28 ms·

Google’s problems are bigger than just the antitrust case

335 points by martincmartin 6y ago

neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/Oyn47 https://archive.is/Oyn47
alderz 6y ago
http://archive.is/Oyn47 http://archive.is/Oyn47
- johnyzee 6y ago
  Thanks, was looking for non-paywall version.
- cooljacob204 6y ago
  Search Engines should punish sits that do this. They put up a paywall a second after loading so bots can scrape the data and advertise their site as providing answers when really they hide it behind a paywall.
  - rosywoozlechan 6y ago
    > Search Engines should punish sits that do this. Google won't do that. They're already in trouble for stealing content from the sites they crawl, especially news sites. Google goes out of their way to enable paywalls so they don't look like they're anti-copyright or out to destroy news and content sites.
qaz_plm 6y ago
https://outline.com/zHVV66 https://outline.com/zHVV66
Shivetya 6y ago
I was under the impression that having all these separate subs within Alphabet. As for the changes at the Cloud division then simply having Alphabet management put up a firewall between groups that dissuades that type of structure moving across the company is necessary, by firewall I mean come out with a policy denoting it. Perhaps more autonomy for each within Alphabet is needed. You can get back to the "small" feeling and still be part of a larger family; the only family reunion setup where you only meed the relatives on occasion but you know you are all part of a larger whole.
s1t5 6y ago
> Mr Pichai’s foremost challenge is to prevent Alphabet from becoming what Mr Brin and Mr Page were so bent on avoiding—a “conventional company” that dies a slow death from lack of innovation and declining growth. I don't think that he's succeeding at the innovation part but that won't matter as long as their financials look good.
- lalos 6y ago
  That and the fact that the financials that look good come from a single faucet (around ~90 percent was ads last time I checked). Sounds like a "conventional company" with a strong cash cow.
  - shazow 6y ago
    70% as revenue by Alphabet in 2019, 60% of that from Google and 10% from YouTube. https://dashboards.trefis.com/no-login-required/HMtQjcWW/Alphabet-s-Revenues-How-Does-Alphabet-Make-Money- https://dashboards.trefis.com/no-login-required/HMtQjcWW/Alp...
    - lalos 6y ago
      + 12.5% with Google Network, isn't that ads or am I misreading?
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  From the article -- After The Economist went to press Alphabet was expected to report the first year-on-year decline in quarterly revenues in its history, hurt by the pandemic-induced tightening of marketing budgets. I think it is convenient here to blame the pandemic but it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    > I think it is convenient Did you intend to imply that the revenues would have declined without the pandemic? That seems unlikely. https://www.statista.com/statistics/507742/alphabet-annual-global-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/507742/alphabet-annual-g... Sorry if I've read you wrong but that is the typical meaning of "convenient" in a sentence like the one you wrote.
Fiveplus 6y ago
>In fact, it is a herd of ponies, some of which look rather more like full-grown Shires. Nine have more than a billion users globally. Every day people make an estimated 6bn search queries on Google and upload more than 49 years’ worth of video to YouTube. More than 300bn emails are said to be sent every day. The absolute scale of Alphabet and its services sometimes boggles my mind. In particular - YouTube where one can't help but ponder about content moderation at this scale being impossible without highly sophisticated algorithms(which also face the heat every once in a while).
- lalos 6y ago
  This is scary to think about given that you need rare earth elements to build those chips powering all those machines. Makes sense why some countries are ensuring to have a supply on this in the long term, feels like the new oil.
  - mc32 6y ago
    At least they are recoverable and recyclable, oil not so much.
    - CogitoCogito 6y ago
      Are they? If you have a pile of 1,000,000 chips, can you really get any of the elements out at reasonable (by almost any metric) cost?
      - SpaceRaccoon 6y ago
        Why would it be more difficult than to extract from ore? You can smelt them, that will burn away the plastic, and then you can separate the metals.
        CogitoCogito 6y ago
        I'm honestly having a bit of trouble putting my misgiving into thoughts (which if anything demonstrates I haven't thought this all through), but if you throw together say 10 materials, how likely are you to be able to separate out those 10 materials again? Or will you only be able to separate a couple metals with certain convenient melting points? I do see what you're saying though. Maybe the easy question is, what actually happens when electronics are recycled today? How much of the original material is retrieved? Maybe I'm just entirely wrong even given the state of the art today?
zozin 6y ago
Out of the four companies questioned by Congress Google seems to be the most poorly/inefficiently run, as well as the most likely to be broken up due to its products monopolizing the spaces they compete in. If Congress does act and if Google does indeed get split up or negatively affected by antitrust regs, doesn't it stand to reason that the other three also face the same fate? Weakening AdWords would be a boon to Facebook; making Android independent might help out iPhone sales and increase Apple's walled garden; spinning off YouTube would probably help Facebook, Prime Video and YouTube TV; Google Shopping ceasing to be subsidized by AdWords would be great for Bezos' bottomline, etc. It seems to me that if Congress weakens one of the four, the others will only grow in size/influence.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  You really think Google is the inefficient of those four? Apple runs a hot/spare datacenter strategy. Their overhead has to be ridiculous.
  - kccqzy 6y ago
    Hardware doesn't cost that much. Think about the number of new projects or products Google just starts without a coherent strategy and then shuts down without monetizing them, pissing off both users and the original developers. Think about the wasted engineering time. That's why Google is inefficiently run.
shadowgovt 6y ago
There are a couple of ways a startup can become a conventional company. Some of them are good things that Google probably should do. For example, big companies have quality expectations that startups don't need to honor (because everyone kind of understands the whole undertaking is a risk and if it fails, oh well). They also have more impact on culture and people (in multiple countries, often), and the nature of that impact has to be considered (because there's no such thing, really, as "neutral;" one person's neutrality is another's adherence to status quo, and the status quo is not always good. If it was, we'd never need new companies). This results in some loss of velocity (quality takes time; consideration of outsized effects takes time). But it's loss of velocity for the right reasons, as a company moves from 1,000 users to 1 billion.
binarymax 6y ago
Has google meet come up in antitrust allegations? Google has been forcing it on me everywhere. That nonsense is egregious.
jorams 6y ago
I'm still reading the article, but this stood out to me: > More than 300bn emails are said to be sent every day and if only one-third originate on Gmail—a conservative estimate—then a stack of print-outs would be 10,000km high. I don't think that's a conservative estimate at all. In fact, I'd say it's a massive over-estimation. Only one type of email is dominated by Gmail: personal email. I don't know about everyone, but I don't see many personal emails being sent. Lots of those emails are for work, and there Gmail is not dominant at all. It's not insignificant, but Microsoft is a significantly larger part of the pile. Another very large part of the total is automated emails, which are not sent through Gmail either. Since Google Cloud doesn't include an email service, I'd go so far as to guess that more email originates from Amazon (SES) than from Google.
- jedimastert 6y ago
  I do wonder how many emails they receive though...
- kaesar14 6y ago
  https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23 https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23 Seems like 1/3rd is more or less right. I think you're underestimating how big enterprise buy-in for the G-Suite is, Docs and Sheets are both widely used at this point.
  - jorams 6y ago
    Very interesting! Looks like my perspective is very Western Europe-centric, where the data matches what I expected. Gmail is bigger than I expected in the US, and also in Eastern Europe. I do wonder what "market share" means here, and how the domains are selected. The massive market share of GoDaddy seems off, especially since from their website they seem to be reselling Microsoft Office 365, but could be explained by default email MX records on domains registered there (do they do that?).
    - kaesar14 6y ago
      FWIW, I've worked at two companies in my career so far, both could be described as tech unicorns turned public in the last decade, and both used G-Suite for all enterprise use-cases where applicable. Absolutely no adoption of MSFT products. That being said it also means I'm somewhat in the SV company bubble and I'm not sure how this picture looks throughout the industry.
known 6y ago
One President/Prime Minister cannot lead/manage 7 billion people; Google should be split into separate companies; http://archive.li/WOJje http://archive.li/WOJje
- Proven 6y ago
  Or perhaps you should stop minding other people's business. If the CEO can't manage it will lose market share so why should that bother anyone but their shareholders?
RestlessMind 6y ago
> the company is now run by a different triumvirate. Besides Mr Pichai it includes Kent Walker, senior vice-president of global affairs, and Ruth Porat, the finance chief Google leadership in 2001: 2 engineers and an eng manager. In 2020: 1 eng manager, 1 lawyer, 1 banker. No wonder!
- pb7 6y ago
  That's not optional when you are running a company of this size.
  - RestlessMind 6y ago
    Amazon is bigger than Google. And yet, its leadership is only Bezos ever since it started. Sure, it might have a CFO or CLO, but when it comes to calling ultimate shots, there is no doubt regarding who is in charge. That's not the case at Google where it seemed no one wanted to take charge and put his/her stamp on company's execution.
    - pb7 6y ago
      Bezos holds the majority voting rights. He answers to no one. That hasn’t been the case with Google since Larry and Sergei checked out.
      - RestlessMind 6y ago
        So what is holding Sundar back now that the founders have checked out? FWIW, Nadella doesn't have majority voting rights in MSFT, but you can see his clear stamp on the company's execution (de-emphasizing Windows, for instance).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nova22033 6y ago
  It's a public company. It has a CFO. Nothing unusual about that.
ehvatum 6y ago
> To keep hierarchies flat, Mr Brin and Mr Page briefly went so far as to abolish managers altogether, though the experiment had to be dialled back. A compromise was to give managers a minimum of seven direct reports to limit the time they have to loom over each underling. In my experience, so many direct reports changes a manager’s job from “managing people” to “facilitating people”. It’s the same for engineers and laborers, scientists and shit-scrapers. There is time enough to defend your team from HR terrorism, advocate for your team’s technical perspective, and fight for resources - and that’s it. Except at the big-big overly-titanic conglomerates, who trade behemoth economy of scale for total dysfunction, so as to barely break even. IE, Google’s future.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  In my experience, when a manager has a lot of reports, it usually ends up with team members playing all kinds of pathological controlling behavior (e.g mild to not-so-mild bullying). Conflicts arise, and team members who are the loudest usually win. The manager simply is too stretched to understand enough to manage these situations. He will usually cede to the people who he thinks are the "experts" in the team. Essentially, you now have unofficial managers in the team. It's no longer de facto a flat hierarchy. And worse, there is little to no accountability. People will try to "seize power" and carve out their niche. This is usually not intentional on the part of said people, but I think it is more or less the "natural" dynamic that arises. I'm sure there are exceptions. Having a manager who can assert authority and make decisions in conflict situations is great. He/she shouldn't do it often (i.e. micromanage), but a manager who has lots of reports (e.g. > 10) rarely makes good decisions in such situations.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    I tend to agree. Philosophically I really, really wanted to do away with managers but after working in a company that basically did that, it was the loud and forceful personalities that became the de facto bosses/decision makers. It created several monsters that I could not wait to get away from. Having good managers is my goal now rather than having little to no managers.
DoctorNick 6y ago
Remember when we all were happy that Google was finally starting to break down the Microsoft monopoly? And then they ended up becoming a way, way worse monopoly? Good times.
- scarface74 6y ago
  You mean like in 2000 when Microsoft dominated the operating system and office productivity market and when they were one of the top five most valuable companies in the US? How things have changed thanks to government intervention and Google....
  - criddell 6y ago
    You aren't going to lay any of the blame at Ballmer's feet?
    - scarface74 6y ago
      I was being sarcastic. Microsoft still has about the same dominance in two of the areas where antitrust was concerned - computer operating systems and productivity. The third was the browser. No one cares about browser dominance except for Google because of advertising.
      - criddell 6y ago
        I think your statement is right. Things really have changed.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  the great thing about tech monopolies is that there are so many of them
- jefftk 6y ago
  How is Google a way, way worse monopoly than Microsoft was? (Disclosure: I work for Google now, and I think I would not have worked for Microsoft 20 years ago)
coliveira 6y ago
I don't understand what is the big problem in just splitting Google into separate companies. This will be great for everyone, including shareholders. It is not a secret that one of methods to unleash value in a stock is to split the company. See for example the case of Ebay and Paypal.
- alexpetralia 6y ago
  Can you provide more evidence of this?
- guyzero 6y ago
  "It is not a secret that one of methods to unleash value in a stock is to split the company" Yes, and it's not a secret that the other way to unleash value is to merge companies. See for example AT&T or Exxon & Mobil.
  - gph 6y ago
    But you'll notice the companies that successfully gain value through merging are typically competitors that are able to generate more value together instead of fighting for the same profits. The same does not seem to be true for any of the Alphabet companies, except in the sense of being able to leverage shared user data for better targeted ads. Perhaps that does make it worth it to remain one company, but it's debatable, especially for something like Waymo which likely won't benefit from having access to search data.
    - guyzero 6y ago
      There are tons of industrial conglomerates, from GE to Samsung to Siemens and there's not really any universal agreement that they're any worse than more focussed companies. This goes all the way back to the most basic theories of organization - why do companies even exist? Why is everyone not effectively a contractor? Why do companies not outsource every non-core function? And there are good reasons why companies exist - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm External transaction costs are real and breaking Google up could significantly increase those. Someone from Siemens once told me "Siemens is an investment bank that happens to own all of the companies it has invested in." I'm not sure whether that's true or not, but it's a good description of conglomerates in general.
johnyzee 6y ago
So have Larry and Sergei completely checked out? It seems a little weird that they would just turn their back completely on the company they created with their own hands. Particularly since they still have the controlling interest, and could do pretty much whatever they feel like with the company. That's a lot of power to not use.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  They don't want to be the ones hauled in front of Congress. Every other company testifying yesterday's actual head of the company was there, but Google's was merely a lackey. Larry and Sergey have just slid themselves out of the official structure, but their share voting power keeps them squarely in charge. You don't hear about what they're up to because they can afford what they've taken from everyone else: Privacy.
- CobrastanJorji 6y ago
  Sure, but say you're a crazy rich billionaire and you've found you kind of hate being a CEO. What I think a lot of crazy rich CEOs don't understand, which Larry Page did understand, is that you can just stop. You don't need to give away your control, you don't need to give away your fortune, you can just point to somebody nearby and say "you're in charge now," then just go live on an island in the middle of nowhere and watch old movies or build ships in a bottle or whatever it is you like to do. Why is it a problem for you that you have a lot of power that you're not using? It'd be a hassle to figure out who to give away the power to, so just keep it. It always weirds me out when I see these 75 year old CEOs with massive wealth spending their retirement years trying to get Walgreens to grow an extra 5% this quarter or something. Why are you doing this? Are you that invested in the future of Walgreens? You're got $8 billion, maybe take a break or try and fix the world or do something that will bring you joy.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    At that point, they enjoy green uplifting lines more than anything else. I know my grandpa loves some pointless things as a habit. Maybe they have forgotten how to enjoy life through other means.
hinkley 6y ago
In the Evil Empire days of Microsoft, a few different people explained to me that there's a lot of populism in antitrust cases. That through history, the monopolist really only loses once their list of friends and allies grows thin. Microsoft beat every case until a couple years after the crowd had turned on them. I don't think the crowd has turned on Google yet. What has changed in this time is that the EU has gotten sharp teeth and quite a lot of backbone, so they end up winning cases that help us a little bit here in the States long before we get around to the same sort of conclusions.
- murgindrag 6y ago
  Google is quickly becoming the Evil Empire of Microsoft of the Nineties (who, in turn, has managed to pull a 180). The soul left with Larry/Sergei/Eric, and we have corporate drones at the top seeking to maximize shareholder value. It's only a matter of time before reputation catches up. At the same time, Google is much less suited to weather a storm: 1) This quote struck me: “You can paper over a lot of problems by throwing money at it and hiring more bodies,” says a long-time Googler, who previously worked for Microsoft. Google went from a small, elite team of the smartest guys in the room, to just bringing in bodies with a pulse. The screening processes are, as has been mentioned many times, simply random. 2) The old culture carried elitism and arrogance, which kind of works if you're competent, but much less so when mixed in with incompetence. Cultural problems are tough to clean up. Wrong and arrogant about it is very poor. 3) Short-term profits are up, and they'll rise for a while yet, but the fundamentals seem to be increasingly evaporating. Switching from Google has a lot less friction than switching from Microsoft. Goodwill was a fundamental for Google. Even when Google tries to be good, it doesn't follow universal values. It's all grounded in a left-wing ideology that resonates with a tiny fraction of its customer base. We can all agree with helping the poor. A lot of people don't agree with identity politics. It takes 5 minutes to switch search from Google to DDG, so I don't think there's the same stickiness as having Microsoft file formats and APIs.
saberience 6y ago
Paywall on this, can someone provide the text?
monadic2 6y ago
I’m fairly certain a conventional company was the plan all along. Why else bring in Eric Schmidt? Any perception that it was not is marketing to push down engineering salaries.
littlepinkpill 6y ago
>from the article: “This enviable track record justifies Mr Pichai’s rich compensation package over several years, of $2m annual salary plus $240m in shares and stock options” ==It does not.== Consider this tidbit against today's discussion about UBI (Universal Basic Income)[#39 on the HN hit parade: article=<https://timjrobinson.com/universal-basic-income-is-capitalism-2-0/> https://timjrobinson.com/universal-basic-income-is-capitalis... comment thread= <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23993259> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23993259>]. No. Body. Is worth that kind of annual salary. And calling it "enviable" reveals a content-free value system. We've become an absurdist economy.
three_seagrass 6y ago
Clever of the Economist to drop this on the day of Google's earnings.
jjwilliamson 6y ago
Google's ads revenue is down a lot, but they will try to make people not pay attention to it by focusing on other stuff. The reality is that Google's almost all revenue is from ads, period.
Animats 6y ago
About 60% of product searches now start on Amazon Now that's a big problem for Google. Product searches are Google's money machine. Google's other big problem is being terrible at anything which needs repair or customer support. Their various attempts at becoming an internet service provider, via WiFi, fiber, or balloons, have not been successful. Buying up all the good robotics startups and running them into the ground benefited nobody. The self-driving car thing is a huge money drain that still hasn't produced a product. Anyone remember the Google Search Appliance? Two other engineering-first companies blew it - Hewlett-Packard, and Westinghouse. Both were successful, profitable, and renowned for excellent engineering. It's useful to study what they did wrong.
- gundmc 6y ago
  Google Fi was widely praised for excellent customer service when they first launched, but I think that reputation was lost as they scaled out in the last few years. Edited to make past tense more clear.
  - rainyMammoth 6y ago
    Do we live on a different planet? Google Fi is well known to be one of the worst customer services. I used it for a couple of months and most obvious queries are automated. Anything that requires an human barely gets any attention. The subreddit for Google Fi is very telling.
    - bronco21016 6y ago
      I think the parent is referring to when it initially rolled out. I was among the first customers when it came out and the customer service was indeed excellent. I was always able to quickly get through to talk to a native English speaker in the US. The support staff were always very knowledgeable and friendly as well. I didn't last long on the service though. I just couldn't live without my iPhone in those early days of the service. No idea how things are now. EDIT: My bad, I see parent is referring to present day. Experience from the early days still stands though.
    - 6y ago
RobertSmith 6y ago
Google's ad revenue had declined 8% in the second quarter. Revenue and profit also dropped year-over-year. https://news.alphastreet.com/alphabet-goog-googl-q2-2020-earnings-the-most-important-numbers/ https://news.alphastreet.com/alphabet-goog-googl-q2-2020-ear...
psadri 6y ago
Will Google buy Shopify to compete with Amazon?
sandoooo 6y ago
If all you want to do is make money off of stock speculation, it doesn't matter much who's going to win between the FAAAs. You could just split your investment evenly or by market cap. Even the losers are going to hold their value quite well in the mid-term, there's plenty of time to exit before the writing's on the wall. In the short term there's the whole coronavirus-and-shrinking-gdp-and-money-printing thing going on, of course, so who knows.
voidhorse 6y ago
If you watched the hearing, you will have noticed many of the congressmen and women, after asking their questions in a harsh, accusatory manner, sometimes speaking over the witnesses, turn down to their laps to look at their Apple or Google phones, Google search something, post it to Twitter and or Facebook, and maybe purchase something on Amazon for good measure. That kind of illustrates the point that these companies just might be too big, but what I don't hear anyone discussing are the potential consequences of breaking these companies up--they are a hard dependency in some way for most of the American populace if not the world's day to day operations and the quality of their services is largely reliant on their scale--I don't think the analogy to Standard Oil does justice to the complexity of the situation. We're not talking about a simple consumer product here, we're talking about complicated data-driven services, services that all rely on access to massive pools of information collected over years at this point, once you fragment the access to that data, the services will no longer perform as they currently do--then what will happen to the little guy we're trying to protect from the big boys who relies on Facebook and Google to advertise, Amazon to feed part of his supply chain, and Apple hardware? How might his business look if you suddenly swap out all of these behemoth quality services he depends on for disjointed shadows of their former selves, many of which will no longer be able to justify the gratis offerings and free tiers they currently can? Not saying it these giants shouldn't be broken up, just saying it's a process that will require a lot of incredibly careful thought and to be honest I'm not confident those with the power to make the decisions in this case have all the tools they need to ensure such a transition happens without having catastrophic side-effects.
- esperent 6y ago
  If Google search vanished overnight the world would turn to DDG within a day. Ok, that would probably crash their servers but I'm sure they and other search engines could scale up quickly.
  - voidhorse 6y ago
    Right, but the average person doesn't know about DDG--sure word would catch on, but the initial break would cause major friction for the vast majority of people. Also, what happens to all that data in stowed away in other services? What happens, with Gmail if it's separated from the ads division? Do they suddenly start charging everyone to use it? Can they still run ads in Gmail? Would they have access to the infra serving those ads? If they flame out completely do we lose all our data? Will they give us a chance to export it? In what format?.... I just can't help but feel these sorts of breaks would be extremely difficult to get right.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
Too many of Google's eggs have been in one basket for quite some time. Thiel was spot on in Zero to One when he pointed out how many of Google's endeavors are simply a cover for its stranglehold (read: monopoly) on search and associated adds. Also, given Slack and Zoom's growth certainly Google is crying when it thinks about Wave and Hangouts. Microsoft had to fall to get back up again. Now it's Google's turn.
trevor-e 6y ago
Since the article is login-walled I can only generally comment. The hard part of competing against Google is they have seemingly infinite discretionary money and computing power to throw at a problem. Normal businesses have to be profitable to survive, but Google can subsidize loss leaders with their advertising/search profits and still win in the end because it all feeds into their data collection and strengthens their core business. Meanwhile competitors in this areas get squeezed out. Take Google Flights for example. They purchased ITA and eventually closed external API access. The expensive computations are likely done via GCP for a cheaper rate. Travel sites pay billions of dollars to Google for ad rankings, yet Google can still promote their travel tools (search "Flights to San Francisco" to see a custom UI that links to Google Flights) in search results, and once you book a flight it creates a trip for you in Gmail. See: https://www.pymnts.com/antitrust/2020/google-under-fire-allegedly-promoting-own-travel-service-over-others/ https://www.pymnts.com/antitrust/2020/google-under-fire-alle... Disclaimer: I do work for a competitor but this is just my own personal observation.
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  The Achilles heel of Google is stricter privacy laws. Every other threat pales in comparison. Apple can survive, and in fact thrives in an environment where privacy takes paramount importance. Google cannot. Even FB may swim through, as it is driven by user actions. People post on it, share articles, chat on it, etc. Google has a big moat now, and that moat will vanish if people start getting serious about privacy.
  - mrep 6y ago
    Really? I'd say it's the exact opposite between Facebook and Google. Google gets the majority of their ad revenue from search and search ads for me at least are always based on exactly what you are searching for. The other data is only useful seems to only be used for their ads on other peoples websites but that's only like 15% of their revenue. Facebook on the other hand advertises essentially based on your browser history and not on the content around it so they'd get hosed on stricter privacy laws.
sabujp 6y ago
I think selling boston dynamics was a mistake, as was spinning off motorola. Instead of merging these with AI initiatives, these were sold off because they weren't "cultural fits" whatever that means. Business units need to have their own cultures because their customers have different cultures as well.
querez 6y ago
> Another is for Google to become more of a data fiduciary that manages people’s information for them—a bit like a bank does with money. I'm not sure Google is the right company for this due to people not trusting them, but overall I kind of like that idea. I've self-hosted a lot of my services due to not wanting to give companies too much of my data. But it's a hassle. I noticed that I'm willing to pay money for peopel to take this off my hands, but those need to be people I trust. I think protonmail might become the company of choice for me in these regards. They already have my email, and I wouldn't mind outsourcing my calendar and VPN to them, either.

335 points by martincmartin 6y ago

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/Oyn47 https://archive.is/Oyn47

alderz 6y ago

http://archive.is/Oyn47 http://archive.is/Oyn47

johnyzee 6y ago
Thanks, was looking for non-paywall version.
cooljacob204 6y ago
Search Engines should punish sits that do this. They put up a paywall a second after loading so bots can scrape the data and advertise their site as providing answers when really they hide it behind a paywall.
- rosywoozlechan 6y ago
  > Search Engines should punish sits that do this. Google won't do that. They're already in trouble for stealing content from the sites they crawl, especially news sites. Google goes out of their way to enable paywalls so they don't look like they're anti-copyright or out to destroy news and content sites.

qaz_plm 6y ago

https://outline.com/zHVV66 https://outline.com/zHVV66

Shivetya 6y ago

I was under the impression that having all these separate subs within Alphabet. As for the changes at the Cloud division then simply having Alphabet management put up a firewall between groups that dissuades that type of structure moving across the company is necessary, by firewall I mean come out with a policy denoting it. Perhaps more autonomy for each within Alphabet is needed. You can get back to the "small" feeling and still be part of a larger family; the only family reunion setup where you only meed the relatives on occasion but you know you are all part of a larger whole.

s1t5 6y ago

> Mr Pichai’s foremost challenge is to prevent Alphabet from becoming what Mr Brin and Mr Page were so bent on avoiding—a “conventional company” that dies a slow death from lack of innovation and declining growth. I don't think that he's succeeding at the innovation part but that won't matter as long as their financials look good.

lalos 6y ago
That and the fact that the financials that look good come from a single faucet (around ~90 percent was ads last time I checked). Sounds like a "conventional company" with a strong cash cow.
- shazow 6y ago
  70% as revenue by Alphabet in 2019, 60% of that from Google and 10% from YouTube. https://dashboards.trefis.com/no-login-required/HMtQjcWW/Alphabet-s-Revenues-How-Does-Alphabet-Make-Money- https://dashboards.trefis.com/no-login-required/HMtQjcWW/Alp...
  - lalos 6y ago
    + 12.5% with Google Network, isn't that ads or am I misreading?
ChuckMcM 6y ago
From the article -- After The Economist went to press Alphabet was expected to report the first year-on-year decline in quarterly revenues in its history, hurt by the pandemic-induced tightening of marketing budgets. I think it is convenient here to blame the pandemic but it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  > I think it is convenient Did you intend to imply that the revenues would have declined without the pandemic? That seems unlikely. https://www.statista.com/statistics/507742/alphabet-annual-global-revenue/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/507742/alphabet-annual-g... Sorry if I've read you wrong but that is the typical meaning of "convenient" in a sentence like the one you wrote.

Fiveplus 6y ago

>In fact, it is a herd of ponies, some of which look rather more like full-grown Shires. Nine have more than a billion users globally. Every day people make an estimated 6bn search queries on Google and upload more than 49 years’ worth of video to YouTube. More than 300bn emails are said to be sent every day. The absolute scale of Alphabet and its services sometimes boggles my mind. In particular - YouTube where one can't help but ponder about content moderation at this scale being impossible without highly sophisticated algorithms(which also face the heat every once in a while).

lalos 6y ago
This is scary to think about given that you need rare earth elements to build those chips powering all those machines. Makes sense why some countries are ensuring to have a supply on this in the long term, feels like the new oil.
- mc32 6y ago
  At least they are recoverable and recyclable, oil not so much.
  - CogitoCogito 6y ago
    Are they? If you have a pile of 1,000,000 chips, can you really get any of the elements out at reasonable (by almost any metric) cost?
    - SpaceRaccoon 6y ago
      Why would it be more difficult than to extract from ore? You can smelt them, that will burn away the plastic, and then you can separate the metals.
      - CogitoCogito 6y ago
        I'm honestly having a bit of trouble putting my misgiving into thoughts (which if anything demonstrates I haven't thought this all through), but if you throw together say 10 materials, how likely are you to be able to separate out those 10 materials again? Or will you only be able to separate a couple metals with certain convenient melting points? I do see what you're saying though. Maybe the easy question is, what actually happens when electronics are recycled today? How much of the original material is retrieved? Maybe I'm just entirely wrong even given the state of the art today?

zozin 6y ago

Out of the four companies questioned by Congress Google seems to be the most poorly/inefficiently run, as well as the most likely to be broken up due to its products monopolizing the spaces they compete in. If Congress does act and if Google does indeed get split up or negatively affected by antitrust regs, doesn't it stand to reason that the other three also face the same fate? Weakening AdWords would be a boon to Facebook; making Android independent might help out iPhone sales and increase Apple's walled garden; spinning off YouTube would probably help Facebook, Prime Video and YouTube TV; Google Shopping ceasing to be subsidized by AdWords would be great for Bezos' bottomline, etc. It seems to me that if Congress weakens one of the four, the others will only grow in size/influence.

jeffbee 6y ago
You really think Google is the inefficient of those four? Apple runs a hot/spare datacenter strategy. Their overhead has to be ridiculous.
- kccqzy 6y ago
  Hardware doesn't cost that much. Think about the number of new projects or products Google just starts without a coherent strategy and then shuts down without monetizing them, pissing off both users and the original developers. Think about the wasted engineering time. That's why Google is inefficiently run.

shadowgovt 6y ago

There are a couple of ways a startup can become a conventional company. Some of them are good things that Google probably should do. For example, big companies have quality expectations that startups don't need to honor (because everyone kind of understands the whole undertaking is a risk and if it fails, oh well). They also have more impact on culture and people (in multiple countries, often), and the nature of that impact has to be considered (because there's no such thing, really, as "neutral;" one person's neutrality is another's adherence to status quo, and the status quo is not always good. If it was, we'd never need new companies). This results in some loss of velocity (quality takes time; consideration of outsized effects takes time). But it's loss of velocity for the right reasons, as a company moves from 1,000 users to 1 billion.

binarymax 6y ago

Has google meet come up in antitrust allegations? Google has been forcing it on me everywhere. That nonsense is egregious.

jorams 6y ago

I'm still reading the article, but this stood out to me: > More than 300bn emails are said to be sent every day and if only one-third originate on Gmail—a conservative estimate—then a stack of print-outs would be 10,000km high. I don't think that's a conservative estimate at all. In fact, I'd say it's a massive over-estimation. Only one type of email is dominated by Gmail: personal email. I don't know about everyone, but I don't see many personal emails being sent. Lots of those emails are for work, and there Gmail is not dominant at all. It's not insignificant, but Microsoft is a significantly larger part of the pile. Another very large part of the total is automated emails, which are not sent through Gmail either. Since Google Cloud doesn't include an email service, I'd go so far as to guess that more email originates from Amazon (SES) than from Google.

jedimastert 6y ago
I do wonder how many emails they receive though...
kaesar14 6y ago
https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23 https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23 Seems like 1/3rd is more or less right. I think you're underestimating how big enterprise buy-in for the G-Suite is, Docs and Sheets are both widely used at this point.
- jorams 6y ago
  Very interesting! Looks like my perspective is very Western Europe-centric, where the data matches what I expected. Gmail is bigger than I expected in the US, and also in Eastern Europe. I do wonder what "market share" means here, and how the domains are selected. The massive market share of GoDaddy seems off, especially since from their website they seem to be reselling Microsoft Office 365, but could be explained by default email MX records on domains registered there (do they do that?).
  - kaesar14 6y ago
    FWIW, I've worked at two companies in my career so far, both could be described as tech unicorns turned public in the last decade, and both used G-Suite for all enterprise use-cases where applicable. Absolutely no adoption of MSFT products. That being said it also means I'm somewhat in the SV company bubble and I'm not sure how this picture looks throughout the industry.

known 6y ago

One President/Prime Minister cannot lead/manage 7 billion people; Google should be split into separate companies; http://archive.li/WOJje http://archive.li/WOJje

Proven 6y ago
Or perhaps you should stop minding other people's business. If the CEO can't manage it will lose market share so why should that bother anyone but their shareholders?

RestlessMind 6y ago

> the company is now run by a different triumvirate. Besides Mr Pichai it includes Kent Walker, senior vice-president of global affairs, and Ruth Porat, the finance chief Google leadership in 2001: 2 engineers and an eng manager. In 2020: 1 eng manager, 1 lawyer, 1 banker. No wonder!

pb7 6y ago
That's not optional when you are running a company of this size.
- RestlessMind 6y ago
  Amazon is bigger than Google. And yet, its leadership is only Bezos ever since it started. Sure, it might have a CFO or CLO, but when it comes to calling ultimate shots, there is no doubt regarding who is in charge. That's not the case at Google where it seemed no one wanted to take charge and put his/her stamp on company's execution.
  - pb7 6y ago
    Bezos holds the majority voting rights. He answers to no one. That hasn’t been the case with Google since Larry and Sergei checked out.
    - RestlessMind 6y ago
      So what is holding Sundar back now that the founders have checked out? FWIW, Nadella doesn't have majority voting rights in MSFT, but you can see his clear stamp on the company's execution (de-emphasizing Windows, for instance).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nova22033 6y ago
It's a public company. It has a CFO. Nothing unusual about that.

ehvatum 6y ago

> To keep hierarchies flat, Mr Brin and Mr Page briefly went so far as to abolish managers altogether, though the experiment had to be dialled back. A compromise was to give managers a minimum of seven direct reports to limit the time they have to loom over each underling. In my experience, so many direct reports changes a manager’s job from “managing people” to “facilitating people”. It’s the same for engineers and laborers, scientists and shit-scrapers. There is time enough to defend your team from HR terrorism, advocate for your team’s technical perspective, and fight for resources - and that’s it. Except at the big-big overly-titanic conglomerates, who trade behemoth economy of scale for total dysfunction, so as to barely break even. IE, Google’s future.

BeetleB 6y ago
In my experience, when a manager has a lot of reports, it usually ends up with team members playing all kinds of pathological controlling behavior (e.g mild to not-so-mild bullying). Conflicts arise, and team members who are the loudest usually win. The manager simply is too stretched to understand enough to manage these situations. He will usually cede to the people who he thinks are the "experts" in the team. Essentially, you now have unofficial managers in the team. It's no longer de facto a flat hierarchy. And worse, there is little to no accountability. People will try to "seize power" and carve out their niche. This is usually not intentional on the part of said people, but I think it is more or less the "natural" dynamic that arises. I'm sure there are exceptions. Having a manager who can assert authority and make decisions in conflict situations is great. He/she shouldn't do it often (i.e. micromanage), but a manager who has lots of reports (e.g. > 10) rarely makes good decisions in such situations.
- freedomben 6y ago
  I tend to agree. Philosophically I really, really wanted to do away with managers but after working in a company that basically did that, it was the loud and forceful personalities that became the de facto bosses/decision makers. It created several monsters that I could not wait to get away from. Having good managers is my goal now rather than having little to no managers.

DoctorNick 6y ago

Remember when we all were happy that Google was finally starting to break down the Microsoft monopoly? And then they ended up becoming a way, way worse monopoly? Good times.

scarface74 6y ago
You mean like in 2000 when Microsoft dominated the operating system and office productivity market and when they were one of the top five most valuable companies in the US? How things have changed thanks to government intervention and Google....
- criddell 6y ago
  You aren't going to lay any of the blame at Ballmer's feet?
  - scarface74 6y ago
    I was being sarcastic. Microsoft still has about the same dominance in two of the areas where antitrust was concerned - computer operating systems and productivity. The third was the browser. No one cares about browser dominance except for Google because of advertising.
    - criddell 6y ago
      I think your statement is right. Things really have changed.
missedthecue 6y ago
the great thing about tech monopolies is that there are so many of them
jefftk 6y ago
How is Google a way, way worse monopoly than Microsoft was? (Disclosure: I work for Google now, and I think I would not have worked for Microsoft 20 years ago)

coliveira 6y ago

I don't understand what is the big problem in just splitting Google into separate companies. This will be great for everyone, including shareholders. It is not a secret that one of methods to unleash value in a stock is to split the company. See for example the case of Ebay and Paypal.

alexpetralia 6y ago
Can you provide more evidence of this?
guyzero 6y ago
"It is not a secret that one of methods to unleash value in a stock is to split the company" Yes, and it's not a secret that the other way to unleash value is to merge companies. See for example AT&T or Exxon & Mobil.
- gph 6y ago
  But you'll notice the companies that successfully gain value through merging are typically competitors that are able to generate more value together instead of fighting for the same profits. The same does not seem to be true for any of the Alphabet companies, except in the sense of being able to leverage shared user data for better targeted ads. Perhaps that does make it worth it to remain one company, but it's debatable, especially for something like Waymo which likely won't benefit from having access to search data.
  - guyzero 6y ago
    There are tons of industrial conglomerates, from GE to Samsung to Siemens and there's not really any universal agreement that they're any worse than more focussed companies. This goes all the way back to the most basic theories of organization - why do companies even exist? Why is everyone not effectively a contractor? Why do companies not outsource every non-core function? And there are good reasons why companies exist - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm External transaction costs are real and breaking Google up could significantly increase those. Someone from Siemens once told me "Siemens is an investment bank that happens to own all of the companies it has invested in." I'm not sure whether that's true or not, but it's a good description of conglomerates in general.

johnyzee 6y ago

So have Larry and Sergei completely checked out? It seems a little weird that they would just turn their back completely on the company they created with their own hands. Particularly since they still have the controlling interest, and could do pretty much whatever they feel like with the company. That's a lot of power to not use.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
They don't want to be the ones hauled in front of Congress. Every other company testifying yesterday's actual head of the company was there, but Google's was merely a lackey. Larry and Sergey have just slid themselves out of the official structure, but their share voting power keeps them squarely in charge. You don't hear about what they're up to because they can afford what they've taken from everyone else: Privacy.
CobrastanJorji 6y ago
Sure, but say you're a crazy rich billionaire and you've found you kind of hate being a CEO. What I think a lot of crazy rich CEOs don't understand, which Larry Page did understand, is that you can just stop. You don't need to give away your control, you don't need to give away your fortune, you can just point to somebody nearby and say "you're in charge now," then just go live on an island in the middle of nowhere and watch old movies or build ships in a bottle or whatever it is you like to do. Why is it a problem for you that you have a lot of power that you're not using? It'd be a hassle to figure out who to give away the power to, so just keep it. It always weirds me out when I see these 75 year old CEOs with massive wealth spending their retirement years trying to get Walgreens to grow an extra 5% this quarter or something. Why are you doing this? Are you that invested in the future of Walgreens? You're got $8 billion, maybe take a break or try and fix the world or do something that will bring you joy.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  At that point, they enjoy green uplifting lines more than anything else. I know my grandpa loves some pointless things as a habit. Maybe they have forgotten how to enjoy life through other means.

hinkley 6y ago

In the Evil Empire days of Microsoft, a few different people explained to me that there's a lot of populism in antitrust cases. That through history, the monopolist really only loses once their list of friends and allies grows thin. Microsoft beat every case until a couple years after the crowd had turned on them. I don't think the crowd has turned on Google yet. What has changed in this time is that the EU has gotten sharp teeth and quite a lot of backbone, so they end up winning cases that help us a little bit here in the States long before we get around to the same sort of conclusions.

murgindrag 6y ago
Google is quickly becoming the Evil Empire of Microsoft of the Nineties (who, in turn, has managed to pull a 180). The soul left with Larry/Sergei/Eric, and we have corporate drones at the top seeking to maximize shareholder value. It's only a matter of time before reputation catches up. At the same time, Google is much less suited to weather a storm: 1) This quote struck me: “You can paper over a lot of problems by throwing money at it and hiring more bodies,” says a long-time Googler, who previously worked for Microsoft. Google went from a small, elite team of the smartest guys in the room, to just bringing in bodies with a pulse. The screening processes are, as has been mentioned many times, simply random. 2) The old culture carried elitism and arrogance, which kind of works if you're competent, but much less so when mixed in with incompetence. Cultural problems are tough to clean up. Wrong and arrogant about it is very poor. 3) Short-term profits are up, and they'll rise for a while yet, but the fundamentals seem to be increasingly evaporating. Switching from Google has a lot less friction than switching from Microsoft. Goodwill was a fundamental for Google. Even when Google tries to be good, it doesn't follow universal values. It's all grounded in a left-wing ideology that resonates with a tiny fraction of its customer base. We can all agree with helping the poor. A lot of people don't agree with identity politics. It takes 5 minutes to switch search from Google to DDG, so I don't think there's the same stickiness as having Microsoft file formats and APIs.

saberience 6y ago

Paywall on this, can someone provide the text?

monadic2 6y ago

I’m fairly certain a conventional company was the plan all along. Why else bring in Eric Schmidt? Any perception that it was not is marketing to push down engineering salaries.

littlepinkpill 6y ago

>from the article: “This enviable track record justifies Mr Pichai’s rich compensation package over several years, of $2m annual salary plus $240m in shares and stock options” ==It does not.== Consider this tidbit against today's discussion about UBI (Universal Basic Income)[#39 on the HN hit parade: article=<https://timjrobinson.com/universal-basic-income-is-capitalism-2-0/> https://timjrobinson.com/universal-basic-income-is-capitalis... comment thread= <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23993259> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23993259>]. No. Body. Is worth that kind of annual salary. And calling it "enviable" reveals a content-free value system. We've become an absurdist economy.

three_seagrass 6y ago

Clever of the Economist to drop this on the day of Google's earnings.

jjwilliamson 6y ago

Google's ads revenue is down a lot, but they will try to make people not pay attention to it by focusing on other stuff. The reality is that Google's almost all revenue is from ads, period.

Animats 6y ago

About 60% of product searches now start on Amazon Now that's a big problem for Google. Product searches are Google's money machine. Google's other big problem is being terrible at anything which needs repair or customer support. Their various attempts at becoming an internet service provider, via WiFi, fiber, or balloons, have not been successful. Buying up all the good robotics startups and running them into the ground benefited nobody. The self-driving car thing is a huge money drain that still hasn't produced a product. Anyone remember the Google Search Appliance? Two other engineering-first companies blew it - Hewlett-Packard, and Westinghouse. Both were successful, profitable, and renowned for excellent engineering. It's useful to study what they did wrong.

gundmc 6y ago
Google Fi was widely praised for excellent customer service when they first launched, but I think that reputation was lost as they scaled out in the last few years. Edited to make past tense more clear.
- rainyMammoth 6y ago
  Do we live on a different planet? Google Fi is well known to be one of the worst customer services. I used it for a couple of months and most obvious queries are automated. Anything that requires an human barely gets any attention. The subreddit for Google Fi is very telling.
  - bronco21016 6y ago
    I think the parent is referring to when it initially rolled out. I was among the first customers when it came out and the customer service was indeed excellent. I was always able to quickly get through to talk to a native English speaker in the US. The support staff were always very knowledgeable and friendly as well. I didn't last long on the service though. I just couldn't live without my iPhone in those early days of the service. No idea how things are now. EDIT: My bad, I see parent is referring to present day. Experience from the early days still stands though.
  - 6y ago

RobertSmith 6y ago

Google's ad revenue had declined 8% in the second quarter. Revenue and profit also dropped year-over-year. https://news.alphastreet.com/alphabet-goog-googl-q2-2020-earnings-the-most-important-numbers/ https://news.alphastreet.com/alphabet-goog-googl-q2-2020-ear...

psadri 6y ago

Will Google buy Shopify to compete with Amazon?

sandoooo 6y ago

If all you want to do is make money off of stock speculation, it doesn't matter much who's going to win between the FAAAs. You could just split your investment evenly or by market cap. Even the losers are going to hold their value quite well in the mid-term, there's plenty of time to exit before the writing's on the wall. In the short term there's the whole coronavirus-and-shrinking-gdp-and-money-printing thing going on, of course, so who knows.

voidhorse 6y ago

If you watched the hearing, you will have noticed many of the congressmen and women, after asking their questions in a harsh, accusatory manner, sometimes speaking over the witnesses, turn down to their laps to look at their Apple or Google phones, Google search something, post it to Twitter and or Facebook, and maybe purchase something on Amazon for good measure. That kind of illustrates the point that these companies just might be too big, but what I don't hear anyone discussing are the potential consequences of breaking these companies up--they are a hard dependency in some way for most of the American populace if not the world's day to day operations and the quality of their services is largely reliant on their scale--I don't think the analogy to Standard Oil does justice to the complexity of the situation. We're not talking about a simple consumer product here, we're talking about complicated data-driven services, services that all rely on access to massive pools of information collected over years at this point, once you fragment the access to that data, the services will no longer perform as they currently do--then what will happen to the little guy we're trying to protect from the big boys who relies on Facebook and Google to advertise, Amazon to feed part of his supply chain, and Apple hardware? How might his business look if you suddenly swap out all of these behemoth quality services he depends on for disjointed shadows of their former selves, many of which will no longer be able to justify the gratis offerings and free tiers they currently can? Not saying it these giants shouldn't be broken up, just saying it's a process that will require a lot of incredibly careful thought and to be honest I'm not confident those with the power to make the decisions in this case have all the tools they need to ensure such a transition happens without having catastrophic side-effects.

esperent 6y ago
If Google search vanished overnight the world would turn to DDG within a day. Ok, that would probably crash their servers but I'm sure they and other search engines could scale up quickly.
- voidhorse 6y ago
  Right, but the average person doesn't know about DDG--sure word would catch on, but the initial break would cause major friction for the vast majority of people. Also, what happens to all that data in stowed away in other services? What happens, with Gmail if it's separated from the ads division? Do they suddenly start charging everyone to use it? Can they still run ads in Gmail? Would they have access to the infra serving those ads? If they flame out completely do we lose all our data? Will they give us a chance to export it? In what format?.... I just can't help but feel these sorts of breaks would be extremely difficult to get right.

chiefalchemist 6y ago

Too many of Google's eggs have been in one basket for quite some time. Thiel was spot on in Zero to One when he pointed out how many of Google's endeavors are simply a cover for its stranglehold (read: monopoly) on search and associated adds. Also, given Slack and Zoom's growth certainly Google is crying when it thinks about Wave and Hangouts. Microsoft had to fall to get back up again. Now it's Google's turn.

trevor-e 6y ago

Since the article is login-walled I can only generally comment. The hard part of competing against Google is they have seemingly infinite discretionary money and computing power to throw at a problem. Normal businesses have to be profitable to survive, but Google can subsidize loss leaders with their advertising/search profits and still win in the end because it all feeds into their data collection and strengthens their core business. Meanwhile competitors in this areas get squeezed out. Take Google Flights for example. They purchased ITA and eventually closed external API access. The expensive computations are likely done via GCP for a cheaper rate. Travel sites pay billions of dollars to Google for ad rankings, yet Google can still promote their travel tools (search "Flights to San Francisco" to see a custom UI that links to Google Flights) in search results, and once you book a flight it creates a trip for you in Gmail. See: https://www.pymnts.com/antitrust/2020/google-under-fire-allegedly-promoting-own-travel-service-over-others/ https://www.pymnts.com/antitrust/2020/google-under-fire-alle... Disclaimer: I do work for a competitor but this is just my own personal observation.

kumarvvr 6y ago
The Achilles heel of Google is stricter privacy laws. Every other threat pales in comparison. Apple can survive, and in fact thrives in an environment where privacy takes paramount importance. Google cannot. Even FB may swim through, as it is driven by user actions. People post on it, share articles, chat on it, etc. Google has a big moat now, and that moat will vanish if people start getting serious about privacy.
- mrep 6y ago
  Really? I'd say it's the exact opposite between Facebook and Google. Google gets the majority of their ad revenue from search and search ads for me at least are always based on exactly what you are searching for. The other data is only useful seems to only be used for their ads on other peoples websites but that's only like 15% of their revenue. Facebook on the other hand advertises essentially based on your browser history and not on the content around it so they'd get hosed on stricter privacy laws.

sabujp 6y ago

I think selling boston dynamics was a mistake, as was spinning off motorola. Instead of merging these with AI initiatives, these were sold off because they weren't "cultural fits" whatever that means. Business units need to have their own cultures because their customers have different cultures as well.

querez 6y ago

> Another is for Google to become more of a data fiduciary that manages people’s information for them—a bit like a bank does with money. I'm not sure Google is the right company for this due to people not trusting them, but overall I kind of like that idea. I've self-hosted a lot of my services due to not wanting to give companies too much of my data. But it's a hassle. I noticed that I'm willing to pay money for peopel to take this off my hands, but those need to be people I trust. I think protonmail might become the company of choice for me in these regards. They already have my email, and I wouldn't mind outsourcing my calendar and VPN to them, either.