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How does it make sense for google to pay for the hosting for this stuff? Or google charts...I'm building a product that uses this pretty heavily right now, but

by blhack 16y ago

How does it make sense for google to pay for the hosting for this stuff? Or google charts...I'm building a product that uses this pretty heavily right now, but it seems too good to be true. Generating those graphs for me is really nice, but the bandwidth and CPU cycles that I'm using aren't free (for google), what's their upside? Cool, google, and thanks, but how does this make financial sense for you?

petervandijck 16y ago
Not everything a company does has to bring in revenue (make financial sense).
- blhack 16y ago
  But how do they justify this to their shareholders? This is literally the type of stuff I daydream about... "Here, I've got all this computing infrastructure, isn't it cool? Tell you what, use it for free!" That's awesome. I guess I was kindof asking if I was missing the point or something. Are there really people at google who are saying "Listen, boss, I'm going to need $money to build google font library. I'm going to need $foo engineers, and $bar resources, but we should do this because it would be fun!" And their boss goes "huh, cool! Yeah, here is some money!" ?
  - personalcompute 16y ago
    Note that Microsoft also considers it worthwhile: http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.5.2.js http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.5.2.js
Nogwater 16y ago
It makes it easier for people to build web applications instead of Windows applications. If people build web apps, then Google has a shot at making some money off of it if the designer wants to monetize with ads or google checkout.
akamaka 16y ago
Yes, Google's business is on the web, and they've made it their mission to make the web as fast as possible. If the web doesn't speed up, more users will move to closed ecosystems like the iPhone App Store. Other projects are motivated by this are Google Chrome (and the open source around it) and Google Page Speed, for example.
qq66 16y ago
Google Charts gives Google all your chart data in textual form -- if you generated chart images with another app they wouldn't be able to crawl it.
- blhack 16y ago
  It says pretty specifically that they don't store or index the data in the google charts terms of service.
  - qq66 16y ago
    That data is still a URL in your page - the axis titles at the very least will be crawled.
Udo 16y ago
My question would rather be "how does it make sense to rely on an outside source for this stuff?". Really, website developers are introducing another, completely unnecessary point of failure if they hotlink an external jQuery version. It's not such a huge file either, I can't imagine what benefits people think this has. Is it so the first page loads a fraction of a second faster (maybe)?

by blhack 16y ago

petervandijck 16y ago

Not everything a company does has to bring in revenue (make financial sense).

blhack 16y ago
But how do they justify this to their shareholders? This is literally the type of stuff I daydream about... "Here, I've got all this computing infrastructure, isn't it cool? Tell you what, use it for free!" That's awesome. I guess I was kindof asking if I was missing the point or something. Are there really people at google who are saying "Listen, boss, I'm going to need $money to build google font library. I'm going to need $foo engineers, and $bar resources, but we should do this because it would be fun!" And their boss goes "huh, cool! Yeah, here is some money!" ?
- personalcompute 16y ago
  Note that Microsoft also considers it worthwhile: http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.5.2.js http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.5.2.js

Nogwater 16y ago

It makes it easier for people to build web applications instead of Windows applications. If people build web apps, then Google has a shot at making some money off of it if the designer wants to monetize with ads or google checkout.

akamaka 16y ago

Yes, Google's business is on the web, and they've made it their mission to make the web as fast as possible. If the web doesn't speed up, more users will move to closed ecosystems like the iPhone App Store. Other projects are motivated by this are Google Chrome (and the open source around it) and Google Page Speed, for example.

qq66 16y ago

Google Charts gives Google all your chart data in textual form -- if you generated chart images with another app they wouldn't be able to crawl it.

blhack 16y ago
It says pretty specifically that they don't store or index the data in the google charts terms of service.
- qq66 16y ago
  That data is still a URL in your page - the axis titles at the very least will be crawled.

Udo 16y ago

My question would rather be "how does it make sense to rely on an outside source for this stuff?". Really, website developers are introducing another, completely unnecessary point of failure if they hotlink an external jQuery version. It's not such a huge file either, I can't imagine what benefits people think this has. Is it so the first page loads a fraction of a second faster (maybe)?