publisher/provider and therefore have massive advantage in placing their products within the results: Home, YouTube, GCP, Gmail, Shopping(!), Etc. This is the problem, not that they are an aggregator.
Quanttek 8y ago
It's ironic that the report criticizes 60 Minutes for being biased while showing its own bias in the same paragraph > The 60 Minutes report was not exactly fair-and-balanced; it featured an anti-tech-monopoly crusader , an anti-tech-monopoly activist, an anti-tech-monopoly regulator, and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman Characterizing these people, especially Margrethe Vestager, as "anti-tech" (i.e. simply being against technology) when they're just critical of certain aspects and developments in the industry and don't paint such a rosy picture, is very misleading.
- adventured 8y ago
  Not anti-tech. Anti tech monopoly. Against technology monopolies. There's a critical difference.
  - Quanttek 8y ago
    Thank you! That's exactly my point
    - DogPawHat 8y ago
      Yeah, I didn't like the barb aimed at Vestager either, mostly because as I'm Irish and appreciative of her making our Government collect taxes properly.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
swiss_beatz 8y ago
This guy doesn't know how to write concisely
abalone 8y ago
The underlying reasoning about Yelp's argument here is not that great: > There are three problems with this argument [that the answer box is anticompetitive]... First, the answer box originally included content scraped from sources like Yelp and other vertical search sites; under pressure from the FTC, driven in part by complaints from Yelp and other vertical search engines, Google agreed to stop doing so in 2013. This is not really a problem with the argument. Scraping content is just another form of anticompetitive behavior. > Second, in a telling testament to the power of being on top of search results, Google’s ratings and reviews have improved considerably in the two years since that video was posted... Also not really a problem. Blocking your competitors is probably going to help you gain more market share, which is a major factor in the quality of crowdsourced content. > Third — and this is the point of this article — what Yelp seems to want will only serve to make Google stronger. So, Google is incapable of engaging in anticompetitive behavior by blocking Yelp because they're really only hurting themselves in the long run if you really think about it? This is contorted reasoning. Even if blocking competitors is an ill-advised strategy, it is still anticompetitive behavior.
- amarkov 8y ago
  The question is what specific anti-competitive action Google is taking. It would be very strange to decide that, simply because Google's made a really good service everyone prefers to use, they should be forced to pay Yelp for permission to display Yelp's content in their results.
rdlecler1 8y ago
I’m not sure I buy this thesis. If companies were not making more money than they were spending then they wouldn’t be advertising. This suggests that the vast majority of the value is captured by the ecosystem and not Facebook or Google. Moreover, how many billions of people get value from Google and Facebook every day?

477 points by dsr12 8y ago

From a user of both services, and not a lawyer - Yelp has burned all benefit of the doubt by seemingly basing their business on deception. I find using Yelp to be extremely difficult as I end up frequently reading an advertisement instead of a review despite double-checking first (!), I find myself locked out of Yelp content frequently (I have an account! Maybe I'm not signed in? Who knows? Or am I trying to use the website and not their app? etc). Yelp frequently leads users to believe they have information right in front of them when the user has no such thing. Given that this is the current state of affairs, and has been for years (always?) I would think Yelp would have exactly 0 credibility when it comes to them trying to make things "fair" in search results. Why should a society bend for Yelp when Yelp has done everything in their power to deceive us through poor UI, poor UX, misleading links, what I would even call false advertising? We shouldn't. -- Edit: As a point of comparison, on Google you know when you're reading a review and when you're seeing an ad right away, there's no confusion or deception or lies there.

IBM 8y ago
Substitute TripAdvisor or Expedia or any other business in a valuable vertical in place of Yelp and perhaps you can evaluate the antitrust case against Google with more objectivity.
lerchmo 8y ago
The app wall is extremely frustrating for me.
- choward 8y ago
  It makes no sense. Why do I need a separate app to view a web site? That's right. I don't. I always have to switch the the desktop version on my phone. They had to go out of their way to hinder their mobile web site and make it nag to install the app.
scarface74 8y ago
Edit: As a point of comparison, on Google you know when you're reading a review and when you're seeing an ad right away, there's no confusion or deception or lies there. https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/04/27/do-50-of-adults-really-not-recognise-ads-in-search-results/ https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/04/27/do-50-of-adults-rea...
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
Google used to highlight all of their ads in a separately colored box. Now, ads are marked by the word "Ad" in fairly tiny print, and the ad is formatted to look as identical as a real search result as possible. Google's entire search engine design is based around deceiving users into clicking on ads they thought were search results.

TAForObvReasons 8y ago

> Gates said something along the lines of, “That’s a crock of shit. This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.” Funny how the largest tech companies and many silicon valley startups of this wave are trying to do the opposite.

matchagaucho 8y ago
For an Ad-driven revenue company to become a "platform", they must remove themselves from the actual media content and pay royalties to content producers. Neither Facebook or Google are able to do this wholly, because their user adoption is based on content curation and personalized delivery of repurposed content (page rank, graph rank, feed).
- empath75 8y ago
  Google is a content aggregator and an ad platform, and a lot of people have made a lot of money advertising on google.
  - matchagaucho 8y ago
    The point of the article is that the money made by others must exceed the platform. SEO experts and Doubleclick partners make money only at the whim of Google's policies. Google can make or break a partner's revenue stream with just one change.
    - adventured 8y ago
      > The point of the article is that the money made by others must exceed the platform. I'd posit that the economic value derived from Google's ad network, exceeds its own revenue from the ads by several fold at a minimum. The majority of the ad network value is going to the businesses that are doing the advertising. Companies overall have used Google's advertising systems to such a massive degree, because the advertising measurably generates a greater sales/business return than the money they put into the ads. Google's ad network (which yes they ripped off from GoTo.com) was the first large scale advertising system in history to offer such an easy way to judge return on advertising spend. Previously neither radio, TV nor newspapers could offer the kind of instant information that Google ads could on performance (and often they didn't offer any accurate information at all, by which to judge advertising results). Businesses have been voraciously using it for all these years, because it has worked extremely well.

jonbarker 8y ago

Please humor me this reductio ad absurdam question: So does that make a toothbrush company a platform? Because arguably lots of people are avoiding cavities, and that fact seems more economically valuable than the total dollar value of all the toothbrushes sold, or the net present value of all the toothbrush customers in the world. What am I missing here? (I don't think a toothbrush company is a platform company, for the record).

andosa 8y ago
I think in this context it's about businesses built on top of the platform and their direct revenue. A person brushing teeth is not building a business and generating revenue.
- jonbarker 8y ago
  Well it gets defined in the article as 'economic value' not necessarily building businesses using the platform company's features.
samastur 8y ago
That the only thing "building" on top of the toothbrush is tooth paste. Everything else being done to avoid cavities does not depend on toothbrushes. So it would be a platform if you had a dominant company whose brushes would require certain kinds of pastes. Since most toothbrushes are completely interchangable as are pastes created by those same companies, there's nobody really building their business on top of any of those particular "platforms".
ballenf 8y ago
There's an additional key point that missing a single tooth-brushing does not cause cavities. If it did and: - you knew when a person was out of toothpaste and going to the store to buy it - you could implement differential for customers, singling out the customer(s) who have run out of toothpaste - you could control pricing for all stores at which customers could buy toothpaste Then yes, you could extract the full value of your toothbrush product. Whether this makes it a platform would remain up for debate. I'd just call it a toothpaste monopoly.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

cromwellian 8y ago

It's always surprised me that Yelp, like Flickr, and other early services, became stagnant when the mobile transition happened, and failed to leverage the opportunity. Why didn't Yelp early on see that they could become OpenTable, or GroupOn? In China, services like Dianping combine all three plus mobile payments: Restaurant reviews, booking, discounts, and payment, and even delivery services. Surely Yelp could have seen how other crowd sourced content farms became commodities? Yelp is trying to blame their problems on Search, but the real problem to me is that they failed to adapt their business model in the face of a sea change in computing and from mounting pressure from competitors like TripAdvisor. The Yelp CEO seems to be indulging in the classic approach when your business model fails to resort to patent lawsuits, copyright lawsuits, or begging anti-trust regulators for regulatory capture.

zackbloom 8y ago
They tried, they just weren't successful.
- personlurking 8y ago
  Here's a TC piece on "Yelp Deals": https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/29/yelp-deals-mobile-groupon/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/29/yelp-deals-mobile-groupon/ I also learned the current Yelp is the pivot, as per Wikipedia, via Fortune [1]. > One day Stoppelman was looking for a doctor but had no clue how to find a good one. That gave him and Simmons an idea for a convoluted automated system in which people could e-mail friends asking for recommendations on, say, local doctors, and the answers would be logged at a communal site for everyone to see. Levchin floated the duo $1 million to build out the plan. It went nowhere. But the co-founders noticed an interesting tendency among the early users. People were writing unsolicited reviews of their favorite businesses just for fun. So Yelp switched tack. "I remember the moment that Russ said, 'There should be a way for you to write your own reviews without asking questions,'" Stoppelman recalls. 1 - http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/07/23/100134489/index.htm http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive...
mixmastamyk 8y ago

bo1024 8y ago

Hmm, this is interesting but not completely clear. In this paradigm, what's the difference between a platform and a tool?

eigen-vector 8y ago

Pertinent to revisit Yegge's famous platform rant[1]. Companies like calling themselves platforms—more so in the modern times—because they can usually provide one or dimensions of value. For everything else, they need external entities to bring in value which in turn brings more users. Facebook, for instance, could have simply been a directory of friends, maybe with a chat feature and would have continued being that till the next Facebook took its place. They'd have never been a 'social network platform' However, to make money and commoditize the swath of data users were giving Facebook and in turn, make users give them even more data, they needed other companies to provide value in a few other dimensions—games from Zynga, articles from publishers, ads from everyone under the sun. For this, they had to become a platform and market themselves as such. It is the same case with say Google where they needed companies like Rotten Tomatoes, or Wikipedia to exist so Google can make search results better. Platform today isn't what the Bill Gates quote indicates but is just a way for companies to meet their value providers halfway. I have the data, come build services on top of it. It is a win-win till it isn't—see the Weather Channel pulling out of FB videos[2]. Maybe platforms of yore vied to make their value providers richer than they are, but platforms of today are goldmines for value providers to commercialize that value. For instance, YouTube creators are the value providers without whom YouTube isn't valuable, but for those value providers to make money off the content they create, they are reliant on YouTube. Each YouTube channel is a company of sorts as many many YouTubers are doing it as their full-time job. To say that the value providers' companies should be more expensive than YouTube itself is a funny proposition. [1] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17134451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17134451

PantaloonFlames 8y ago
> To say that the value providers' companies should be more expensive than YouTube itself is a funny proposition. Why? That’s the Gates Line. Why is it funny ?
- eigen-vector 8y ago
  That's my entire comment about. The Gates line made sense when platforms brought infrastructure. It doesn't when the platform is less about infrastructure and more about providing an audience for the services built on top to succeed. To clarify, maybe these comparisons are not justified when we're comparing different kinds of platforms altogether. Infrastructure platforms still exist, like AWS and Azure. The solution is likely classifying—in Ben's terms— 'aggregators' into an entirely different bucket called data platforms. When dealing with infra platforms, the value providers build things on top of the platform and that's where the relationship ends. If company A works on AWS and makes $X MM a year, it could still make the same $X MM if it is built on Azure (all infra costs being the same). Whereas, a content creator can produce the same video and would make less money by hosting on Facebook as compared to hosting it on YouTube. The platform has a direct impact on commercializing the content/value/whatchamacallit.

justboxing 8y ago

Here's the actual "Bill Gates Line" that the title references > And I remember when we raised money from Bill Gates, 3 or 4 months after — like our funding history was $5M, $83 M, $500M, and then $15B. When that 15B happened a few months after Facebook Platform and Gates said something along the lines of, “That’s a crock of shit. This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.”

reaperducer 8y ago

There's a small mental disconnect at the beginning of this article. The author accuses 60 Minutes of not balancing the story. But does so immediately after noting that Google refused to talk to 60 Minutes. Sounds like 60 Minutes tried to balance it, but Google wasn't interested in or capable of providing that balance. An alternative would have been to get industry types to try to explain Google's side of the story, but that's not usually a good idea since nobody really knows what Google is up to except Google. Anyone else is just speculating.

arebop 8y ago
They might have done some investigation besides asking the competition to tell them how bad Google is. For example, instead of asking Yelp's CEO if his results should be on top, they could have run a UX study to see if non-interested people find a reordered SERP more or less useful than what Google serves. Maybe this isn't the best alternative but it seems to me it is clearly better than the path they chose. Also, IMO the claim that 90% market penetration = abuse of monopoly power is very questionable. If the 60 Minutes team wants to run a story taking a clear position on a controversial issue, they ought to assign a team member to play the devil's advocate and point out where their key arguments are so flimsy as this. Then they can either remove or shore up these points. I don't think every news story has to give equal time to "both sides" of the story, but this story did appear to give 100% of time and thought to one side with no scrutiny about whether that side has 100% of the truth.
- scarface74 8y ago
  If Google wanted to defend itself, it had the opportunity.
- bitmapbrother 8y ago
  I find it funny that 60 minutes neglected to mention the Yelp documentary Billion Dollar Bully that exposes Yelp's business practices. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2dkJctUDIs&t=3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2dkJctUDIs&t=3s
bcoates 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

denzil_correa 8y ago

> Remember the conditions that led to Facebook’s rise in the first place: the company was able to circumvent Google, go directly to users, and build a walled garden of data that the search company couldn’t touch. Umm, not really. In the relatively early days of Facebook, Google allowed Facebook access to its "Contacts API" which let Facebook peek into your contacts and find out your GTalk/GMail contacts on Facebook. GTalk was the popular IM client pre-Facebook Messenger and your "social network" resided within your e-mail plus IM client. OTOH, Facebook did not allow access to its "Contacts List" citing privacy concerns (talk about irony!). Google eventually stopped Facebook from access to GMail/GTalk contact lists [0]. Facebook complained but did find a work around to export contact lists [1]. Twitter found a work around to get access to Facebook contact lists - by using the Facebook app for Twitter [2]. But lady irony died again when, Facebook blocked Twitter's ability to do so [3]. [0] https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/04/facebook-google-contacts/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/04/facebook-google-contacts/ [1] https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/08/facebook-finds-a-new-way-to-liberate-your-gmail-contact-data/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/08/facebook-finds-a-new-way-t... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/23/twitter-facebook-friends-linkedin/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/23/twitter-facebook-friends-l... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/23/facebook-blocks-twitter/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/23/facebook-blocks-twitter/

jedberg 8y ago
That's... exactly what the article says. That Facebook created a walled garden that Google couldn't get to.
- jdminhbg 8y ago
  I think the quibble is that Facebook didn't circumvent Google, they used an open API that Google themselves provided. It wasn't an end-around, it was just Google leaving the keys in the door.
  - acoard 8y ago
    The "circumvent" part is that Facebook's content isn't indexable by Google. For example, a website review on Yelp winds up on Google, but a review from Facebook won't show up. Insofar as they're creating content in a walled garden that Google can't access, they're circumventing Google. (It might not be the best usage of the word circumvent, but I still think it's clear what the author is going for here)

stcredzero 8y ago

Google has had the luxury of operating in an environment — the world wide web — that was by default completely open. That let the best technology win What is the effect of Google? Is the web now more or less open than it used to be? Has any of that change been attributable to Google?

BigChiefSmokem 8y ago
I am exactly ten years older than the internet and here is what I would say: 1) Google (not Reddit) is the "front page" of the modern world wide web. Before Google, it was AOL (which was a closed network with access to the open internet) and Yahoo. The public internet existed some time before the world wide web, and that was an important distinction back in the mid 90s. 2) Definitely a lot less open and more controlled and regulated in 2018. There was no dark web back then, it was just one web. My first online purchase was a pre-order of Diablo II, tax free and it took forever to arrive :) 3) Yes, Google has been the heaviest and richest lobbying power representing Silicon Valley in Washington for years now, ever since hiring Eric Schmidt and before debuting their IPO. Whether this is a good thing or bad thing will be the measure of how open (or closed) you think Google and companies like Amazon have made the web with their lobbying efforts.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  I am exactly ten years older than the internet and here is what I would say: Another oldtimer here. My internet use predates the web. I've been using it since the late 80's.
- jholman 8y ago
  > I am exactly ten years older than the internet Wait wait wait, does InterNet have a precise date of birth?
  - sah2ed 8y ago
    Yes, 1969. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

headsoup 8y ago

I think the article misses one important point. Google is not just an aggregate. They are also a publisher/provider and therefore have massive advantage in placing their products within the results: Home, YouTube, GCP, Gmail, Shopping(!), Etc. This is the problem, not that they are an aggregator.

Quanttek 8y ago

It's ironic that the report criticizes 60 Minutes for being biased while showing its own bias in the same paragraph > The 60 Minutes report was not exactly fair-and-balanced; it featured an anti-tech-monopoly crusader , an anti-tech-monopoly activist, an anti-tech-monopoly regulator, and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman Characterizing these people, especially Margrethe Vestager, as "anti-tech" (i.e. simply being against technology) when they're just critical of certain aspects and developments in the industry and don't paint such a rosy picture, is very misleading.

adventured 8y ago
Not anti-tech. Anti tech monopoly. Against technology monopolies. There's a critical difference.
- Quanttek 8y ago
  Thank you! That's exactly my point
  - DogPawHat 8y ago
    Yeah, I didn't like the barb aimed at Vestager either, mostly because as I'm Irish and appreciative of her making our Government collect taxes properly.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

swiss_beatz 8y ago

This guy doesn't know how to write concisely

abalone 8y ago

The underlying reasoning about Yelp's argument here is not that great: > There are three problems with this argument [that the answer box is anticompetitive]... First, the answer box originally included content scraped from sources like Yelp and other vertical search sites; under pressure from the FTC, driven in part by complaints from Yelp and other vertical search engines, Google agreed to stop doing so in 2013. This is not really a problem with the argument. Scraping content is just another form of anticompetitive behavior. > Second, in a telling testament to the power of being on top of search results, Google’s ratings and reviews have improved considerably in the two years since that video was posted... Also not really a problem. Blocking your competitors is probably going to help you gain more market share, which is a major factor in the quality of crowdsourced content. > Third — and this is the point of this article — what Yelp seems to want will only serve to make Google stronger. So, Google is incapable of engaging in anticompetitive behavior by blocking Yelp because they're really only hurting themselves in the long run if you really think about it? This is contorted reasoning. Even if blocking competitors is an ill-advised strategy, it is still anticompetitive behavior.

amarkov 8y ago
The question is what specific anti-competitive action Google is taking. It would be very strange to decide that, simply because Google's made a really good service everyone prefers to use, they should be forced to pay Yelp for permission to display Yelp's content in their results.

rdlecler1 8y ago

I’m not sure I buy this thesis. If companies were not making more money than they were spending then they wouldn’t be advertising. This suggests that the vast majority of the value is captured by the ecosystem and not Facebook or Google. Moreover, how many billions of people get value from Google and Facebook every day?