6 ms·

Anyone find anything that Google does these days to be aggressively competitive? As a one-man startup guy, I feel everything I do pales in comparison to what Go

Anyone find anything that Google does these days to be aggressively competitive? As a one-man startup guy, I feel everything I do pales in comparison to what Google are doing and I feel nothing more than /eclipsed/ by them. I have found myself wondering: "If you can't beat them join them" on many occasions. I probably should just merge into Google one day and stop my worrying?

jrempel 7y ago
Google can only do so many things. Every avenue needs to have a significant impact. Google is also a SV echo chamber. They have a lot of blind spots. Lots of room for smaller startups to carve a niche. After get large enough to get Google's full competitive attention another story.
satanspastaroll 7y ago
You are correct, google is trying to cover all sectors they can, and offer tools to join them even at a loss. After they own everything, they can start raising prices, dictate web standards and so on
- dantheman 7y ago
  Your worst case scenario has never happened.
  - satanspastaroll 7y ago
    I'm quite sure a monopoly is not that alien a concept
    - dantheman 7y ago
      A monopoly that keeps prices artificially low for years, drives everyone out of business, and then raises prices to make up for the years of lost profit -- I'd like to hear one example - it's never happened as far as i know. Most monopolies have been government granted - railroads through free land, AT&T by creation, etc.
      - satanspastaroll 7y ago
        I believe the Rockefeller's General Oil was dissolved as an illegal monopoly. It used it's massive, over 90% share of the market (and it's vertical supply chain) to deter competition, and made deals with other suppliers to make the inertia of competing a herculean task
        dantheman 7y ago
        During the rise of standard oil the price of oil went down, it did not go up. Competitors fought and complained that they couldn't compete because standard was vertically integrated and got it broken up. But the price did not go up.
        spc476 7y ago
        While a company that controls the majority of a market may be the text book definition of a monopoly, it's the the legal definition in the US. The US law recognizes that a company may naturally (and legally) gain a majority market share (even 100%) and be left alone. It's only when a company with such control over a market uses that to leverage control over another market that it becomes illegal under US law. Standard Oil owned 90%+ of the oil refineries in the US (they never did drill for oil) yet that wasn't why Standard Oil was broken up. They were broken up because they were using their influence with oil to control the train industry, specifically, train transport of oil. [1] Microsoft wasn't threatened with breakup over their operating system monopoly on desktop computers, but because they were using that influence with at attempt to control the web browser industry. [1] And ironically, it was the breakup of Standard Oil that made John. D. Rockefeller the richest man in the world. He was also responsible for saving the world's population of whales. [2] [2] Half-serious here. Whale oil was big business, until Rockefeller made petroleum products cheap enough to supplant whale oil as a product.
      - wongarsu 7y ago
        You could argue about Microsoft. They started out by offering MSDos as a low cost option and now own close to the entire OS market. Google is undercutting everyone in the mobile OS market. What once was a varied market died completely because nobody could compete with Android's "it's free if you agree to preload a bunch of Google apps" (iOS isn't really on the market since its Apple exclusive, LG can only reasonably choose Android). Google makes all that lost income back because this creates a monopoly for the Play Store, and massively helps other Google services. Not really textbook examples, but that's because the textbook example of selling at a loss to kill all competition and then raise prices is illegal in most cases
    - BurningFrog 7y ago
      When did one company last "own everything"?
- tudelo 7y ago
  They may run some operations at a loss, but overall?
- wongarsu 7y ago
  I think we can make useful distinctions here between Google services. - Google Search/Ads and Google Cloud are money makers. They are constantly improved, handled with care and have prices comparable to the competition, maybe slightly lower - Chrome is costing massive amounts of money. Between the massive development effort and the big worldwide marketing campaigns Google must have spent billions on Chrome in a play to protect their other services and dictate web standards. Android also belongs in this category, dictating a massive portion of the mobile market - GMail/GSuite, Youtube, Google Home etc probably about break even. Like the previous category they are strategic plays aimed at controlling a market, and they are great for the brand. But since their markets are less valuable they are the step children - lastly we have the experiments. Google has cut most of them, and you are probably better off not using them at all
jwr 7y ago
It's easy: find a niche which is too small for Google or any other large company to bother with. There are plenty of those, especially if you look for something tied to the physical world (serving real businesses around you) and if you avoid the SV echo chamber (which means HN much of the time, too). In other words, don't try to be another Google, Facebook, Uber, or Bird. Do something specialized. (I'm a self-funded entrepreneur)
- YinglingLight 7y ago
  And if your work is any means creative, 1000 true fans principle: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fan...
reportgunner 7y ago
Hang in there, the end is near.
JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
Just make something good and useful and don’t kill it and you will be exceeding Google in so many areas. Think marathon, not sprint.
- PerryCox 7y ago
  Yeah this is a good point, if you have a product with good support, that's one way you can out compete them.
  - amelius 7y ago
    But don't be too successful, or you'll be copied by them.
- cpv 7y ago
  " Think marathon, not sprint." I've seen this before as "Think long-term, not short-term". Sometimes it can be true.
notyourday 7y ago
> Anyone find anything that Google does these days to be aggressively competitive? they certainly do aggressively shutdown the products. > I probably should just merge into Google one day and stop my worrying? Every second you are worrying about what Google is doing rather than continuing to work on whatever you are working on is the second you are wasting.
adventured 7y ago
Google isn't doing anything new + interesting at all. I consider Google to be one of the giants that are entirely irrelevant in competitive terms. They almost comically stay in their lane: search, YouTube, search, Gmail, search, search, ads, search, Android, search, search, Google Cloud, search. Every ten years or so maybe they'll add something. I consider Google to be a company that never has to be considered when I'm thinking about building something. I have no plans to launch my own massive operating system (what small team is going to do that anyway). I have no interest in doing a common search engine. Competing in the streaming space with YouTube, Netflix, & Co. is a nightmare of licensing & rights problems (and it's very saturated). The last thing I'd ever want to do is run an email service (thankful for those that do it well). AWS, Azure, and 37 other cloud service providers already exist, no need to reinvent that wheel and compete with Google Cloud (they're not the most competitive there anyway). Google search is 21 years old. Gmail is 15 years old. YouTube is 14-15 years old. Android is 11 years old. Google is gray. So what else is there? That just leaves 99% of everything else that I never, ever have to worry about Google competing seriously in.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- xiphias2 7y ago
  Of course every mature product has is more than 10 years old: it takes 10 years to get to a point when the product itself is mature. Google is the first company that started to spend money on productionize self driving technology. It takes time to get to market, because the problem is super hard. If you want something newer that probably won't go away any time soon, Tensorflow is a few years old, and TPUs are also just a few years old. Google has many of the best and biggest number of AI researchers, and it's not shy to use the AI infrastructure in production.
- sweeneyrod 7y ago
  > Google isn't doing anything new + interesting at all. If they're not, what large company is?
ok_coo 7y ago
People once felt the same way about Microsoft. There’s ways to be competitive with Google for whatever you’re interested in. You can compete by having good customer service for your product. They’ve given that up to the algos. I know I personally highly value the ability to talk to an actual human if I’m having a problem.
- close04 7y ago
  As any sector matures it becomes harder and harder to truly "disrupt" (not talking about "fake disrupt" by being better because you take shortcuts even if it breaks the law). You see it in many other sectors, consolidation is key. Standing out, while not impossible, is improbable. This is not meant to discourage people from trying, you never know until you do. But if big IT has learned their lesson they won't wait until you're too big to run you over. It's why everyone is on acquisition sprees these days, or simply incorporate tech and ideas into their products and use their sheer market share to drown smaller competitors they borrowed the idea from. A niche may be different since no company can cover everything. But it's still uncertain when they choose to go there and go head to head with you. Google didn't overtake MS by playing in a niche. So I guess it depends on what your targets are.
- TX-i 7y ago
  Once felt the same way? Microsoft owns GitHub and part of the unix kernal now. Competition only exists to become assets to these companies.
tozeur 7y ago
They’ve always been aggressively competitive. You don’t become a 700B company playing nice
VikingCoder 7y ago
The cost to move atoms and bits everywhere in the world is near zero. This means that you could be the best in your field for hundreds of miles around, but your neighbors might still go on Amazon and order a product manufactured in China. I worry about this.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  It works both ways. Find or invent a tiny niche and be among the best in the world in it, and the whole world (including China) will come to you for it.
  - pyrale 7y ago
    And Amazon will take the lion's share of your benefits.
erikpukinskis 7y ago
Every company has things they structurally cannot do well. Google scales? They can’t do customer service. Facebook has all the network effects? They can’t iterate rapidly. Tesla has the best electric cars? They can’t sell nostalgia. That’s why people tell you to “be yourself”. It’s a rough proxy for “don’t be other people” which is a rough proxy for “don’t be something someone else is already succeeding at.” But also, if you are really enamored of Google, maybe that means you should work towards getting hired there!
skrebbel 7y ago
I'm a startup founder, and I've never understood this worry. I know of scary few products by Google (or one of the other tech bigcos) that successfully wiped out an up-and-coming startup. They did acquire quite a bunch, but can you name a successful Google product that killed a startup without acquiring it? I'm sure there are some but it can't be much. Docs, Android, Firebase, Maps all came out of acquisitions. I mean, sure, they're super competitive, but my impression is that that competitiveness is mostly targeted at Amazon/AWS, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. I mean GCP is mostly just Google reimplementing the most popular AWS products with less cruft. That's super competitive but I'm curious how it threatens your one man business.
- curious_fella1 7y ago
  Was gmail made in house?
  - antoinealb 7y ago
    Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail
    - rackad 7y ago
      Good to know. I did not know that.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Without Google's resources Android, Maps, YouTube, DoubleClick and the like wouldn't be the powerhouses they are today. Take that how you will, good or bad.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

jrempel 7y ago

Google can only do so many things. Every avenue needs to have a significant impact. Google is also a SV echo chamber. They have a lot of blind spots. Lots of room for smaller startups to carve a niche. After get large enough to get Google's full competitive attention another story.

satanspastaroll 7y ago

You are correct, google is trying to cover all sectors they can, and offer tools to join them even at a loss. After they own everything, they can start raising prices, dictate web standards and so on

dantheman 7y ago
Your worst case scenario has never happened.
- satanspastaroll 7y ago
  I'm quite sure a monopoly is not that alien a concept
  - dantheman 7y ago
    A monopoly that keeps prices artificially low for years, drives everyone out of business, and then raises prices to make up for the years of lost profit -- I'd like to hear one example - it's never happened as far as i know. Most monopolies have been government granted - railroads through free land, AT&T by creation, etc.
    - satanspastaroll 7y ago
      I believe the Rockefeller's General Oil was dissolved as an illegal monopoly. It used it's massive, over 90% share of the market (and it's vertical supply chain) to deter competition, and made deals with other suppliers to make the inertia of competing a herculean task
      - dantheman 7y ago
        During the rise of standard oil the price of oil went down, it did not go up. Competitors fought and complained that they couldn't compete because standard was vertically integrated and got it broken up. But the price did not go up.
      - spc476 7y ago
        While a company that controls the majority of a market may be the text book definition of a monopoly, it's the the legal definition in the US. The US law recognizes that a company may naturally (and legally) gain a majority market share (even 100%) and be left alone. It's only when a company with such control over a market uses that to leverage control over another market that it becomes illegal under US law. Standard Oil owned 90%+ of the oil refineries in the US (they never did drill for oil) yet that wasn't why Standard Oil was broken up. They were broken up because they were using their influence with oil to control the train industry, specifically, train transport of oil. [1] Microsoft wasn't threatened with breakup over their operating system monopoly on desktop computers, but because they were using that influence with at attempt to control the web browser industry. [1] And ironically, it was the breakup of Standard Oil that made John. D. Rockefeller the richest man in the world. He was also responsible for saving the world's population of whales. [2] [2] Half-serious here. Whale oil was big business, until Rockefeller made petroleum products cheap enough to supplant whale oil as a product.
    - wongarsu 7y ago
      You could argue about Microsoft. They started out by offering MSDos as a low cost option and now own close to the entire OS market. Google is undercutting everyone in the mobile OS market. What once was a varied market died completely because nobody could compete with Android's "it's free if you agree to preload a bunch of Google apps" (iOS isn't really on the market since its Apple exclusive, LG can only reasonably choose Android). Google makes all that lost income back because this creates a monopoly for the Play Store, and massively helps other Google services. Not really textbook examples, but that's because the textbook example of selling at a loss to kill all competition and then raise prices is illegal in most cases
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    When did one company last "own everything"?
tudelo 7y ago
They may run some operations at a loss, but overall?
wongarsu 7y ago
I think we can make useful distinctions here between Google services. - Google Search/Ads and Google Cloud are money makers. They are constantly improved, handled with care and have prices comparable to the competition, maybe slightly lower - Chrome is costing massive amounts of money. Between the massive development effort and the big worldwide marketing campaigns Google must have spent billions on Chrome in a play to protect their other services and dictate web standards. Android also belongs in this category, dictating a massive portion of the mobile market - GMail/GSuite, Youtube, Google Home etc probably about break even. Like the previous category they are strategic plays aimed at controlling a market, and they are great for the brand. But since their markets are less valuable they are the step children - lastly we have the experiments. Google has cut most of them, and you are probably better off not using them at all

jwr 7y ago

It's easy: find a niche which is too small for Google or any other large company to bother with. There are plenty of those, especially if you look for something tied to the physical world (serving real businesses around you) and if you avoid the SV echo chamber (which means HN much of the time, too). In other words, don't try to be another Google, Facebook, Uber, or Bird. Do something specialized. (I'm a self-funded entrepreneur)

YinglingLight 7y ago
And if your work is any means creative, 1000 true fans principle: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fan...

reportgunner 7y ago

Hang in there, the end is near.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

Just make something good and useful and don’t kill it and you will be exceeding Google in so many areas. Think marathon, not sprint.

PerryCox 7y ago
Yeah this is a good point, if you have a product with good support, that's one way you can out compete them.
- amelius 7y ago
  But don't be too successful, or you'll be copied by them.
cpv 7y ago
" Think marathon, not sprint." I've seen this before as "Think long-term, not short-term". Sometimes it can be true.

notyourday 7y ago

> Anyone find anything that Google does these days to be aggressively competitive? they certainly do aggressively shutdown the products. > I probably should just merge into Google one day and stop my worrying? Every second you are worrying about what Google is doing rather than continuing to work on whatever you are working on is the second you are wasting.

adventured 7y ago

Google isn't doing anything new + interesting at all. I consider Google to be one of the giants that are entirely irrelevant in competitive terms. They almost comically stay in their lane: search, YouTube, search, Gmail, search, search, ads, search, Android, search, search, Google Cloud, search. Every ten years or so maybe they'll add something. I consider Google to be a company that never has to be considered when I'm thinking about building something. I have no plans to launch my own massive operating system (what small team is going to do that anyway). I have no interest in doing a common search engine. Competing in the streaming space with YouTube, Netflix, & Co. is a nightmare of licensing & rights problems (and it's very saturated). The last thing I'd ever want to do is run an email service (thankful for those that do it well). AWS, Azure, and 37 other cloud service providers already exist, no need to reinvent that wheel and compete with Google Cloud (they're not the most competitive there anyway). Google search is 21 years old. Gmail is 15 years old. YouTube is 14-15 years old. Android is 11 years old. Google is gray. So what else is there? That just leaves 99% of everything else that I never, ever have to worry about Google competing seriously in.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
xiphias2 7y ago
Of course every mature product has is more than 10 years old: it takes 10 years to get to a point when the product itself is mature. Google is the first company that started to spend money on productionize self driving technology. It takes time to get to market, because the problem is super hard. If you want something newer that probably won't go away any time soon, Tensorflow is a few years old, and TPUs are also just a few years old. Google has many of the best and biggest number of AI researchers, and it's not shy to use the AI infrastructure in production.
sweeneyrod 7y ago
> Google isn't doing anything new + interesting at all. If they're not, what large company is?

ok_coo 7y ago

People once felt the same way about Microsoft. There’s ways to be competitive with Google for whatever you’re interested in. You can compete by having good customer service for your product. They’ve given that up to the algos. I know I personally highly value the ability to talk to an actual human if I’m having a problem.

close04 7y ago
As any sector matures it becomes harder and harder to truly "disrupt" (not talking about "fake disrupt" by being better because you take shortcuts even if it breaks the law). You see it in many other sectors, consolidation is key. Standing out, while not impossible, is improbable. This is not meant to discourage people from trying, you never know until you do. But if big IT has learned their lesson they won't wait until you're too big to run you over. It's why everyone is on acquisition sprees these days, or simply incorporate tech and ideas into their products and use their sheer market share to drown smaller competitors they borrowed the idea from. A niche may be different since no company can cover everything. But it's still uncertain when they choose to go there and go head to head with you. Google didn't overtake MS by playing in a niche. So I guess it depends on what your targets are.
TX-i 7y ago
Once felt the same way? Microsoft owns GitHub and part of the unix kernal now. Competition only exists to become assets to these companies.

tozeur 7y ago

They’ve always been aggressively competitive. You don’t become a 700B company playing nice

VikingCoder 7y ago

The cost to move atoms and bits everywhere in the world is near zero. This means that you could be the best in your field for hundreds of miles around, but your neighbors might still go on Amazon and order a product manufactured in China. I worry about this.

BurningFrog 7y ago
It works both ways. Find or invent a tiny niche and be among the best in the world in it, and the whole world (including China) will come to you for it.
- pyrale 7y ago
  And Amazon will take the lion's share of your benefits.

erikpukinskis 7y ago

Every company has things they structurally cannot do well. Google scales? They can’t do customer service. Facebook has all the network effects? They can’t iterate rapidly. Tesla has the best electric cars? They can’t sell nostalgia. That’s why people tell you to “be yourself”. It’s a rough proxy for “don’t be other people” which is a rough proxy for “don’t be something someone else is already succeeding at.” But also, if you are really enamored of Google, maybe that means you should work towards getting hired there!

skrebbel 7y ago

I'm a startup founder, and I've never understood this worry. I know of scary few products by Google (or one of the other tech bigcos) that successfully wiped out an up-and-coming startup. They did acquire quite a bunch, but can you name a successful Google product that killed a startup without acquiring it? I'm sure there are some but it can't be much. Docs, Android, Firebase, Maps all came out of acquisitions. I mean, sure, they're super competitive, but my impression is that that competitiveness is mostly targeted at Amazon/AWS, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. I mean GCP is mostly just Google reimplementing the most popular AWS products with less cruft. That's super competitive but I'm curious how it threatens your one man business.

curious_fella1 7y ago
Was gmail made in house?
- antoinealb 7y ago
  Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Gmail
  - rackad 7y ago
    Good to know. I did not know that.
cameronbrown 7y ago
Without Google's resources Android, Maps, YouTube, DoubleClick and the like wouldn't be the powerhouses they are today. Take that how you will, good or bad.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]