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Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. Google keeps killing low-to-mediu

Google (okay, Alphabet) is the only big tech company that I can imagine would ultimately _benefit_ from an antitrust breakup. Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully. Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, etc. (for example: Google Reader could not be spun off because it assumed things about Google's infrastructure + libraries.) So Google arrives at this strange position where medium-yet-small profitable products can't be spun off or divested because of Google's secret sauce (their internal infrastructure). So Google kills successful products instead, because it isn't interested in scaling up an only _modestly_ successful product. This is insane and a sign that something is deeply wrong in Google. Splitting Google up, forcing this infrastructure to become open, etc would be much healthier than perpetually killing small products to protect Google's secret sauce.

nojito 6y ago
Google will likely go under if they are broken up. The prevailing theory is that their ad success is solely due to data sharing throughout their service offerings.
- FrojoS 6y ago
  The search engine alone is a money printing machine even without sophisticated ads. As an example, if I search for 'nike' right now, the first result is an ad payed by Nike leading to nike.com, the second is an ad for an independent webshop selling Nike products and the third is the first actual search result (almost not on the screen anymore), again leading to nike.com So, effectively Nike is paying Google (a lot) to get the result they would have if there were no ads, or if people would type 'nike.com' into the address bar instead of 'nike'.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    > So, effectively Nike is paying Google (a lot) to get the result they would have if there were no ads Yes, but we live in a world with ads, so what they're actually paying for is making sure a competitor doesn't show up. That's why I consider branded keywords a racket.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    I am shocked this isn't illegal yet. Basically what Google is doing in your example is selling Nike it's own trademark, with the subtle threat that if they don't, Google will use Nike's trademark to direct to a competitor instead. The idea that Google can charge Nike to be the top result on a search for Nike is a form of subtle extortion, and I'd have to imagine trademark infringement. It's definitely a form of rent-seeking, as Google isn't actually helping advertise Nike: The people searching for it already knew where they wanted to go.
    - spanhandler 6y ago
      I have a suspicion a significant amount of their income comes from exactly that kind of extortion, and (very much relatedly) from tricking people who aren't Good at Computers into clicking ads that they think are search results, not from any machine-learning magic. At least as far as search ads are concerned.
      - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
        I am very, very confident that this is true. I do not think people who actually know how the ad revenue is generated would like the public to know what percentage of Google's revenue is built on exploiting senior citizens' tendency to click on scammy ads, and trademark squatting such as this. I spoke to a Googler a few days ago here about how a scam ad was being constantly perpetrated against seniors on Google's ad platform, screenshots included, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24044837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24044837
        spanhandler 6y ago
        I distinctly remember their experiments with inlining ads "ethically", and all the discussion about that by outsiders, and how the "ethically" part quietly went away and they settled on "clearly trying to trick people". I have no inside knowledge but can only speculate that those early experiments shot the profitability arrow so hard upward, and that every tweak making the results more deceptive did so even more, that they just couldn't resist becoming... well, what they became after that. And nearly all the difference between their numbers before and after those tweaks are, plainly, due to deception. [EDIT] also and again directly related to their inlining of ads with search results, I've noticed a trend even among the reasonably tech-savvy to click an ad that is what they wanted... even when the natural result is just a couple entries under it. That's not sending people to the wrong place but it is gaining Google money from something that is exactly and entirely rent-seeking, as in it could go in an encyclopedia as a perfect and unequivocal real-world example.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    DHH talks about this. https://mobile.twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 https://mobile.twitter.com/jasonfried/status/116898696270498... Edit oops: it’s not DHH, it’s Jason Fried - Basecamp’s other cofounder.
    - spanhandler 6y ago
      I like all the proposed solutions in that thread involving brandname keyword bans and giving ad accounts time-outs for violations and such when the actual fix is to go back to putting ads somewhere other than inline with search results, and making it very clear that they're ads. The move away from that was pure evil, but I'm sure it's made Google a lot of money. It's crazy it doesn't count as some sort of fraud.
- strbean 6y ago
  I don't see it. All the spinoffs will presumably still use federated Google sign-ins. They can simply contract with the Ads spinoff to share user data.
shadowgovt 6y ago
It's not even so much about protecting the secret sauce as protecting user data. Every tool interfacing to the Google backend is a potential attack vector. When the time comes that nobody's willing to bear the cost to keep it updated as the core infrastructure changes, the product dies. In a world where Google is split up, that'll still be true; it'll look more like "Google CoreCloud has just changed API foo to protect against backflooper attacks; all users must change by Q4 2022." And spin-offs that can't afford the change will kill features or products. In fact, in a world where individual pieces of Alphabet are required to sink or swim based on their own profitability, I expect more products dead, not fewer. Ads pays for search. Who pays for search in a world where the government has stepped in and divested ads and search from each other?
- Retric 6y ago
  Presumably spinoffs would end up with their own copy of all software infrastructure, which would evolve independently at that point.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    I'm not sure that's presumable. It sounds like a better way to do things in the short run (in the long run, there's a net loss from the loss of the cross-pollination benefits of security and best-practice on the backend that Google enjoys now).
    - Nasrudith 6y ago
      It depends on how stupid the regulators are - the one with the google name will win. Seriously people - domain names and awareness matter ans you can't just partition websites to regions with an international web.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        We already know how incapable the regulators are. 20 years after they went after MS for their dominance in personal computer operating systems, productivity software and browsers, MS is still dominant in two and the third doesn’t matter to anyone except for Google. MS had the highest market cap in the US in 2000. As of today it is #3. The government had a monopoly suit against IBM in 1969 and finally withdrew it in 1983 and nothing came of it. People in tech have been wanting the government to go after Big Tech for years. Four of the CEOs show up for Congressional hearings and then the government goes after...TikTok and WeChat instead.
DSingularity 6y ago
What? Why don’t they fork internal dependencies or push the developers of the infrastructure to support the dependent projects?
dmitriid 6y ago
> perpetually killing small products to protect Google's secret sauce. I doubt Google kills those products because it can't spin them off because of secret sauce. Google kills those products because: - they are not profitable enough (profitable enough for Google) - they don't drive engagement and ad sales enough (once again, not enough for Google) - it offers no promotion paths for people who may run them, so it's hard to recruit internally (as many posts have shown, development of new shiny things, however superficial, is rewarded, maintaining is not) And "spinning something off" is not a simple task in itself and will most likely cost more money than just shutting a product down.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  This is really the core of it. If you run the numbers, Google makes something like $1 million of profit per year for each engineer at the company. If a product has a 10-person engineering team and isn't bringing in $40 million / year at a 25% profit margin then there are just better things for those engineers to be working on and the product will likely be shut down so that the team can reprioritize.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I remember back when I was an industry analyst talking to someone at IBM about some initiative other. And one of the things he said--I might not have the number/metric quite right but the idea is the important thing--was that if an initiative isn't going to bring in a billion dollars, it just doesn't move the needle enough to bother with. Every little project takes some number of cycles from everyone up the management chain as well as finance, HR, etc. etc. At some point, even if it is profitable on its own, it's just too small of a blip to bother with. Plus, of course, no one is going to want to work on it because it's that dead end thing that the company doesn't care about and may randomly cancel at any time.
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      As someone else mentioned elsewhere, Google has serious data security and privacy requirements to contend with. The “up the chain cycles” consumed by a small project are massively exacerbated when everything has to be done in a way that won’t open the company to risk of Chinese cyberattack or massive EU fines. Projects have to be large enough to justify the effort to build them to extremely high quality, because anything low-quality is a risk that outweighs any potential benefit.
milesward 6y ago
And people wonder why kubernetes/Anthos is a thing...
- pas 6y ago
  umm, what's anthos? I thought I'm well versed in k8s-onomy, but it seems I've missed this :o And worse, none of the search results are helpful!
  - jpadkins 6y ago
    https://cloud.google.com/anthos https://cloud.google.com/anthos
    - gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
      That link doesn't really help explain anything.
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        As best I can explain it (being a non-expert who technically works in the Google Cloud PA but not really): Anthos is an abstraction layer that allows you to manage on prem and on cloud servers in ~the same way. So if you have on prem infra that you can't migrate to the cloud (for legal reasons or because it's some big hefty SAP server or whatnot, or because you want to migrate but can't yet), but still want to have some stuff be cloud-y, and maybe have that stuff communicate, you can use anthos to make that work. And that's the best I can give you.
EarthIsHome 6y ago
> Splitting Google up, forcing this infrastructure to become open, etc would be much healthier than perpetually killing small products to protect Google's secret sauce. I totally agree! But this assumes that what Google wants to do is healthy. What Google actually does is try to make more profit. A majority of choices made are guided by this one law: to accumulate as much capital as possible (after all, we live in a capitalist system). This law is similar to other physical laws that govern our physical system e.g. "current likes to flow in the path of least resistance." In a capitalist system, the mode of production is fueled by profit. Companies that aren't profitable or can't compete with larger companies cease to exist or get eaten up by larger corps. In turn, the wealth of these smaller companies get sucked into the larger companies, and they keep subsuming more and more. It's the natural tendency of the system. It's not like these companies really have a choice in the matter.. they're just operating within the confines and laws of the system. In order to slow this tendency, an outside force must act on the system.
dilippkumar 6y ago
> Splitting Google up, forcing this infrastructure to become open, etc would be much healthier than perpetually killing small products to protect Google's secret sauce. There are probably many Googlers here who have sacrificed huge portions of their life and time getting the Google infrastructure to work. Forcing engineers to make changes to their creation is insane. Personally, I’d rather not build anything than have someone force me to break up what I’ve built because I was too successful at building it. I think we should all agree to just keep politics out of engineering. We build things because we like to, we should assume the same for Google engineers.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- selestify 6y ago
  Engineers are forced by management to make changes to their creations anyway. What’s the difference between management telling an engineer to do something and the government telling management to tell an engineer to do something?
- t0mmyb0y 6y ago
  " Forcing engineers to make changes to their creation is insane." Really? Is it really insane to command employees to do what the company wants? One of the biggest issues google has always had is allowing engineers to do what they want to get them to work on various platforms. Do you know how many thousands of hidden commands are in gmail?
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  If you think Google isn't deeply involved in politics already, you are fooling yourself.
jackfoxy 6y ago
It is worth noting when Standard Oil was broken up John D. Rockefeller's net worth went up. The sum value of the new oil companies soon exceeded the value of the old monolith. Also for reasons I cannot explain, investors happily watch the failed conglomerate model re-invented time and time again, even though history shows conglomerates running their divinions into the ground.
- mathattack 6y ago
  Same with breaking up Ma Bell. Sometimes it’s that M and A helps the CEOs more than the investors.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  His wealth increased but his power decreased. In Google’s case, their monopoly drives tremendous value to management at the expense of society and its shareholders.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  Be careful not to confuse monopolies with conglomerates. You're right conglomerates mismanage (usually neglect) some divisions, but that wasn't the case with Standard Oil. Esso wasn't a neglected divison; oil is oil. The new companies being more valuable is interesting. It helped that they were regional monopolies. Maybe people thought the added competition drove growth on its own. Maybe the new companies became crowded trades because rather than just being a bet on oil, it was a bet on oil and who would win in oil.
  - jackfoxy 6y ago
    I didn't imply Standard Oil was a conglomerate or that conglomerates are monopolies. How did you parse that? Alphabet on the other hand has characteristics of both.
    - MiroF 6y ago
      You certainly imply that the "history" you refer to in your third sentence is the one described in the previous two.
imeanth00 6y ago
It’s almost as if Google isn’t a product company but an engineering study hall. Perhaps societies take on what we should expect of these places is due for a refresh? Obviously Google knows about this. They’ve brought it up. The culture continues to not care as it’s mostly a capital extraction vehicle for IT workers. I’ve had a number of Googlers from pre-2010s mope Google isn’t favoring them anymore and is trying to push products not imaginations of engineers, it’s not working with all those older engineers hanging about collecting $500k+/yr. Who gives that up? Capitalism doesn’t demand product development. Just exchange of “capital” for rubberneckers to bet against. If y’all are gonna imagine Google has that much capital to trade why do they need to make products? You’re already buying the myth.
polyomino 6y ago
This could be a good forcing function for them to get their act together on cloud. However, I've heard that teams internally can't build on google cloud for various reasons. It may even make more sense for them to directly spin off onto AWS. Even "seperate" companies like Waymo build their systems on the internal google infra.
- easton 6y ago
  I'd imagine (although I don't work there) that it has something to do with datacenter availability. Google probably has a lot more datacenters than are available in Google Cloud used purely for internal workloads that run on their commodity hardware, which was what Borg was designed to run on. It's much easier to manage internal workloads by saying "it has to work on this" instead of letting each individual team go wild on Google Cloud and spin up whatever they want, which is how you get into an unmanageable flustercluck of shadow IT. Coupled with "Google-scale"(tm), where every service has to be able to scale globally (which is why they have so many datacenters and boxes in ISPs, etc.), it'd be difficult to manage that real estate the same way as companies do on your cloud (what if you need to bring up a ton of Gmail or YouTube traffic and the datacenter is at 97% load because Google Cloud had a good sales month? Not an impossible problem to fix, I suppose, but you could suddenly find yourself without enough hardware when you're talking about Google sized traffic.) I suppose AWS figured it out, although I always figured amazon.com didn't exactly compete for resources with outsiders.
Google234 6y ago
Your theory on Google reader is completely false. This fake news
heavyset_go 6y ago
> Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully It's worse than that, Google releases products for free killing competitors in the markets they enter, and once those competitors are gone, Google pulls their products.
- andrewla 6y ago
  Yes -- I think this is far more important. If anything, Google kills off low-to-medium _adoption_ products, regardless of profitability.
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  I feel like I agree with this statement, but I can't think of any examples. Google Fiber doesn't seem to fit, or Reader, or Wave, which are the most commonly cited examples of popular products that got killed.
  - okennedy 6y ago
    Google Reader?
    - jonny_eh 6y ago
      IIRC the incumbents were free, like Mozilla Thunderbird.
kristianc 6y ago
> Google Reader could not be spun off because it assumed things about Google's infrastructure + libraries.) The reason to not spin it off Is less because of Google’s infra and libraries than it not fitting with Google’s revenue model. It existed only to tie user preference data to an identity, and sharpen Google’s ads business. Divested of that, it doesn’t make sense. Google has no interest in joining the hobbyist $5 a month RSS reader market.
tomerico 6y ago
Even analysts believe that Google's sum-of-its-parts is larger's than the whole. https://www.barrons.com/articles/alphabet-stock-is-worth-35-more-based-on-a-sum-of-its-parts-analyst-says-51595947081 https://www.barrons.com/articles/alphabet-stock-is-worth-35-...
acituan 6y ago
> Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, etc. (for example: Google Reader could not be spun off This is a not a likely speculation. Did reader really require anything special that doesn’t already exist as a Google Cloud API? Or majority of their killed products honestly? Or to look another way, do you think anyone who has a cloud services platform (Microsoft, Amazon, Google) can really afford having a separate, divergent infrastructure internally? Haven’t these services started for utilizing excess capacity and economies of scale of existing infrastructure? Also you are idealizing code reuse, especially at scale. When you take a dependency the arrow goes both ways and now there is a cost for depended breaking things too. Each integration potentially creates non-trivial friction points, if not we would have open source code of the world converge towards a single codebase organically already.
- andrewem 6y ago
  It's probably true that now (in 2020) Google has cloud services that do everything which Reader needed, but it wasn't true when Reader was shut down in 2013. For instance, cloud Bigtable launched to the public in 2015. (I don't know whether current Google products mainly rely on the public services, or internal near-equivalents to the public services, or significantly different internal services. I assume it's mainly either the first or the second.)
  - acituan 6y ago
    Well the point is there is no “secret sauce infra”, let alone Google specific infra as the OP speculates. If we were to claim timing as a factor, AWS was available since 2006.
    - lrem 6y ago
      You really missed the point. It does not matter if the "secret sauce infra" is better than equivalents. What matters is that the code you have is based on it. And since literally everything is based on Stubby, which has a hard dependency on Borg, once you remove the bits of the backend's code that are secret-sauce-dependent you're left with a Makefile ;) Disclaimer: I work in Google, but the above is easily inferred from the SRE books.
d1zzy 6y ago
The engineering effort required to split up a mammoth code base where everything has been written based on those assumptions about the rest of the codebase is making such a split extremely unlikely to succeed. We're not talking about a few millions lines of code, we're talking about billions[1] of lines of code. It would take more than a decade of having thousands of engineers work only on this and not do anything else (like, you know, actually develop features to keep being competitive). I don't see how it would work. What I could see working tho would be to focus on exporting some of the very core internal libraries[2] and then go on a project by project basis and do the work required to be made to work externally. The latter would be a never ending effort but the end result would be a number of averagely successful projects that spin off Google. [1] https://www.wired.com/2015/09/google-2-billion-lines-codeand-one-place/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/google-2-billion-lines-codeand... 2 billion lines of code in 2015, I'd imagine there are at least 3 by now, considering the increase in employee count. [2] https://opensource.google/projects/abseil https://opensource.google/projects/abseil
- menage 6y ago
  But most of those billions of lines are not the low-level infrastructure relied on by many projects. To split out a single product would only require creating external versions of a much smaller subset of the code (and once that had been done once, other products being split out could build on that effort).
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Companies with millions of miles of physical infrastructure have been broken up before. You're missing the forest for the trees if you're fixating on the code.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    Breaking up physical infrastructure is a lot easier than breaking up something like Google's monorepo, and that's not to mention all of the physical infrastructure Google has all over the world that would have to be divvied up as well.
- 6y ago
ytdytvhxgydvhh 6y ago
I’m not sure that it’s insane to kill off profitable products. Some folks were upset recently that Honda is discontinuing the Fit subcompact hatchback in the US. That’d be easily understandable if it were an unpopular, unprofitable product. But the Fit was well-loved and dealers struggled to keep them on the lots. So why did Honda kill it? The HR-V subcompact SUV based on the Fit has been produced for the US in the same factory in Mexico and is more profitable and more popular. If you’re Honda, maybe it makes sense to make more of the vehicle that makes twice as much profit and divert resources away from the less profitable model. Still bums me out that I soon won’t be able to buy a new Honda Fit though.
- monadic2 6y ago
  How does that make sense? On paper they just lose the revenue of the Fit without gaining any new revenue elsewhere. That’s just a loss. It takes some magical thinking to argue that these lost customers will move over to the more popular model, a qualitatively different car.
  - ummonk 6y ago
    What I got from that comment is that they're supply constrained, and gain new revenue elsewhere by producing more of the HR-V.
    - monadic2 6y ago
      Why would they think that demand of the HR-V is likely to increase if they remove the fit? I understand removing unprofitable lines, but if it’s making money why fix something that ain’t broken? If they’re worried about competing with themselves, they’ve blatantly told you as a customer the car you want is too desirable for you to have it. Wtf?
      - ytdytvhxgydvhh 6y ago
        They’re supply constrained on both Fit and HR-V. The factory is going all out, but building a new factory isn’t a short term thing. So they can build all of the more profitable HR-V and sell every one or they could mix in some less profitable Fits.
djsumdog 6y ago
I was so glad when Google Reader died and I switched back to a real RSS reader. Google Reader was garbage. It wouldn't show 404s and had a ton of bugs. Every RSS reader I've tried since has been loads better.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
If a Google employee uses these taboo words in an HN comment, will YC get a subpoena?

nojito 6y ago

Google will likely go under if they are broken up. The prevailing theory is that their ad success is solely due to data sharing throughout their service offerings.

FrojoS 6y ago
The search engine alone is a money printing machine even without sophisticated ads. As an example, if I search for 'nike' right now, the first result is an ad payed by Nike leading to nike.com, the second is an ad for an independent webshop selling Nike products and the third is the first actual search result (almost not on the screen anymore), again leading to nike.com So, effectively Nike is paying Google (a lot) to get the result they would have if there were no ads, or if people would type 'nike.com' into the address bar instead of 'nike'.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  > So, effectively Nike is paying Google (a lot) to get the result they would have if there were no ads Yes, but we live in a world with ads, so what they're actually paying for is making sure a competitor doesn't show up. That's why I consider branded keywords a racket.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  I am shocked this isn't illegal yet. Basically what Google is doing in your example is selling Nike it's own trademark, with the subtle threat that if they don't, Google will use Nike's trademark to direct to a competitor instead. The idea that Google can charge Nike to be the top result on a search for Nike is a form of subtle extortion, and I'd have to imagine trademark infringement. It's definitely a form of rent-seeking, as Google isn't actually helping advertise Nike: The people searching for it already knew where they wanted to go.
  - spanhandler 6y ago
    I have a suspicion a significant amount of their income comes from exactly that kind of extortion, and (very much relatedly) from tricking people who aren't Good at Computers into clicking ads that they think are search results, not from any machine-learning magic. At least as far as search ads are concerned.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      I am very, very confident that this is true. I do not think people who actually know how the ad revenue is generated would like the public to know what percentage of Google's revenue is built on exploiting senior citizens' tendency to click on scammy ads, and trademark squatting such as this. I spoke to a Googler a few days ago here about how a scam ad was being constantly perpetrated against seniors on Google's ad platform, screenshots included, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24044837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24044837
      - spanhandler 6y ago
        I distinctly remember their experiments with inlining ads "ethically", and all the discussion about that by outsiders, and how the "ethically" part quietly went away and they settled on "clearly trying to trick people". I have no inside knowledge but can only speculate that those early experiments shot the profitability arrow so hard upward, and that every tweak making the results more deceptive did so even more, that they just couldn't resist becoming... well, what they became after that. And nearly all the difference between their numbers before and after those tweaks are, plainly, due to deception. [EDIT] also and again directly related to their inlining of ads with search results, I've noticed a trend even among the reasonably tech-savvy to click an ad that is what they wanted... even when the natural result is just a couple entries under it. That's not sending people to the wrong place but it is gaining Google money from something that is exactly and entirely rent-seeking, as in it could go in an encyclopedia as a perfect and unequivocal real-world example.
- scarface74 6y ago
  DHH talks about this. https://mobile.twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1168986962704982016 https://mobile.twitter.com/jasonfried/status/116898696270498... Edit oops: it’s not DHH, it’s Jason Fried - Basecamp’s other cofounder.
  - spanhandler 6y ago
    I like all the proposed solutions in that thread involving brandname keyword bans and giving ad accounts time-outs for violations and such when the actual fix is to go back to putting ads somewhere other than inline with search results, and making it very clear that they're ads. The move away from that was pure evil, but I'm sure it's made Google a lot of money. It's crazy it doesn't count as some sort of fraud.
strbean 6y ago
I don't see it. All the spinoffs will presumably still use federated Google sign-ins. They can simply contract with the Ads spinoff to share user data.

shadowgovt 6y ago

It's not even so much about protecting the secret sauce as protecting user data. Every tool interfacing to the Google backend is a potential attack vector. When the time comes that nobody's willing to bear the cost to keep it updated as the core infrastructure changes, the product dies. In a world where Google is split up, that'll still be true; it'll look more like "Google CoreCloud has just changed API foo to protect against backflooper attacks; all users must change by Q4 2022." And spin-offs that can't afford the change will kill features or products. In fact, in a world where individual pieces of Alphabet are required to sink or swim based on their own profitability, I expect more products dead, not fewer. Ads pays for search. Who pays for search in a world where the government has stepped in and divested ads and search from each other?

Retric 6y ago
Presumably spinoffs would end up with their own copy of all software infrastructure, which would evolve independently at that point.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  I'm not sure that's presumable. It sounds like a better way to do things in the short run (in the long run, there's a net loss from the loss of the cross-pollination benefits of security and best-practice on the backend that Google enjoys now).
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    It depends on how stupid the regulators are - the one with the google name will win. Seriously people - domain names and awareness matter ans you can't just partition websites to regions with an international web.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      We already know how incapable the regulators are. 20 years after they went after MS for their dominance in personal computer operating systems, productivity software and browsers, MS is still dominant in two and the third doesn’t matter to anyone except for Google. MS had the highest market cap in the US in 2000. As of today it is #3. The government had a monopoly suit against IBM in 1969 and finally withdrew it in 1983 and nothing came of it. People in tech have been wanting the government to go after Big Tech for years. Four of the CEOs show up for Congressional hearings and then the government goes after...TikTok and WeChat instead.

DSingularity 6y ago

What? Why don’t they fork internal dependencies or push the developers of the infrastructure to support the dependent projects?

dmitriid 6y ago

> perpetually killing small products to protect Google's secret sauce. I doubt Google kills those products because it can't spin them off because of secret sauce. Google kills those products because: - they are not profitable enough (profitable enough for Google) - they don't drive engagement and ad sales enough (once again, not enough for Google) - it offers no promotion paths for people who may run them, so it's hard to recruit internally (as many posts have shown, development of new shiny things, however superficial, is rewarded, maintaining is not) And "spinning something off" is not a simple task in itself and will most likely cost more money than just shutting a product down.

dodobirdlord 6y ago
This is really the core of it. If you run the numbers, Google makes something like $1 million of profit per year for each engineer at the company. If a product has a 10-person engineering team and isn't bringing in $40 million / year at a 25% profit margin then there are just better things for those engineers to be working on and the product will likely be shut down so that the team can reprioritize.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I remember back when I was an industry analyst talking to someone at IBM about some initiative other. And one of the things he said--I might not have the number/metric quite right but the idea is the important thing--was that if an initiative isn't going to bring in a billion dollars, it just doesn't move the needle enough to bother with. Every little project takes some number of cycles from everyone up the management chain as well as finance, HR, etc. etc. At some point, even if it is profitable on its own, it's just too small of a blip to bother with. Plus, of course, no one is going to want to work on it because it's that dead end thing that the company doesn't care about and may randomly cancel at any time.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    As someone else mentioned elsewhere, Google has serious data security and privacy requirements to contend with. The “up the chain cycles” consumed by a small project are massively exacerbated when everything has to be done in a way that won’t open the company to risk of Chinese cyberattack or massive EU fines. Projects have to be large enough to justify the effort to build them to extremely high quality, because anything low-quality is a risk that outweighs any potential benefit.

milesward 6y ago

And people wonder why kubernetes/Anthos is a thing...

pas 6y ago
umm, what's anthos? I thought I'm well versed in k8s-onomy, but it seems I've missed this :o And worse, none of the search results are helpful!
- jpadkins 6y ago
  https://cloud.google.com/anthos https://cloud.google.com/anthos
  - gvjddbnvdrbv 6y ago
    That link doesn't really help explain anything.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      As best I can explain it (being a non-expert who technically works in the Google Cloud PA but not really): Anthos is an abstraction layer that allows you to manage on prem and on cloud servers in ~the same way. So if you have on prem infra that you can't migrate to the cloud (for legal reasons or because it's some big hefty SAP server or whatnot, or because you want to migrate but can't yet), but still want to have some stuff be cloud-y, and maybe have that stuff communicate, you can use anthos to make that work. And that's the best I can give you.

EarthIsHome 6y ago

> Splitting Google up, forcing this infrastructure to become open, etc would be much healthier than perpetually killing small products to protect Google's secret sauce. I totally agree! But this assumes that what Google wants to do is healthy. What Google actually does is try to make more profit. A majority of choices made are guided by this one law: to accumulate as much capital as possible (after all, we live in a capitalist system). This law is similar to other physical laws that govern our physical system e.g. "current likes to flow in the path of least resistance." In a capitalist system, the mode of production is fueled by profit. Companies that aren't profitable or can't compete with larger companies cease to exist or get eaten up by larger corps. In turn, the wealth of these smaller companies get sucked into the larger companies, and they keep subsuming more and more. It's the natural tendency of the system. It's not like these companies really have a choice in the matter.. they're just operating within the confines and laws of the system. In order to slow this tendency, an outside force must act on the system.

dilippkumar 6y ago

> Splitting Google up, forcing this infrastructure to become open, etc would be much healthier than perpetually killing small products to protect Google's secret sauce. There are probably many Googlers here who have sacrificed huge portions of their life and time getting the Google infrastructure to work. Forcing engineers to make changes to their creation is insane. Personally, I’d rather not build anything than have someone force me to break up what I’ve built because I was too successful at building it. I think we should all agree to just keep politics out of engineering. We build things because we like to, we should assume the same for Google engineers.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
selestify 6y ago
Engineers are forced by management to make changes to their creations anyway. What’s the difference between management telling an engineer to do something and the government telling management to tell an engineer to do something?
t0mmyb0y 6y ago
" Forcing engineers to make changes to their creation is insane." Really? Is it really insane to command employees to do what the company wants? One of the biggest issues google has always had is allowing engineers to do what they want to get them to work on various platforms. Do you know how many thousands of hidden commands are in gmail?
throwaway2048 6y ago
If you think Google isn't deeply involved in politics already, you are fooling yourself.

jackfoxy 6y ago

It is worth noting when Standard Oil was broken up John D. Rockefeller's net worth went up. The sum value of the new oil companies soon exceeded the value of the old monolith. Also for reasons I cannot explain, investors happily watch the failed conglomerate model re-invented time and time again, even though history shows conglomerates running their divinions into the ground.

mathattack 6y ago
Same with breaking up Ma Bell. Sometimes it’s that M and A helps the CEOs more than the investors.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
His wealth increased but his power decreased. In Google’s case, their monopoly drives tremendous value to management at the expense of society and its shareholders.
dehrmann 6y ago
Be careful not to confuse monopolies with conglomerates. You're right conglomerates mismanage (usually neglect) some divisions, but that wasn't the case with Standard Oil. Esso wasn't a neglected divison; oil is oil. The new companies being more valuable is interesting. It helped that they were regional monopolies. Maybe people thought the added competition drove growth on its own. Maybe the new companies became crowded trades because rather than just being a bet on oil, it was a bet on oil and who would win in oil.
- jackfoxy 6y ago
  I didn't imply Standard Oil was a conglomerate or that conglomerates are monopolies. How did you parse that? Alphabet on the other hand has characteristics of both.
  - MiroF 6y ago
    You certainly imply that the "history" you refer to in your third sentence is the one described in the previous two.

imeanth00 6y ago

It’s almost as if Google isn’t a product company but an engineering study hall. Perhaps societies take on what we should expect of these places is due for a refresh? Obviously Google knows about this. They’ve brought it up. The culture continues to not care as it’s mostly a capital extraction vehicle for IT workers. I’ve had a number of Googlers from pre-2010s mope Google isn’t favoring them anymore and is trying to push products not imaginations of engineers, it’s not working with all those older engineers hanging about collecting $500k+/yr. Who gives that up? Capitalism doesn’t demand product development. Just exchange of “capital” for rubberneckers to bet against. If y’all are gonna imagine Google has that much capital to trade why do they need to make products? You’re already buying the myth.

polyomino 6y ago

This could be a good forcing function for them to get their act together on cloud. However, I've heard that teams internally can't build on google cloud for various reasons. It may even make more sense for them to directly spin off onto AWS. Even "seperate" companies like Waymo build their systems on the internal google infra.

easton 6y ago
I'd imagine (although I don't work there) that it has something to do with datacenter availability. Google probably has a lot more datacenters than are available in Google Cloud used purely for internal workloads that run on their commodity hardware, which was what Borg was designed to run on. It's much easier to manage internal workloads by saying "it has to work on this" instead of letting each individual team go wild on Google Cloud and spin up whatever they want, which is how you get into an unmanageable flustercluck of shadow IT. Coupled with "Google-scale"(tm), where every service has to be able to scale globally (which is why they have so many datacenters and boxes in ISPs, etc.), it'd be difficult to manage that real estate the same way as companies do on your cloud (what if you need to bring up a ton of Gmail or YouTube traffic and the datacenter is at 97% load because Google Cloud had a good sales month? Not an impossible problem to fix, I suppose, but you could suddenly find yourself without enough hardware when you're talking about Google sized traffic.) I suppose AWS figured it out, although I always figured amazon.com didn't exactly compete for resources with outsiders.

Google234 6y ago

Your theory on Google reader is completely false. This fake news

heavyset_go 6y ago

> Google keeps killing low-to-medium profitable smaller product lines and tools because it can't spin them off successfully It's worse than that, Google releases products for free killing competitors in the markets they enter, and once those competitors are gone, Google pulls their products.

andrewla 6y ago
Yes -- I think this is far more important. If anything, Google kills off low-to-medium _adoption_ products, regardless of profitability.
edmundsauto 6y ago
I feel like I agree with this statement, but I can't think of any examples. Google Fiber doesn't seem to fit, or Reader, or Wave, which are the most commonly cited examples of popular products that got killed.
- okennedy 6y ago
  Google Reader?
  - jonny_eh 6y ago
    IIRC the incumbents were free, like Mozilla Thunderbird.

kristianc 6y ago

> Google Reader could not be spun off because it assumed things about Google's infrastructure + libraries.) The reason to not spin it off Is less because of Google’s infra and libraries than it not fitting with Google’s revenue model. It existed only to tie user preference data to an identity, and sharpen Google’s ads business. Divested of that, it doesn’t make sense. Google has no interest in joining the hobbyist $5 a month RSS reader market.

tomerico 6y ago

Even analysts believe that Google's sum-of-its-parts is larger's than the whole. https://www.barrons.com/articles/alphabet-stock-is-worth-35-more-based-on-a-sum-of-its-parts-analyst-says-51595947081 https://www.barrons.com/articles/alphabet-stock-is-worth-35-...

acituan 6y ago

> Google can't spin off tools successfully because their internal codebases are deeply reliant on assumptions about Google's infrastructure and Google internal libraries, etc. (for example: Google Reader could not be spun off This is a not a likely speculation. Did reader really require anything special that doesn’t already exist as a Google Cloud API? Or majority of their killed products honestly? Or to look another way, do you think anyone who has a cloud services platform (Microsoft, Amazon, Google) can really afford having a separate, divergent infrastructure internally? Haven’t these services started for utilizing excess capacity and economies of scale of existing infrastructure? Also you are idealizing code reuse, especially at scale. When you take a dependency the arrow goes both ways and now there is a cost for depended breaking things too. Each integration potentially creates non-trivial friction points, if not we would have open source code of the world converge towards a single codebase organically already.

andrewem 6y ago
It's probably true that now (in 2020) Google has cloud services that do everything which Reader needed, but it wasn't true when Reader was shut down in 2013. For instance, cloud Bigtable launched to the public in 2015. (I don't know whether current Google products mainly rely on the public services, or internal near-equivalents to the public services, or significantly different internal services. I assume it's mainly either the first or the second.)
- acituan 6y ago
  Well the point is there is no “secret sauce infra”, let alone Google specific infra as the OP speculates. If we were to claim timing as a factor, AWS was available since 2006.
  - lrem 6y ago
    You really missed the point. It does not matter if the "secret sauce infra" is better than equivalents. What matters is that the code you have is based on it. And since literally everything is based on Stubby, which has a hard dependency on Borg, once you remove the bits of the backend's code that are secret-sauce-dependent you're left with a Makefile ;) Disclaimer: I work in Google, but the above is easily inferred from the SRE books.

d1zzy 6y ago

The engineering effort required to split up a mammoth code base where everything has been written based on those assumptions about the rest of the codebase is making such a split extremely unlikely to succeed. We're not talking about a few millions lines of code, we're talking about billions[1] of lines of code. It would take more than a decade of having thousands of engineers work only on this and not do anything else (like, you know, actually develop features to keep being competitive). I don't see how it would work. What I could see working tho would be to focus on exporting some of the very core internal libraries[2] and then go on a project by project basis and do the work required to be made to work externally. The latter would be a never ending effort but the end result would be a number of averagely successful projects that spin off Google. [1] https://www.wired.com/2015/09/google-2-billion-lines-codeand-one-place/ https://www.wired.com/2015/09/google-2-billion-lines-codeand... 2 billion lines of code in 2015, I'd imagine there are at least 3 by now, considering the increase in employee count. [2] https://opensource.google/projects/abseil https://opensource.google/projects/abseil

menage 6y ago
But most of those billions of lines are not the low-level infrastructure relied on by many projects. To split out a single product would only require creating external versions of a much smaller subset of the code (and once that had been done once, other products being split out could build on that effort).
heavyset_go 6y ago
Companies with millions of miles of physical infrastructure have been broken up before. You're missing the forest for the trees if you're fixating on the code.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  Breaking up physical infrastructure is a lot easier than breaking up something like Google's monorepo, and that's not to mention all of the physical infrastructure Google has all over the world that would have to be divvied up as well.
6y ago

ytdytvhxgydvhh 6y ago

I’m not sure that it’s insane to kill off profitable products. Some folks were upset recently that Honda is discontinuing the Fit subcompact hatchback in the US. That’d be easily understandable if it were an unpopular, unprofitable product. But the Fit was well-loved and dealers struggled to keep them on the lots. So why did Honda kill it? The HR-V subcompact SUV based on the Fit has been produced for the US in the same factory in Mexico and is more profitable and more popular. If you’re Honda, maybe it makes sense to make more of the vehicle that makes twice as much profit and divert resources away from the less profitable model. Still bums me out that I soon won’t be able to buy a new Honda Fit though.

monadic2 6y ago
How does that make sense? On paper they just lose the revenue of the Fit without gaining any new revenue elsewhere. That’s just a loss. It takes some magical thinking to argue that these lost customers will move over to the more popular model, a qualitatively different car.
- ummonk 6y ago
  What I got from that comment is that they're supply constrained, and gain new revenue elsewhere by producing more of the HR-V.
  - monadic2 6y ago
    Why would they think that demand of the HR-V is likely to increase if they remove the fit? I understand removing unprofitable lines, but if it’s making money why fix something that ain’t broken? If they’re worried about competing with themselves, they’ve blatantly told you as a customer the car you want is too desirable for you to have it. Wtf?
    - ytdytvhxgydvhh 6y ago
      They’re supply constrained on both Fit and HR-V. The factory is going all out, but building a new factory isn’t a short term thing. So they can build all of the more profitable HR-V and sell every one or they could mix in some less profitable Fits.

djsumdog 6y ago

I was so glad when Google Reader died and I switched back to a real RSS reader. Google Reader was garbage. It wouldn't show 404s and had a ton of bugs. Every RSS reader I've tried since has been loads better.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

If a Google employee uses these taboo words in an HN comment, will YC get a subpoena?