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If Google went down...literally overnight, thousands if not hundreds of thousands of small businesses that rely on AdSense to pay their bills would be in seriou
by marcamillion 16y ago
If Google went down...literally overnight, thousands if not hundreds of thousands of small businesses that rely on AdSense to pay their bills would be in serious hot water.
Not to mention those companies that rely on Adwords to drive traffic through their doors (both online and offline).
I can almost assure you that the markets would get very jittery and irrationality would likely spread to all sorts of other industries.
It is easy to take these things for granted.
Amazon is the same. There are thousands of mini-retailers that earn a living on Amazon. Amazon might even be more so - the equivalent of a Walmart going down....but almost worst.
At it's extremes, the beauties of capitalism lead to large firms that build ecosystems to entrench their positions - whose failure would be significant and potentially systemically dangerous. It is the nature of capitalism - it actually is very healthy for the system. Over time they eventually fade out and other large companies come and take it's place - e.g. the newspaper industry, telecom, etc. So you can't really escape it.
- arethuza 16y agoNo doubt that would be really bad - don't get me wrong - but it's not quite at the scale of what almost happened in 2008.
- jbooth 16y agoAnd we have regulations to prevent things like that. Sarbox, for all the bitching about it, does a reasonably good job of insuring that Google won't just fail overnight and shock everyone -- makes it much harder for them to cook the books and stop people from seeing it a year out. Of course, the libertarian purists argue that we shouldn't have sarbox and shouldn't bail companies out -- which makes me think that if they were in charge the last few years, my electricity wouldn't be working by now.
- Symmetry 16y agoGenerally when a company fails it goes into bankrupcy, where the process is designed to keep the business functioning while things proceed. So even if Amazon or Google declared bankruptcy tomorrow Adsense and Amazon Marketplace would go on. The people who would be in trouble would be the people who Google owed money to, which was very much the concern with Lehman Brothers.
- marcamillion 16y agoI would generally agree if we never just went through a major crisis and saw the failings of current processes. One of the things that was made explicitly clear, is that for some firms that are too large, the bankruptcy proceedings don't really work like they should. I do think, however, that if Google or Amazon failed there are some elements that would stay up - but it's more than just those elements. It's the little things, like email for 200million people disappearing overnight. I can't even imagine the amounts of things that would be lost (receipts from sales, tax information, customer data, invoices, legal contracts, etc.). Much less just a major communication channel going dark. That alone would cause a dip in GDP (in my opinion). Might be difficult to foresee, but so was the banking crisis.
- Symmetry 16y agoWhere did we see failing of the current process? Not the financial system, which obviously failed, but the bankruptcy process. I'm not aware of any company suddenly closing up shop during the crisis. We didn't use follow the normal rules with the automakers but that was because it would have been bad politically for the UAW to lose their pensions, rather than out of any inability of bankruptcy to keep the automakers going in some form. If you have specific examples of things suddenly shutting down during the crisis apart from debt repayments or people being less willing to spend money, I'd be really interested in hearing it.
- Bitmobrich 16y agoIf a Business fails because AdSense, Amazon.com, or others are shutdown, than it was that Businesses fault in not diversifying their revenue streams.