7 ms·

> The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy. On the outset, you might think with such ridiculously high compensation t

> The thing of stuff just stagnating and no care to scrub the rough corners is crazy. On the outset, you might think with such ridiculously high compensation there would be an expectation of quality, but I think that's an error. Google operates as an ad-company that happens to employ ridiculous amounts of exhorbitantly compensated individuals to engage in market and technological research, particularly to open or expand markets for their ads. They didn't create mail, docs, drive et al in order to create productivity apps, they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same. They don't really care what content is in the browser so long as it is browser-based content the user consumes and not native apps. The more browser time spent, the higher the likelihood of being served Google ads, or providing Google with data, and similar.

HenryBemis 6y ago
> _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product". And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data. This applies to many companies, but to Google most of all. Also, the further they keep users away from Win10 (where MS siphons everything) and they keep them locked in Android/Chrome operating systems, then it's +1 for them and -1 for the competition.
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  > Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product" So, when I am using Libreoffice, who sees me as their product ?
  - mostlysimilar 6y ago
    It's a rule of thumb. No, not every costless product is monetizing your use of it. FOSS is especially counter to this rule. In the case of web-based tools that are owned and operated by big advertising companies, I think it's a fairly safe bet. As always, think critically about each instance and consider the implications of the software and products you use.
  - roenxi 6y ago
    You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free. The quote is pithy but assumes some context - the [something] is being provided below the marginal cost to produce and therefore being provided with an expectation of benefit for the provider. Acquiring LibreOffice is not $0 marginal cost but they have a big "DONATE" button top-right corner of the website and The Document Foundation turns a small profit from donations.
    - thomasahle 6y ago
      > You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free. That's silly. Paid office suites use just as many computing resources, and Google docs use plenty resources through your browser as well. I think the "if you don't pay for it, you're the product" quote is fine. You just have to exclude free and open source software.
      - roenxi 6y ago
        Excluding free software from a quote that starts "When something is free..." is equally silly. The quote stops being about anything. But yeah, good point that my argument didn't make sense.
        smolder 6y ago
        There is free as in Freedom as well as free as in beer. The quote seems to apply to things that are free as in beer but not free as in freedom. It'd be valid given that distinction.
        thomasahle 6y ago
        > The quote stops being about anything. It is still about stuff other than open source software. You can't expect some Internet quote to apply universally. Just know the exceptions and use it when it applies.
  - PeterStuer 6y ago
    Originally this product knwn as StarOffice ws not free. It only became so after Sun aquired it and reeased it as OpenOffice. This was basically a loss-leader not just fr sun but for other companies as well to break Microsoft's capture of the Knowledege Worker productivity which they leveraged into other areas. So the idea was you were the product, "sold" to the non-MS-Windows/Intel companies in te hopes of you being retained or transferred to a non-MS stack. LibreOffice is post Oracle's acquisition of Sun, but the idea is still the same.
    - solvorn 6y ago
      Nobody called them “knowledge workers” outside of Page Mill Dr. when StarOffice was made and Sun didn’t compete in that space as much though Microsoft was starting to eat their lunch in other areas, like academia, government, military, and high end computation. I worked on a Sun at NOAA in the 90s in Hawaii and the computer we used for bathymetry imaging was a Sun and the ships used Suns. Most of that equipment was replaced with a little Linux and Windows Servers.
      - PeterStuer 6y ago
        Same experience, maybe few years earlier . We all had the Sun pizzaboxes that had replaced Lisp Machines, and 2 years later we all had Mac's and later PC's. Latex still had it's place in academia, and would continue to dominate academic publishing for quite some time, but for 'ordinary' daily productivity needs first MacWrite and MacDraw, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and later Word and Excel were becoming the staples. With both software being ported to the PC/Mac platforms, and Linux starting to make inroads into the Unix compute workloads, Sun needed an answer fast to stop the bleeding. Their inability to transform their high tough / high margin business model would do them in eventually as the commodity / thin margin model of the PC ecosystem grinded them into dust. But before that, they would try several things one of which was an attempt to 'complete' the offering of a single box solution which would have to include an 'office' package so as to keep the Mac / PC of the desks.
  - e_proxus 6y ago
    For open source, you kind of are in a weird way. Open source projects need contributions, for example in the form of bug reports, feature requests, proof reading and (in the rare case) source code. Many ousers provide these benefits to open source projects, which make them thrive. On the other hand, looking at the coin from the other side you could also argue you’re paying with your time and effort and not your money.
  - PaulHoule 6y ago
    It's not a good comparison. StarOffice was developed by a company that was trying to sell it the old fashioned way but became Open Source because Sun was trying to keep its Unix workstations viable (no way we'd see "Office for SPARC") and also challenging Microsoft with Java. Oracle bought Sun. Oracle kept Sun products alive because they know one reason people $$$ for Oracle is support. Once it got renamed and spun out of Oracle, LibreOffice has been kept alive by various stakeholders such as companies that have big fleets of heavily hacked instances, Eurocrats who wish they could break the hold of American software monopolies, linux distros who want another piece of shovelware to list on the box, etc. A typical end user might not perceive that leaving an issue on GitHub is not good customer service, even if some people enjoy the liberty of fixing things for themselves. --- More seriously, Libreoffice is software you run on a computer you control (e.g. your desktop, a cloud server, whatever, ...) Since you are paying for the computer, you don't have conflicts about how generously to provision hardware. Libreoffice is a ship in a bottle. 1000 years from now somebody might dig up an optical disk from a landfill and boot Libreoffice, but it is hard to believe Google Docs will last that long.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  Who does Google sell your docs and drive data to?
  - gumby 6y ago
    They aggregate what they learn about each user across all their properties. (Their hope was the plus would make this easier). So while I seriously doubt they tell advertisers, “joshuamorton writes about JavaScript, metallurgy and anime”, whatever they learn from the enormous number of places they are collecting info increases the probability that you might see an ad on gmail relating to anime. And they are quite public about scanning documents written using the free drive service, as they are proud that they take down documents with content they or the government consider inappropriate, as discussed on HN recently.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      So your contention is that because they check hashes of documents stored on drive for unlawful material, we'll say, that this proves that Google is lying about how it uses data from docs and drive? Or are you saying they don't actually share any data learned from docs and drive
      - virtue3 6y ago
        how would they check the HASH of a document for unlawful material? I think the complaint was they scan your entire doc, for all it's content.
        joshuamorton 6y ago
        > HASH of a document for unlawful material This is ~super common with things like copyright violations and child porn. You store a database of hashes of copyrighted or pornographic data. And specifically you can use visual-similarity hashing to detect even somewhat perturbed documents. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA)
      - 6y ago
- eitland 6y ago
  > And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data. I am a vocal Google critic, but I have yet to see any evidence of them selling my data. Unlike a number of other companies and organizations Google serms to have realized long ago that they are totally dependent on user trust. I'm not saying they are smart (judging by the ads they have sent me the last 13 years, the killing off of Reader, the nymwars and then killing off Google+ after it turned out to be nice) or nice (the way they keep trying to crush the open web, the "embrace, extend, extinguish" model of pushing Chrome relentlessly until they almost have monopoly, then try to remove the possibility to run adblockers etc etc)
  - fakedang 6y ago
    I guess throwing away your key asset is not in the interest of Google or Facebook. I presume Cambridge Analytica only got so far with Facebook because Facebook didn't realize the potential value of its user data till then. Now they'll engage in the same act themselves.
  - NeutronStar 6y ago
    > I have yet to see any evidence of them selling my data. Uh, what do you think an ad is?
stickfigure 6y ago
mail, docs, drive et al ... they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising This seems obviously false. Google clearly monetizes gsuite as a paid service, and "everyone uses the same service at home that they do at work" has clear advantages, whether or not there is advertising in your gmail. Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite (or "google apps for domains", as they called it then - horrible).
- realityking 6y ago
  > Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite This is clearly false. The screenshots in this Time article show gmail having advertising from day one. https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/ https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/
  - techsupporter 6y ago
    Completely accurate. The ads were even touted as somewhat of a feature. Something along the lines of "Gmail has ads, just like the other services, but our ads will be relevant to your interests."
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    It’s accurate and inaccurate. Ads were there but many users saw none for a long time. IMO ads were a distraction to enable the data harvesting, which drove Adsense targeting. Even today, the ads I see on GMail are pretty low quality. Some lovelorn guy used my email address unintentionally to sign up for a 55+ dating site 3 years ago. The most targeted ads I get are for similar sites. Of course YMMV.
    - lozenge 6y ago
      They actually stopped targeting by email contents a while back https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-emails-1202477321/ https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-email...
  - thegagne 6y ago
ip26 6y ago
Notice every G product with a decent level of ongoing support & development is in some form or another an ad platform.
- earthboundkid 6y ago
  To be fair, DFP sucks too.
  - teriaki 6y ago
    Tsk tsk. You mean Ad Manager :rolls eyes:
ngold 6y ago
And the reason they probably want to stay an ad company is so they don't get stuck with IBM sized workforce. Their lack of customer support is border line criminal.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Lol, no. They have >100k employees.
  - 300bps 6y ago
    Google has 118,899 employees. IBM has 352,600 which is about 3x the number of employees that Google has.
    - pembrook 6y ago
      If you count on-site, full time contractors at Google you get closer to 250,000. Give it time. My guess is Google will be well over 300,000 by 2030.
    - dleslie 6y ago
      You're comparing a 900lbs Gorilla to a 300lbs Gorilla and sort of overlooking that they're both Gorillas.
      - zepto 6y ago
        I think the argument is that the 300lb gorilla is actually an overweight chimp.
    - fgonzag 6y ago
      Imagine all the tech support you could buy with 200k employees.
jariel 6y ago
"_open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same." No, I think they wanted to make money from it directly via Enterprise sales. MS Office is the #1 source of profit for MS for a long while. In the 2000's it seemed 'everything was going cloud', naturally Google thought they could leapfrog MS into that space. But it didn't work out.
- bsder 6y ago
  Well, obviously, if Google was going to have to take an actual phone call from somebody when things went pear-shaped, that was never going to work out.
- dx034 6y ago
  And that even though MSFT started creating Office Online much later and also had to basically create a whole new product. And yet they now have the by far superior product.
armandhammer 6y ago
Google didn't create Docs, they bought it.

HenryBemis 6y ago

> _open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product". And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data. This applies to many companies, but to Google most of all. Also, the further they keep users away from Win10 (where MS siphons everything) and they keep them locked in Android/Chrome operating systems, then it's +1 for them and -1 for the competition.

johnchristopher 6y ago
> Yes, thank you. "When something is free then you are the product" So, when I am using Libreoffice, who sees me as their product ?
- mostlysimilar 6y ago
  It's a rule of thumb. No, not every costless product is monetizing your use of it. FOSS is especially counter to this rule. In the case of web-based tools that are owned and operated by big advertising companies, I think it's a fairly safe bet. As always, think critically about each instance and consider the implications of the software and products you use.
- roenxi 6y ago
  You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free. The quote is pithy but assumes some context - the [something] is being provided below the marginal cost to produce and therefore being provided with an expectation of benefit for the provider. Acquiring LibreOffice is not $0 marginal cost but they have a big "DONATE" button top-right corner of the website and The Document Foundation turns a small profit from donations.
  - thomasahle 6y ago
    > You're paying for the computing resources to run LibreOffice; it isn't free. That's silly. Paid office suites use just as many computing resources, and Google docs use plenty resources through your browser as well. I think the "if you don't pay for it, you're the product" quote is fine. You just have to exclude free and open source software.
    - roenxi 6y ago
      Excluding free software from a quote that starts "When something is free..." is equally silly. The quote stops being about anything. But yeah, good point that my argument didn't make sense.
      - smolder 6y ago
        There is free as in Freedom as well as free as in beer. The quote seems to apply to things that are free as in beer but not free as in freedom. It'd be valid given that distinction.
      - thomasahle 6y ago
        > The quote stops being about anything. It is still about stuff other than open source software. You can't expect some Internet quote to apply universally. Just know the exceptions and use it when it applies.
- PeterStuer 6y ago
  Originally this product knwn as StarOffice ws not free. It only became so after Sun aquired it and reeased it as OpenOffice. This was basically a loss-leader not just fr sun but for other companies as well to break Microsoft's capture of the Knowledege Worker productivity which they leveraged into other areas. So the idea was you were the product, "sold" to the non-MS-Windows/Intel companies in te hopes of you being retained or transferred to a non-MS stack. LibreOffice is post Oracle's acquisition of Sun, but the idea is still the same.
  - solvorn 6y ago
    Nobody called them “knowledge workers” outside of Page Mill Dr. when StarOffice was made and Sun didn’t compete in that space as much though Microsoft was starting to eat their lunch in other areas, like academia, government, military, and high end computation. I worked on a Sun at NOAA in the 90s in Hawaii and the computer we used for bathymetry imaging was a Sun and the ships used Suns. Most of that equipment was replaced with a little Linux and Windows Servers.
    - PeterStuer 6y ago
      Same experience, maybe few years earlier . We all had the Sun pizzaboxes that had replaced Lisp Machines, and 2 years later we all had Mac's and later PC's. Latex still had it's place in academia, and would continue to dominate academic publishing for quite some time, but for 'ordinary' daily productivity needs first MacWrite and MacDraw, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and later Word and Excel were becoming the staples. With both software being ported to the PC/Mac platforms, and Linux starting to make inroads into the Unix compute workloads, Sun needed an answer fast to stop the bleeding. Their inability to transform their high tough / high margin business model would do them in eventually as the commodity / thin margin model of the PC ecosystem grinded them into dust. But before that, they would try several things one of which was an attempt to 'complete' the offering of a single box solution which would have to include an 'office' package so as to keep the Mac / PC of the desks.
- e_proxus 6y ago
  For open source, you kind of are in a weird way. Open source projects need contributions, for example in the form of bug reports, feature requests, proof reading and (in the rare case) source code. Many ousers provide these benefits to open source projects, which make them thrive. On the other hand, looking at the coin from the other side you could also argue you’re paying with your time and effort and not your money.
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  It's not a good comparison. StarOffice was developed by a company that was trying to sell it the old fashioned way but became Open Source because Sun was trying to keep its Unix workstations viable (no way we'd see "Office for SPARC") and also challenging Microsoft with Java. Oracle bought Sun. Oracle kept Sun products alive because they know one reason people $$$ for Oracle is support. Once it got renamed and spun out of Oracle, LibreOffice has been kept alive by various stakeholders such as companies that have big fleets of heavily hacked instances, Eurocrats who wish they could break the hold of American software monopolies, linux distros who want another piece of shovelware to list on the box, etc. A typical end user might not perceive that leaving an issue on GitHub is not good customer service, even if some people enjoy the liberty of fixing things for themselves. --- More seriously, Libreoffice is software you run on a computer you control (e.g. your desktop, a cloud server, whatever, ...) Since you are paying for the computer, you don't have conflicts about how generously to provision hardware. Libreoffice is a ship in a bottle. 1000 years from now somebody might dig up an optical disk from a landfill and boot Libreoffice, but it is hard to believe Google Docs will last that long.
joshuamorton 6y ago
Who does Google sell your docs and drive data to?
- gumby 6y ago
  They aggregate what they learn about each user across all their properties. (Their hope was the plus would make this easier). So while I seriously doubt they tell advertisers, “joshuamorton writes about JavaScript, metallurgy and anime”, whatever they learn from the enormous number of places they are collecting info increases the probability that you might see an ad on gmail relating to anime. And they are quite public about scanning documents written using the free drive service, as they are proud that they take down documents with content they or the government consider inappropriate, as discussed on HN recently.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    So your contention is that because they check hashes of documents stored on drive for unlawful material, we'll say, that this proves that Google is lying about how it uses data from docs and drive? Or are you saying they don't actually share any data learned from docs and drive
    - virtue3 6y ago
      how would they check the HASH of a document for unlawful material? I think the complaint was they scan your entire doc, for all it's content.
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        > HASH of a document for unlawful material This is ~super common with things like copyright violations and child porn. You store a database of hashes of copyrighted or pornographic data. And specifically you can use visual-similarity hashing to detect even somewhat perturbed documents. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA)
    - 6y ago
eitland 6y ago
> And for the case of Google, someone pays Google shitloads of money to buy YOUR data. I am a vocal Google critic, but I have yet to see any evidence of them selling my data. Unlike a number of other companies and organizations Google serms to have realized long ago that they are totally dependent on user trust. I'm not saying they are smart (judging by the ads they have sent me the last 13 years, the killing off of Reader, the nymwars and then killing off Google+ after it turned out to be nice) or nice (the way they keep trying to crush the open web, the "embrace, extend, extinguish" model of pushing Chrome relentlessly until they almost have monopoly, then try to remove the possibility to run adblockers etc etc)
- fakedang 6y ago
  I guess throwing away your key asset is not in the interest of Google or Facebook. I presume Cambridge Analytica only got so far with Facebook because Facebook didn't realize the potential value of its user data till then. Now they'll engage in the same act themselves.
- NeutronStar 6y ago
  > I have yet to see any evidence of them selling my data. Uh, what do you think an ad is?

stickfigure 6y ago

mail, docs, drive et al ... they created them to _open a new market_ for advertising This seems obviously false. Google clearly monetizes gsuite as a paid service, and "everyone uses the same service at home that they do at work" has clear advantages, whether or not there is advertising in your gmail. Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite (or "google apps for domains", as they called it then - horrible).

realityking 6y ago
> Advertising in (consumer) gmail came long after paid gsuite This is clearly false. The screenshots in this Time article show gmail having advertising from day one. https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/ https://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/
- techsupporter 6y ago
  Completely accurate. The ads were even touted as somewhat of a feature. Something along the lines of "Gmail has ads, just like the other services, but our ads will be relevant to your interests."
- Spooky23 6y ago
  It’s accurate and inaccurate. Ads were there but many users saw none for a long time. IMO ads were a distraction to enable the data harvesting, which drove Adsense targeting. Even today, the ads I see on GMail are pretty low quality. Some lovelorn guy used my email address unintentionally to sign up for a 55+ dating site 3 years ago. The most targeted ads I get are for similar sites. Of course YMMV.
  - lozenge 6y ago
    They actually stopped targeting by email contents a while back https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-emails-1202477321/ https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/google-gmail-ads-email...
- thegagne 6y ago

ip26 6y ago

Notice every G product with a decent level of ongoing support & development is in some form or another an ad platform.

earthboundkid 6y ago
To be fair, DFP sucks too.
- teriaki 6y ago
  Tsk tsk. You mean Ad Manager :rolls eyes:

ngold 6y ago

And the reason they probably want to stay an ad company is so they don't get stuck with IBM sized workforce. Their lack of customer support is border line criminal.

Spooky23 6y ago
Lol, no. They have >100k employees.
- 300bps 6y ago
  Google has 118,899 employees. IBM has 352,600 which is about 3x the number of employees that Google has.
  - pembrook 6y ago
    If you count on-site, full time contractors at Google you get closer to 250,000. Give it time. My guess is Google will be well over 300,000 by 2030.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    You're comparing a 900lbs Gorilla to a 300lbs Gorilla and sort of overlooking that they're both Gorillas.
    - zepto 6y ago
      I think the argument is that the 300lb gorilla is actually an overweight chimp.
  - fgonzag 6y ago
    Imagine all the tech support you could buy with 200k employees.

jariel 6y ago

"_open a new market_ for advertising, and to gather data for the same." No, I think they wanted to make money from it directly via Enterprise sales. MS Office is the #1 source of profit for MS for a long while. In the 2000's it seemed 'everything was going cloud', naturally Google thought they could leapfrog MS into that space. But it didn't work out.

bsder 6y ago
Well, obviously, if Google was going to have to take an actual phone call from somebody when things went pear-shaped, that was never going to work out.
dx034 6y ago
And that even though MSFT started creating Office Online much later and also had to basically create a whole new product. And yet they now have the by far superior product.

armandhammer 6y ago

Google didn't create Docs, they bought it.