5 ms·
Maybe but here on the Internet there seems to be one search engine which rakes in most of the money, one social network where most people have accounts, one ele
by blfr 7y ago
Maybe but here on the Internet there seems to be one search engine which rakes in most of the money, one social network where most people have accounts, one electronic toy maker which sits on top of a mountain on cash. Second prize is a set of steak knives.
- soperj 7y agoAnd yet here I am using Duckduckgo and twitter on firefox...
- kristopolous 7y agoIs that top search engine Baidu? Yandex? Google? Depends on who and where you ask.
- blfr 7y agoYandex has about ~1.5% revenues of Google. Baidu ~11%. It's not even a contest which rakes in the most money.
- kristopolous 7y agoIf I had a company that made even 0.1% of Google, I'd probably start each day running around the room in feats of joy and delight. Seriously, if I could pay talented people many hundreds of thousands of dollars, have a nice office, happy customers, a decent product, and only make a paltry 136 million a year, where do I sign up?!
- blfr 7y agoYou're getting away from the tread though. At 0.1% you're not FedEx to Google's UPS. And if you're running a similar service, say a speciality search engine, Google might come after you at a moment's notice.
- ci5er 7y agoI see (at the time of this post) a regional person and a techno-geek respond to your comment, trying to disqualify it as not being universal (sorry globalist techno-geeks!), even though it is, measured by global magnitude. But I am baffled by the reference to the toy maker? Who is that? Unless you mean Apple?
- blfr 7y agoYes, Apple.
- semiotagonal 7y agoGoogle, Facebook and Apple are all increasingly hated though, and can't figure out new ways to make money. The time may be coming where taking a shot at their profitable businesses becomes a possibility.
- blfr 7y agoGoogle grew its revenue by 23% from 2017 to 2018. Sure, it's not a startup any more but still I wish I couldn't figure out new ways to make money like that.
- nostrademons 7y agoThey're hated because they make a lot of money and you don't have a choice about using them. Companies in competitive markets that piss off their customers don't end up hated; rather, people just don't patronize them, and they go out of business. To be hated requires an inability to simply ignore your existence. If you look at institutions in terms of their favorability ratings, it's basically an inverse list of the level of competition they face. At the top you usually have things like beloved local restaurants, day cares, variety stores, computer games, etc. where if they weren't extremely good, you'd just go somewhere else. At the bottom you have the U.S. Government, the one institution that nobody in the world can escape. Near the bottom are monopolies with heavy network effects like Facebook and Comcast.
- perl4ever 7y agoI want to take exception with your neat generalization. The cable company, at least where I live, (Spectrum) is definitely worse than the government. They have stores, that are like the DMV, but the queue to be waited on is longer - the DMV is significantly more parallelized. And the DMV isn't designed like an Apple store, because people that work for the government aren't quite as shameless about being a monopoly. When it comes to the feds the IRS has infinitely better customer service than Google (literally, infinitely) and unlike the cable company, when they owe you money, they pay you interest.