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> I think this is why Google and Facebook can't make money from anything but advertising, they have to give away everything else for free or at a loss because n
by wool_gather 7y ago
> I think this is why Google and Facebook can't make money from anything but advertising, they have to give away everything else for free or at a loss because no one trusts them at all.
I'm not sure about this. Google at least was not broadly considered untrustworthy for the first half or more of its existence.
Indeed, the key reason that they're considered untrustworthy is the decisions they've made in support of making their money from advertising.
- samatman 7y agoI think it's a little more subtle than that. Google in the late Noughties was awash in advertising money and inculcated a culture of 'internal startups', where they would offer services (Wave, Reader, Google+) without much of an eye toward profit. Eventually, higher-ups would notice that these services were costing money, and shut them down. Today you'd be a fool to invest in the long-term stability of a Google service that doesn't have an obvious tie to the advertising firehose, because they've yet to figure out how to make money any other way.
- wool_gather 7y agoVery good point; I neglected this aspect.