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Bear in mind, Google is somewhere near 90% advertising revenue. There are other things Google is doing wrong, but they all exist to feed into the ad industry. S

Bear in mind, Google is somewhere near 90% advertising revenue. There are other things Google is doing wrong, but they all exist to feed into the ad industry. Search and Chrome and Play Services and everything are about protecting their ad revenue. You may feel like ads are a dead industry, but remember that via Google's Chrome monopoly, Google can harm ad blockers (Manifest V3) and protect their ability to track and monetize users ("privacy budget"), and that their decisions as such affect the vast majority of users on the planet. Everyone else might be stripping out advertising and tracking, but as long as Google's browsers are protecting it, it'll do just fine. Breaking the back of Google's monopoly is going to take going after them in many angles, and their browser monopoly and search monopoly are very important pillars of that. But all those pillars are upholding one thing: Ads.

actuator 6y ago
> There are other things Google is doing wrong, but they all exist to feed into the ad industry. Do they now? You seem to know a lot about them. YouTube Premium, Docs, entire GCP suite etc kind of hint that they don't have the same vision about their company as you seem to have about them. > Search and Chrome and Play Services and everything are about protecting their ad revenue. I might be mistaken but reading comments on HN from googlers, I remember Chrome being a docs outcome as a better browser can support web productivity software well.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  > I might be mistaken but reading comments on HN from googlers, I remember Chrome being a docs outcome as a better browser can support web productivity software well. A narrative Googlers might tell you, sure. But that has no historical reality. Chrome, is, of course, the brainchild of Sundar Pichai, prior to which was in charge of the Google Toolbar, a pack-in that Google paid Adobe and other companies to inject into their software installers to change the search provider on IE to Google. Chrome was developed out of a (not unfounded) fear that Microsoft would intervene and block the Google Toolbar from IE. (Microsoft hesitated solely because they themselves were pretty scared of getting hit with antitrust violations again.) The Google Toolbar, and it's direct successor, Chrome, came explicitly and exclusively out of a desire to set people's search provider to Google and to enable collecting user browsing data, which of course, leads to ads. Glowing biographies of Sundar Pichai that came out around when he became CEO all testify to this. An example is https://marketrealist.com/2019/12/a-history-of-googles-visionary-ceo-sundar-pichai/ https://marketrealist.com/2019/12/a-history-of-googles-visio...
  - actuator 6y ago
    > A narrative Googlers might tell you, sure. But that has no historical reality. There is a historical account of Google devs submitting improvements to Firefox which were delayed or not merged and that led to the desire to just create a new browser. I will need to search for the Firefox PRs if they exist to verify that story. Chrome really set the benchmark for browser performance and reliability when it came out.

actuator 6y ago

> There are other things Google is doing wrong, but they all exist to feed into the ad industry. Do they now? You seem to know a lot about them. YouTube Premium, Docs, entire GCP suite etc kind of hint that they don't have the same vision about their company as you seem to have about them. > Search and Chrome and Play Services and everything are about protecting their ad revenue. I might be mistaken but reading comments on HN from googlers, I remember Chrome being a docs outcome as a better browser can support web productivity software well.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
> I might be mistaken but reading comments on HN from googlers, I remember Chrome being a docs outcome as a better browser can support web productivity software well. A narrative Googlers might tell you, sure. But that has no historical reality. Chrome, is, of course, the brainchild of Sundar Pichai, prior to which was in charge of the Google Toolbar, a pack-in that Google paid Adobe and other companies to inject into their software installers to change the search provider on IE to Google. Chrome was developed out of a (not unfounded) fear that Microsoft would intervene and block the Google Toolbar from IE. (Microsoft hesitated solely because they themselves were pretty scared of getting hit with antitrust violations again.) The Google Toolbar, and it's direct successor, Chrome, came explicitly and exclusively out of a desire to set people's search provider to Google and to enable collecting user browsing data, which of course, leads to ads. Glowing biographies of Sundar Pichai that came out around when he became CEO all testify to this. An example is https://marketrealist.com/2019/12/a-history-of-googles-visionary-ceo-sundar-pichai/ https://marketrealist.com/2019/12/a-history-of-googles-visio...
- actuator 6y ago
  > A narrative Googlers might tell you, sure. But that has no historical reality. There is a historical account of Google devs submitting improvements to Firefox which were delayed or not merged and that led to the desire to just create a new browser. I will need to search for the Firefox PRs if they exist to verify that story. Chrome really set the benchmark for browser performance and reliability when it came out.